Sales says they don't need a "pitch deck", they just use a few slides but you see untapped value in how sales talks about your platform. How do you convince sales they should considering tapping Product Marketing to build a pitch deck?

As a product marketer a close partnership and relationship with the sales team is critical as a core objective of your role is to help drive pipeline, accelerate deals, and grow customer relationships.

The first step should be to build those relationships with sellers and sales leaders. Set up 1:1 or group calls to understand the current state. Tell them that you're working on a new or refined "pitch deck" and want to understand -- how they run initial discovery calls today and what slides they might be using, challenges they're having with any of the latest messaging, what's working or not, and what content they think would help them.

For my perspective, at it's foundational level, the purpose of a pitch deck / first call deck is to help tell a consistent story at scale. Your entire go to market team -- marketing, sales, customer success, product -- need to be evangelizing a consistent message to break through the noise and provide the most seamless experience for your buyer. There may be additional strategic reasons specific to your business such as adapting to market changes (industry trends, buyer behavior), competitor positioning (new competitors, new messages from current competitors), product innovation (single product > multi product / platform, new differentiation) that will impact business objectives and revenue metrics. You can pair this with additional data points you gather from buyers / customers, market insights, competitive win rates, early stage conversion trends, average selling price of product, etc to help you frame the "why."

Once you get initial buy-in on the pitch deck, start by creating an outline of the narrative. You'll want to make sure key stakeholders across marketing, sales, and product are aligned on high-level outline before you start turning it into slides and design.

After slides are drafted, this is where seller testing and feedback are critical. Connect with a few sales reps or ask for manager nominations to have sellers test the pitch in upcoming calls. Then continue to refine and iterate. My best advice here is that as a PMM, it's your job to make sure these assets have the widest impact and are scalable -- sales reps will always want what's most specific to their experience but it's not scalable to create 1000 versions of a pitch deck. Everyone should be onboarded and trained on the full story and pitch and then feel comfortable to digest and tailor it (e.g. you might go deeper into the product related slides if it's an inbound opp vs outbound you'll focus on the industry trends and educating the prospect, you might change the spelling of some words if its EMEA vs North AMER, etc).

Additional tips for adoption:

• Get an executive sponsor such as your head of sales or a VP to help champion the project and drive adoption amongst reps.

• Make sure what you create is folded into enablement, training, and onboarding processes. If sales reps are going through any other related sales pitch best practices, folding that into your deck and showing them how it all connects will make it easier on them to use.

• Share recordings of sellers delivering the pitch / using it in their calls, collect positive feedback, and measure directional impact on key metrics such as conversion, win/loss, deal size.

Having been on the seller side earlier in my career, and product marketing since, I can empathize with this from both sides. I've found that in order to get the buy-in from sales stakeholders, it's helpful to understand their process, and works towards an ideal solution together. Shadowing calls might illuminate whether a pitch deck is the ideal asset, or if it's simply learning the narrative that they need. Approach internal stakeholder the way you'd expect them to approach customers. Curiousity, understanding, solutioning.