Build The Deck Backwards

Last Friday, OpenAI put Slides in ChatGPT. You can build a presentation from a conversation, a pile of files or a rough outline, edit it with your team, present it right inside ChatGPT, and export it to PowerPoint, PDF or Google Slides. On the desktop app you can open the deck straight in PowerPoint or Keynote. It's rolling out to eligible Pro, Business and Enterprise users who have access to Space, ChatGPT's shared workspace. You start it by asking ChatGPT, in Work, to create a presentation in Space.

It's not alone. Claude's new Google Workspace add on builds slides in Google Slides from your existing theme and flags text that's crammed or running off the edge. Microsoft's Copilot Notebooks started letting people edit PowerPoint files inline. Every major assistant now makes decks.

Here's my worry. Most decks were already bad. Now they're bad in thirty seconds instead of three hours.

Ask any of these tools to "make a sales deck for my company" and you'll get the same thing. A title slide. An agenda. About us. Our services, in six bullet points. Why choose us, in six more. A testimonial. Contact info. Fourteen slides that look professional and say nothing a prospect will remember on the drive home.

Don't blame the tool. It's building the deck the way decks always get built, front to back, starting with you. The fix is to build it in the opposite direction.

A deck exists to get one decision made. Sign the proposal. Approve the budget. Book the second meeting. Pick your bid over the other two.

If that's the job, the most important slide is the last one, where you ask for the decision. Every slide before it should earn the right to ask. Each one answers a question the buyer has to settle before they'll say yes.

So you start at the end. Write the ask. Then figure out every question standing between your buyer and that ask. Then give each question one slide, with the answer as the headline. Then, and only then, figure out how to open.

When you build that way, there's no room for an agenda slide or six bullets about your values. Nobody's buying decision ever hinged on your agenda.

Before you open any AI tool, write two sentences.

The decision. What exactly do you want this person to do when the deck ends? Be specific. "Approve the $18,000 kitchen remodel and pick a start date" beats "move forward."

The person. Who's making that decision, and what do they personally care about? A CFO cares about different things than an operations manager, even at the same company.

That's your last slide. It'll read something like: "Pick a start date and we'll lock your crew and materials this week." One sentence, one thing to do.

Now write down every question this person needs answered before they'll say yes. Use the questions buyers really ask, even the ones you'd rather not hear.

Your sales calls are the best place to find them. If you record calls with Fathom, pull the transcripts from your last five to ten conversations with this type of buyer and run this:

You'll usually get eight to twelve groups. Typical ones: what exactly do I get, how long will it take, what will it really cost, what happens if it goes wrong, why you and not the other guy, who else have you done this for, what do I need to do, and what happens next.

Rank them by how often they came up. The top six to eight become your slides. The rest go in an appendix or the speaker notes.

No recordings? Ask your best salesperson to list the ten questions they hear most. Or open your sent folder and read the last twenty proposal follow ups. The questions are in there.

If you steal one rule from this issue, steal this one. Every slide's headline is the answer to one question, written as a full sentence.

Not "Timeline." Instead: "Your kitchen is done in six weeks, and you're never without a working sink for more than two days."

Not "Pricing." Instead: "Your all in price is $18,400, and it can't go up without your written approval."

Not "Our Team." Instead: "The same crew lead runs your job from demo to final walkthrough."

Here's the test: a busy buyer who reads only the headlines should still get the whole argument. The body of the slide is just the proof for the headline: a number, a photo, a short quote, a simple chart. Not a paragraph.

Each headline makes a claim. Each claim needs proof. Make a quick list before you build:

Numbers. Average timeline, percentage of jobs finished on schedule, customer retention, response time.

Pictures. Before and after photos, screenshots of real results, the actual dashboard the client will get.

Words. Short customer quotes. One or two sentences, with a name and a business. Pull them from reviews or, better, from call transcripts where a client said something good unprompted.

Guarantees. Anything you promise in writing.

If a headline has no proof, either find some or soften the claim. A bold headline sitting on an empty slide makes the buyer doubt every other slide too.

You've done the thinking. Now the tool earns its keep. Here's the build prompt. It works in ChatGPT Slides, and it works just as well as an outline request in any other assistant if you don't have Slides yet.

That last rule is your opening. Skip the logo on slide one. Open with the buyer's problem, described so accurately they nod. Something like: "Your current kitchen works, but it's costing you an hour a day and you've stopped having people over." You lifted that from their own words in the transcript, so it lands.

Rule four is the one you can't skip. Every deck tool on the market will happily invent a "93 percent customer satisfaction" stat to fill an empty slide. The PROOF NEEDED placeholder forces you to see the gaps instead of discovering them in front of a client.

Your first draft will be about 80 percent right. The edit pass gets you the rest, and you can have the model run most of it on itself. Export the deck or paste the slide text back in with this:

Then do two things yourself that no model does well yet.

The squint test. Flip through the deck fast, squinting. Each slide should have one thing your eye lands on first. If you can't tell what that is, the slide's doing too much.

The out loud test. Present it to an empty room using only the speaker notes. Anywhere you stumble or feel the urge to explain more, the slide is either wrong or missing.

A deck built this way is the cleanest piece of sales content you own. Every slide is one question and one answer with proof. That structure works everywhere else too.

A leave behind. Export the deck to PDF and send it after the meeting. Because every headline is a sentence, it reads fine without you in the room. That matters more than you'd think, because decks get forwarded to people who never saw you present.

A short video. Record yourself walking through it in five minutes, or turn the speaker notes into a narrated video with HeyGen. HeyGen launched its own voice model this month and it's free inside the product. A prospect who missed the meeting can catch up on their phone.

A carousel. Take the six strongest headline slides, resize them square and post them as a carousel on LinkedIn or Instagram. Schedule them with Buffer so they go out on a steady rhythm instead of all at once. Each one answers a real buyer question, which is exactly what makes a post worth stopping for.

An email sequence. One email per question. Subject line is the question, opening line is the headline, body is the proof. Six questions, six emails, already written. Load them into a follow up sequence in Go High Level for prospects who saw the deck but didn't decide.

One afternoon of thinking, and you've got a deck, a leave behind, a video, a week of posts and a follow up sequence. All built from what buyers actually asked you.

Say you run a commercial cleaning company and you're pitching a property manager with four office buildings.

The decision: sign a 12 month contract for all four buildings starting the first of next month.

The transcript prompt pulls out what property managers kept asking: Will you actually show up every night? What happens when a tenant complains? Who do I call at 10pm? What's the real monthly cost? Can I see what got done? What if I want out?

Six questions, six slides:

"Your crews check in by GPS every night, and you see it on a dashboard by 7am." Proof: a screenshot of the actual dashboard.

"Tenant complaints get a callback within two hours, or that month's fee for that building drops 10 percent." Proof: the guarantee in writing.

"You get one direct number that a real supervisor answers until midnight." Proof: the supervisor's name and photo.

"Your price for all four buildings is $11,600 a month, locked for the full year." Proof: the line item breakdown.

"You'll get a photo report of every building, every week." Proof: a sample report.

"You can cancel with 30 days notice for any reason after the first 90 days." Proof: the contract clause.

Then the opener, lifted from a real call: "You've switched cleaning companies twice in three years, and you're tired of being the one tenants call."

And the close: "Sign by Friday and your first night of service is the 1st."

That deck will beat a fourteen slide "about us" deck from a bigger competitor almost every time, because it answers what the buyer actually worries about, in the order they worry about it.

AI made the production part of decks nearly free. Layout, formatting, design, export. Done in seconds.

AI still can't tell you what your buyer needs to hear. That comes from listening to them, which is exactly why the backwards method starts with transcripts and questions instead of templates.

So spend twenty minutes thinking before you press the button, and let the AI handle the other two hours.

Pick the one deck you present most often. Your sales pitch, your proposal walkthrough, your investor update.

Write the last slide first. One decision, one sentence.

Run the transcript prompt on your last five sales calls and rank the questions.

Rewrite every headline as a full sentence that answers one question. Fix any slide that doesn't have proof.

Build the new version with the prompt above, then run the edit pass.

Present it once to an empty room. Then send the PDF to one prospect who's been sitting on the fence and see what happens.

Jordan

The AI Newsroom | Practical AI for people with a business to run.