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The secret sauce to your sales success? It’s what happens before the sale. It’s the planning, the strategy, the leadership. And it’s more than demo automation. It’s the thoughtful work that connects people, processes, and performance. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, the pre-work—centered around the human—still makes the dream work. But you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what great sales leaders do best. Combining vision with execution. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to build and lead high-performing sales teams. You’re not just preparing for the sale—you’re unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales leaders who make a difference, their challenges, their wins, and the human connections that drive results, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene - Host (00:00):
Welcome to V5 where we spend exactly five minutes getting on our soapbox. Some of the hottest takes in all of B2B go to market. Now look, I know I say this every episode, every guest, but this is a really special, really unique one. Today's guest is none other than Jarod Greene, CMO of Vivun. Hey Jarod, how's it going?
Jarod Greene - Guest (00:26):
Looking good. I like that shirt.
Jarod Greene - Host (00:28):
Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it's an interesting shirt for sure. You, Jarod, have a take that when I saw it made me look at it twice because it's you saying this, so I'm going to let you go off. But yeah, tell us what you got.
Jarod Greene - Guest (00:44):
All right. If you're in marketing, you're here a hundred percent to support sales. But under no circumstances should you ever, ever, ever be in the business or building their sales tax. I know this is me saying this, I've spent probably two decades perfecting the development of Dex First call decks, second call decks, capability decks, QBR decks, you name it, I've done it.
(01:09):
It used to be the sacred storytelling artifact. But for my sanity and maybe for yours, it is time for that to go. If I could speak specifically about the first call deck, you'll remember the purpose of it is to drive discovery. It's not to deliver a lecture. You're not Don Draper. You're providing some level of visuals to spark and unlock discovery. What is on the mind of the buyer? How does your product or solution solve for it? See if there's a fit. And we've gotten away from that. We've gotten into 30 slides in a deck from methodology vendors. It's overkill. We've gotten into the three slide deck that's just too short in undercooked, the problem was never length. It was always ownership. So I do think there's a world where you as a marketer, you should own the template, the fonts, the colors, the branding, the consistency.
(02:00):
You should a thousand percent own the position who you are, what you do now, it's different. Why someone what you care. And you should own the guidelines, what you can and can or shouldn't say. And that's about it. We're in the era of generative ai. This should be easy. It should be easy for you to take context from conversations that you've had with prospects and customers and others. Put that into the types of tools that generate the slide decks, whether that's gamma or friends at beautiful ai, even tools like Ava from Vivun. And you don't have to be the slide police anymore. You let reps do what they do. At the end of the day, you're going to free yourselves of those late night Slacks that ask you, can you or someone on your team make this thing pretty? You will no longer be the person who is pointed at if they ask why are first meetings not converting at the right rate?
(02:55):
And you actually give the reps what they've always wanted, right? It's the ability to control the narrative, the story in the context that they've shaped, that they have guided. Because the reality, and again, I could talk about this for days, products evolve too fast. Value proposition shifts. Your competitor shifts too fast. And your official deck, the one that you've blessed and everyone agrees on, is outdated just about the moment it's published. So that's my hot take. I could talk about this for days.
Jarod Greene - Host (03:20):
I'm blown away, Jarod, because what got you to this realization? Because you used to live for the deck. What changed you, man?
Jarod Greene - Guest (03:29):
I did. I think it's just been a little bit of protecting my own peace, protecting my own sanity. Because again, I've done this for years and honestly it's not just being exhausted of it, but it's really the same cycle over and over again, right? New launch, new capability, new feature, new competitor means new deck, new structure, new set of approvals next day, new edits, new talk tracks. This is what worked here. Let's try it here. And the context changes really quickly. And so it's kind of buying yourself into seven or eight or 30 slides is crazy. We burn a lot of energy and marketing teams trying to own it. Not the slides, not the colors, but what the deck means, which is oftentimes control and command of the message. You have to let that go. You have to let that go if you ever want to scale. And once my teams decided to let that go, everything opened up because now not only is context shared, but context is understood and obviously context can change by a multitude of variables. So everybody got faster once that command and control need went away. So that's what got me there.
Jarod Greene - Host (04:40):
It certainly has. So Jarod, you're saying marketing should play no role in the production of decks ever again?
Jarod Greene - Guest (04:46):
No, not no role at all. Marketing should have the most important role. It's just not the manual one, you own the message, you own the framework, you own the position, you own the context, you own the narrative. But don't spend weeks publishing pixels for formatting slides and choosing icons and stock images. Just don't do that. You want to make sure there's consistency in the message and in the brand, but you really want to empower the storytellers to use it to do what they do best. They have to bring it to life in their way. How many times have you heard a rep on a recorded call say, marketing makes me show this slide, or I have to show this slide.
(05:22):
Or worse, they're just not confident in what they're delivering, right? The words don't match the energy that the slide's built with, and you basically create people whose jobs it is to memorize. Slide not doing that anymore because again, we don't want to police the content, we want to protect the context. That's the most important thing we have to do here. So marketing can set that table, you can do that. And again, the generative AI tools on the market today that allow you to take context and create content are going to accelerate you 10 times faster than any greatest deck ever could ever do.
Jarod Greene - Host (05:55):
Alright, well said, man. You're always so well-spoken, well put together. So I appreciate that. You heard 'em. Today's Hot Take’s stop making decks period and give 'em the tools, give 'em the context. Thanks to my special guest, me, for finally saying out loud what so many have been thinking and I want to give a special announcement that this is the last hot take style episode of V5.
(06:21):
I want to thank every guest who has spent time telling us what's on their mind, giving us those hot takes, being unafraid to stand up and fight the status quo. Special thank you to all of you will be coming back very soon with a new format, new energy, new ways to challenge how we go to market and do this thing. Until then, protect your peace, protect your time, and protect one another. It's 2025. You don't need another deck, you just need a story that sucks.
(06:51):
You've been listening to the unexpected lever. This stuff gets you fired up and you want to talk about it with other leaders. Join the Power line Slack community. It's a modern open access community for go-to-market professionals and AI enthusiasts alike. We're all ready to turn buzz into business outcomes. Join by going to vivun.com/community. We hope to see you there.