Pretty pages are easy now. Knowing the customer isn’t.
A wave of new software is coming, and much of it makes content for you. Slides, web pages, proposals: a rep can now make something polished in a few minutes. And the tools that make content are joining up with the tools that find data. This week Gamma announced that Clay can now connect directly to it, so teams can “pull in enriched GTM data, lead lists, or market maps and turn them into personalized pitch decks” (Gamma on LinkedIn).
That’s useful. It also sets a trap. When anyone can make something that looks good, looking good stops meaning anything, and it becomes easy to mistake design for relevance.
Reps have never had more templates, slide builders and AI writers. Yet getting into a target account is harder than ever. Buyers are buried in automated outreach. When one of them opens your email or your page, they aren’t looking at the fonts or the colours. They’re looking for themselves: does this person understand my business, and the problem I have right now? If the first screen doesn’t show that, they stop reading. What you sent looks like one more tool producing one more generic page, and they close the tab.
If software can make any page look good, looking good is no longer an advantage. Everyone has it. What still sets a rep apart is the research behind the page: what they found out about this customer, and whether it shows. A well-designed deck about your product’s features goes unread. A page built on what you learned about one account makes the buyer feel understood before the first call. Buyers don’t engage because the slides are sleek. They engage when a page describes their problem better than they could themselves.
So it’s no longer about how fast you can build something. It’s about showing the right customer the right thing at the right time.
That changes where a team should spend its effort. Let software do the building: pull the data together, lay out the page, and let that part take minutes. Spend your people’s time on the research, finding out what’s really slowing this account down, because that’s the part AI can’t fake. And lead with what you found, not with how it looks. The first page a customer sees should be about their world. If it doesn’t hold them in the first few seconds, no design will save it.