The Strategy Deck Nobody Reads

This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter, The Work Behind the Work. Subscribe here.

In nearly every company, there’s a strategy presentation – forty, maybe sixty slides. It was probably created for an away-day, a board meeting, or a planning cycle. It sets out the mission, the market analysis, how the company is positioned against competitors, the key areas for growth, and the strategic objectives someone devoted weeks to perfecting. It is complete, thoroughly researched, and possibly even useful.

Yet almost no one in the marketing department could tell you what it says.

This isn’t because the marketing staff is idle or uninterested. It’s because the strategy was written for senior managers, and the way it’s set out doesn’t work for the people who must turn it into real actions. The presentation is filed on a network drive, shown once, and then forgotten. The distance between “the strategy” and “what the team does on a Tuesday” is greater than most people want to admit.

This is a very common problem in marketing, and it has almost nothing to do with whether the strategy itself is good. It’s about getting it into a form people can actually use.

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

The problem of translation

A strategy presentation is a tool for managers. It’s meant to provide broad direction to people who think in market terms – how a company can grow, and how it compares to rivals. It uses the language of corporate strategy: total addressable market, what makes the company different, the value it offers, and how it will reach the market. This language suits the people it is written for.

But the people who carry out the marketing – those who write content, manage social media, design, run campaigns, and work in the field – don’t work at that level. They deal with specific items to be produced, specific media, and specific audiences. They need to understand: What is the main message we’re using this quarter? Who, exactly, are we speaking to? What is the priority when we can’t do everything? What does good work look like for what I’m making this week?

The strategy presentation does not answer these questions; it wasn’t made to. So the team fills in the gaps with what they guess, what they’ve done before, and what they were told in their last meeting with their boss. Sometimes those guesses are correct. Often, they are slightly off. And “slightly off” across the board – in media, in campaigns, and among team members – adds up to work that is busy, but not aligned with the plan.

What translation means

The most valuable thing a marketing leader can do is link the strategy presentation to the team that will carry it out and put it in a form they can use.

Translation doesn’t mean making the strategy simpler; it means changing it from the language of management to the language of operations – the kind that helps a copywriter write a better heading, a social media manager choose what to post, and a campaign manager decide which project gets the most attention when there isn’t enough to go around.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

From strategic objective to message priority. The presentation might say, “Move into the middle market.” The translation is: “This quarter, our main audience is operations directors at companies with 200–1,000 staff. They care about reliability and how things fit together, not about newness and features. Lead with proof and examples of success, not product details.”

It’s the same strategy. But the second version is something a team member can actually use to make decisions.

From growth aim to campaign focus. The presentation might list three growth aims for the year. The translation is: “Aim one gets 60% of our effort this quarter. Aim two gets 30%. Aim three is put off until the third quarter. If you’re asked to do work on aim three, object, and tell a senior manager.”

Without that translation, the team tries to do all three equally, so none of them gets the sustained effort it needs to achieve results.

From the value offered to messaging for each medium. The presentation might state the value in one or two sentences. The translation is: “Here is how we say this on LinkedIn (professional, based on proof). Here is how we say it on social media (in a natural, based-on-what-it-does-for-you way). Here is how sales should say it on a first call (based on the problem, as a discussion).” The same basic idea, but fitted to the situation.

The one-page brief

The most useful thing I’ve learned for getting strategy across is surprisingly simple: a one-page summary – really, a brief – that distils the strategy into five or six key points for the team.

It isn’t a recap of the strategy presentation. It isn’t a shorter version of the forty-slide deck. It’s a separate document, written for the people who will do the work, answering their questions, not those of senior management.

Typically, I include:

This quarter’s main aim – a single sentence that is definite and measurable. Not “make the brand better known” but “get 20% more inbound requests for demos from the middle of the market, compared with the second quarter.”

Who we are addressing – a clear picture of the buyer, not a broad age or income group. Their job, their biggest problem, where they look for information, and what makes them doubtful.

The central idea – the one thing we want the people we’re speaking to to understand or accept. If every item of content we made this quarter pushed a single point, what would it be?

What we aren’t doing – as vital as what we are doing. Clearly naming the plans, people, or routes that are not included stops the team from being spread too thin.

How we’ll know it’s working – the numbers that tell the story, plainly stated. Not a link to a dashboard, but a sentence that says, “We’ll know this is going well when X happens.”

One page. Possibly two. Something a new team member could read on their first day and instantly grasp what the team is trying to do and why.

Why leaders don’t translate

If translating is so valuable, why doesn’t it happen more often?

Partly, it’s time. Making the strategy presentation took weeks. Translation feels like another task on an already full list. But translation will take a fraction of the time the strategy took to make – and the return on that time is huge, because without it, the strategy never really reaches the people who have to put it into practice.

Partly, it’s a presumption. Leaders often think the strategy is clear, because it seemed clear when they presented it. They stood before the team, went through the slides, answered questions, and left feeling that everyone agreed. But hearing a presentation isn’t the same as absorbing it. The team heard the strategy. That doesn’t mean they can use it without further help.

And partly, it’s unease. Translation requires exactness, and exactness requires commitment. Saying “Our main people this quarter are operations managers in the mid-market” also means saying “We aren’t giving priority to large enterprises this quarter” – and that’s a harder statement to make than “We serve several groups.” The strategy presentation can be broad. The translation can’t.

The cost of not translating

When strategy isn’t turned into something everyone can actually do, the outcome is always the same:

The team creates work that is good in itself, but doesn’t really fit the overall plan. Campaigns might look well-made, but they don’t connect to a unified idea. Team members each have their own view of what’s most important, so their work heads off in different directions at once.

Leaders look at the work and say, “This isn’t what I meant.” The team is frustrated because they did what they believed they’d been asked to do. The leaders are frustrated because the strategy seemed obvious. Both are right, and both are stuck – because the strategy was never translated into a practical plan.

I’ve experienced this problem from each side. The solution, though, is always the same: get together, put the strategy into terms the team can work with, and present it in a way they find useful. It isn’t glamorous work, and it isn’t the sort of thing that appears in success stories. But it is what links planning and doing – and without it, even good plans lead only to average marketing.

Strategy is not what’s in the deck; it’s what the team can tell you without needing to check the document.