Stop Using Slides to Explain How You Work
Slides lose clients before they even start. Here's why a visual client journey beats a deck every time — and how to build one.
You shouldn’t need 10 meetings to explain how you work.
But here’s what actually happens. You send a deck. The client skims it. They come back with questions you already answered on slide 4. You schedule a call to walk them through it. Halfway through, they ask something that sends you back to slide 2. By the end, you’ve both spent an hour on something that should have taken ten minutes — and they still don’t have a clear picture of what working with you actually looks like.
Sound familiar?
The problem isn’t that you’re a bad explainer. The problem is the format.
Why Slides Fail at Telling Your Story
Slides are built for linear storytelling. They assume everyone moves through information the same way, at the same pace, in the same order.
But clients don’t think that way.
One person wants to jump straight to pricing. Another needs to understand your philosophy before anything else makes sense. Someone else is scanning for case studies. A slide deck forces all of them down the same narrow path — and somewhere along the way, at least one of them gets lost.
There’s another issue: slides flatten everything. A discovery call, a strategy phase, a six-week execution sprint, a final debrief — when those get compressed into bullet points on a PowerPoint, they stop feeling like a journey. They feel like a checklist. And checklists don’t build confidence. They don’t help someone feel what it’s like to work with you.
That’s the real gap. Clients don’t just need information — they need to understand the experience. What happens first? What do they need to bring? What does progress look like? What changes for them along the way?
Slides answer the what. They rarely communicate the feel.
The Better Model: Explain Your Work as a Journey
Think about the last time you worked with a client from start to finish. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. There were decisions made, moments of clarity, things that shifted. That’s not a list of services — that’s a story.
And stories need to be told differently.
When you map your process as a journey rather than a list, something clicks for the other person. They can see where they are. They can see where they’re going. They understand what’s expected of them at each stage — and they start to trust that you’ve done this before.
A journey-based explanation works because it mirrors how real projects feel:
- Step by step — each phase flows naturally into the next
- Transformation-focused — the client can see what changes, not just what happens
- Visual and clear — no walls of text, no decoding required
It also builds authority without you having to say a word about your credentials. When someone can follow your process and immediately understand it, they stop asking “have you done this before?” They already know the answer.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
Let’s say you’re a brand consultant. Instead of a deck that says:
“We offer discovery sessions, strategic positioning, brand identity development, and launch support.”
You map it as a journey:
1. Discovery — We dig into where you are, what’s not working, and where you want to go. You leave this phase with clarity.
2. Strategy — We define your positioning, your audience, and the story you need to tell. This becomes your north star.
3. Execution — We build the visual identity, the messaging, and the assets you need to show up consistently.
4. Results — You launch with confidence, knowing every piece of your brand points in the same direction.
Each stage has a clear input, a clear output, and a clear transformation. A client reading this doesn’t need a meeting to understand what they’re signing up for. They can see it.
Tools like Deckjourney let you map and present exactly this kind of client journey — interactively, visually, without needing a designer or a slide template. Instead of a static PDF, your process becomes something the client can actually explore and move through at their own pace.
The Shift That Changes Everything
Here’s the thing about switching from slides to a visual journey: it doesn’t just help clients understand you better. It changes how you think about your own process.
When you’re forced to articulate each stage — what it involves, what the client needs to bring, what they walk away with — you get clearer on your own offer. The vague parts become obvious. The gaps show up. And when you fix those, your work gets tighter, your onboarding gets smoother, and your clients show up better prepared.
It’s a small format change with a surprisingly large impact.
Try It
Take your current process — whatever you do, however many stages it has — and try mapping it as a journey instead of a list.
Give each phase a name. Write one sentence about what the client experiences in that phase. Write one sentence about what they leave with. Do that for every stage.
Then step back and read it like a client would.
If it’s clear, you’re halfway there. If it’s not, now you know exactly where to focus.
And if you want to make it visual and shareable, Deckjourney is worth ten minutes of your time. Build your client journey, share the link, and let people explore your process without you having to walk them through a deck again.
Your process is already good. It just needs a better way to be told.