Imagine you’re starting a business. You’ve gathered several other people to join you, brought in seed money, landed on a name, drawn up the legal paperwork, and started to define your product and service offerings. What now? Where is your limited money, time, and attention best spent?

For Trailway that answer was clear — investing in messaging. That’s where we came in.

Trailway offers a built-for-you go-to-market service. Tackling the growing complexity of outbound sales on behalf of organizations who aren’t yet ready for the expensive task of staffing up internally.

And while they extend an enticing premise — delivering better sales volume — they also ran the risk of blending into the crowded marketplace of other consultants, agencies, and GTM experts.

We were tasked with creating their initial go-to-market messaging system. As sales experts selling a sales product, we knew the messaging needed to make a statement. That’s why we took the Trailway team through our 4-Week Essential GTM Sales Deck Process.

The 4-Week Essential GTM Sales Deck Process

Even though we were hired to deliver messaging, we’ve found that messaging frameworks and copy docs tend to get easily buried and forgotten about.

To keep things as useful as possible, we design our messaging system into a 7-10 slide sales deck. We’ve found the sales deck to be the single most versatile and impactful piece of content — with a direct link to revenue generation, soliciting necessary customer feedback, and the perfect vehicle to showcase brand and design standards.

Imagine one document that can:

Support founder-led sales
Scale your GTM motions
Align multiple teams around a common language
Accomplish basic product marketing
Bring your key messaging to life
Form the backbone of a future investor deck
Inform website copy
Give a clear example of your brand and design standards
Act as a reusable template for future presentations

That’s the power of the sales deck. And even better, with our process it can be ready in just 4 weeks.

Here’s how the schedule shakes out

Kicking Off

Precise coordination was essential for us to be able to finish the project in only 4 weeks. For that reason, we spent a lot of time upfront over-communicating, making document sharing clear, creating a single source of truth, and outlining initial deadlines.

For example, here’s the kick-off email we sent to the Trailway team.

Phase One // Research

There are three common mistakes messaging consultants tend to make:

Bringing their assumptions about your industry and being overly influenced by them
Borrowing heavily from a similar past client
Relying too much on internal company answers to audience questions

The last one especially can be harmful. For example — let’s say we are trying to dig into what makes a company valuable to their customers. It might seem like a good idea to ask the CEO and key internal stakeholders, “What makes you different from your competitors?” “Who is your target audience?” “What problems are they trying to solve?”

But if all you do is take their answers and refine them, you’re prone to end up with messaging that falls flat. Why? Because it’s probably too safe, slightly untrue, and very similar to language the company is already using.

Instead, we recommend a more journalistic approach:

Come in with fresh eyes, ignorance even
Stay curious, expect to ask three questions deep before you get to usable information
Challenge assumptions and previously held ideas
Get outside the boardroom, looking at industry reports, cultural trends, competitor data, and listening to customers
Never compromise on honesty, even if that means saying no to certain suggestions

In the 4-week sprint we learn in a condensed fashion throughout the whole first week, starting with an in-depth questionnaire written to get beyond those surface, “What do you do and who do you do it for,” inquiries.

Sample Questions

To give you an idea of the areas we explore, here are just three of the research categories along with their corresponding questions. The aim is to go deep, quickly.

At the end of the research phase, we produce a single document, recapping the key learnings and highlighting early findings that are standing out to us. This gives us a chance to get a gut check from the client. Are we on the right track? Are we coming to the right conclusions?

The recap document typically contains seven sections.

Company
Customer
Product
Competitors
Messaging
Design
Cultural Forces

Phase Two // Concepts

Coming out of the research phase, we now had enough information to put together some messaging options for the Trailway team to choose from.

We can call these positioning options, or simply high-level messaging concepts. As part of our process, we’ve identified five different concepts companies can use to successfully position and message themselves. They are as follows:

What we do
Point of view
How we do it
You said it
One of these things is not like the otter

You can see examples of each of the concepts in action from the Trailway project below. We use these same five high-level categories for each sales deck client, but of course the actually concepts change.

Positioning and Messaging Concepts

Design Concepts

As a freshly incorporated startup, Trailway had no established brand, logo, or any visual identity. Because of this, we also presented several design directions to their team at this stage.

Phase THREE // outline

We were working through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays for this project. As a result, getting everyone together for team calls became challenging. To remedy, we worked behind the scenes on an outline of the sales deck and then recorded ourselves presenting it. This was then sent to the Trailway team over the break, helping us to solicit feedback without needing to meet in-person.

This worked incredibly well, and it’s a practice we hope to incorporate more going forward. I think the technical term for this is asynchronous work?

Every GTM Essential Sales Deck outline follows a 7-part storytelling framework that we developed:

Take a position
Address the switch
Come to a conclusion
Give an overview
Demonstrate progress
Bring it to life
Evoke the imagination

It may take more than 7 slides to address each of these, so don’t be too concerned about length. We tend to say 7-10 slides is a pretty safe estimate.

You can see a few samples from the Trailway deck below. If you’d like access to the whole deck, send me a message: derek@plain.run

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You’ll notice too that we were able to create some custom backgrounds, illustrations, and animations for them that really helped the deck to have that high-end feel to it. Click on any of these to expand them.

Phase Four // Delivery

In addition to our research findings, the sales deck, and design and messaging guidelines, we also provided Trailway with a slide deck template they can use for future presentations. Since we already made slides for the sales deck, it’s a fairly simple process to then turn those slide designs into templates. It’s just one more way we try to make the 4-week Essential GTM Sales Deck process as useful as possible.

Honestly, even more than providing the sales deck itself, we’ve found that it’s these presentation templates that the employees of a company get most excited about. Here’s a quick look at some of the slides we made for Trailway.

You can see as well that we add the slides into the styles template, making inserting these brand-approved layouts easy for future employees.

IN SUMMARY

We kicked off on 12/02/2024 and handed off the final files on 1/02/2024, exactly four weeks later, even with the holiday delays.
There was some talk during the project about helping Trailway with a custom logo, since they didn’t have one. However, Daniel, our Creative Director, was able to slightly tweak a wordmark logo to get them something custom without any extra expense.
Not everyone on the team felt as confident sharing their input along the way, claiming that they weren’t very good at messaging or creative work. We need to get better in the future at helping these types of people participate. They have a valuable perspective that would add a lot to the final product.
Trailway was so happy with the process and the completed deck that they plan to recommend us to their own customers in the future.
There appears to be a huge market for this 4-week service. Fast, useful, affordable, and still impactful. However we’re still struggling to know how to position ourselves and get in front of the right potential clients. Always room for improvement!

Want to learn more about our 4-week Essential Go-to-Market Sales Deck service?

Send me an email: derek@plain.run

Essential Go-to-Market Sales Deck | Trailway