A deck is what you send when you do not know the point yet. A one-pager is the point.
The five blocks
- Who this is for. One sentence. Their customer, not yours.
- The shared-customer story. Named overlap, or a tight proxy (“merchandisers who already live in both tools”).
- The workflow you would remove. The Monday export. The copy-paste. The “we will sync it in a spreadsheet.”
- What you need from them. A named owner, a sandbox, a review window. Not “alignment.”
- What you will not do. No reseller in year one. No custom fork. No unlimited co-marketing. Saying no on the page saves a month of polite confusion.
That is the page. A screenshot if you have one. A setup-time if you know it. Date it.
Voice
Write as if a busy partner manager will read it on a phone. Short sentences. No origin story. No TAM slide. They do not care that you are “excited to explore.”
The joint sentence
One line a seller can say: “If you already use X, we remove Y.” Test it on a colleague who does not work in partnerships. If they cannot repeat it, rewrite it. The joint value proposition tool is the worksheet.
How it gets used
Attach it to the first email. Put it at the top of the first call. Update it when the scope changes. The dated one-pager is the source of truth, not the Slack thread.
If you cannot fit the idea on one page, you do not have a partnership yet. You have a vibe.