Value stories: the five templates

Before you start. Open the deal. Stories live in the Value Stories panel in Deal Studio, on the right of the deal workspace. The deal's customer model should have finished researching, and the more discovery you have captured in Deal Context, the more specific the story will be.

What a value story is

A story is built from boxes rather than fixed slides. Each box (the cover, the value thesis, one value driver, the ROI summary, and so on) is an independent content unit. The template decides which boxes appear and in what order, and every box renders against the live deal data. Edit a variable in the customer model and the story reflects it immediately. There is no stale copy of the business case to chase.

Boxes draw on four sources. Live deal data boxes are always current and never need regenerating. Narrative boxes are written by valueIQ, versioned, and regenerated on demand. Seller-configured boxes hold what you enter yourself: product name, capability tiles, the call to action, case studies, the stakeholder table. Hybrid boxes combine the three; a driver box, for example, pairs a chart from the model with a generated headline and rationale.

The five templates

All five share the same box library and are available to everyone in the Template Picker.

• Sales Deck. The full-length business case: cover, why change now, cost of the status quo, value thesis, every enabled value driver with its chart, confidence, and cited derivation, proof, ROI and business impact, solution overview, cost of waiting, capability map, competitive comparison, implementation timeline, stakeholder alignment, and a closing value realization and call to action. Use it for the full stakeholder presentation.
• One Pager. The top drivers only, no derivation detail, straight to the call to action. Use it when a champion needs something to forward.
• Executive Briefing. Written for the economic buyer and the board. The full methodology is spelled out, including attribution estimates and realization rates, in a denser financial register. Use it for the budget review.
• Discovery Guide. Internal prep material, never shown to the buyer: discovery questions grouped by topic, with seller-only "listen for" notes on what a good answer sounds like. Use it before a discovery call.
• Co-Session Discovery Guide. The live version of the discovery guide, run in the room or on a call with the customer. You walk through the working estimates and value drivers together and the customer confirms or corrects uncertain variables directly. Field-level locking and presence stop your edits and theirs from colliding, and a question-and-answer capture step packages the confirmed variables and answers, with "customer said" attribution, into the deal's chat context afterwards.

Generate a story

1. Open the Value Stories panel on the deal and click + New Value Story.
2. Pick a template in the Template Picker.
3. Watch it build. A new Sales Deck starts full generation on its own rather than landing on an empty page. Each box shows its state live: queued, generating, stale, regenerating, or ready.

You can also ask the Deal Copilot to create a story for you, for example "Create a One Pager", or create one from an external MCP client. Both routes go through the same creation path.

Configure the boxes

Open the story and use the controls menu → Box configuration to turn individual boxes on or off for this story. Turning a box off changes only the story; the value model underneath is untouched. You can also override the generated copy on any driver box directly.

Pick a chart type

Every driver box has a chart picker. The shapes on offer depend on the driver's data. A before-and-after rate can use a column, dumbbell, or gauge chart. A share-of-spend driver uses a ring or donut. A probability-times-impact driver uses a 10-by-10 risk matrix. Your choice persists per story.

Regenerate a box or the whole story

Controls menu → Regenerate box for one section, or Regenerate all for the whole story. The existing content stays visible until each replacement lands, and the box states update live, so you can regenerate while someone is reading.

Every generation, box toggle, and chart change writes a new version with a change log. See Presentation lock, versions, and export.

Tip. Generate the Discovery Guide first and the Sales Deck last. The guide tells you which variables you still need the customer to confirm, and the deck is stronger once they have.

Related

• Value confirmation
• Sharing with the buyer
• Presentation lock, versions, and export
• Deal context and discovery