The lists don’t agree, and that tells you something
We pulled the first page for b2b sales collateral on 8 September 2026 and counted the promises in the titles.
One says 23 types every team needs. One says 17 must-haves. One says 13 examples. One says 10.
Four vendors, four different answers about the same shelf. When the category can’t agree on the length of the list, the list isn’t the useful part.
The order is. And your buyer has already written it down.
Your buyer’s paperwork names the documents
Anyone who has answered a formal solicitation knows the feeling: the questions arrive in a fixed order, and each one wants a specific document.
The clearest published example is the US federal rulebook. Under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, a request for proposals in a competitive acquisition must describe, at a minimum, 4 things: the requirement, the anticipated terms and conditions, the information required to be in the proposal, and the “Factors and significant subfactors that will be used to evaluate the proposal and their relative importance”.
Read the scope before you borrow the idea. That rule governs negotiated federal acquisitions in the United States. It does not govern a mid-market software deal in Ohio or a bearing supply contract in Yorkshire.
What travels is the shape. Somewhere in your buyer’s organisation, informally or in a template, the same four questions exist: what we need, on what terms, what you must send us, and how we’ll compare you.
Most sales collateral is written against none of them.
Five documents, in the order deals ask for them
One page that states scope and price. What it is, what it isn’t, what it costs or how it’s quoted. It’s the piece most often missing, and the one every other piece leans on.
One proof piece with a checkable number. A case study with a before figure, an after figure and a name attached to the claim. What to gather for it is in what to collect before a case study.
One document that handles the objection you always get. Price, switching cost, integration, capacity, a competitor’s standard feature. Write it down once instead of letting each rep improvise.
One document your champion can forward without you. Their boss’s questions, in their boss’s language, without a login. This is the piece that decides deals you never attend.
The closing paperwork. Terms, insurance, quality certificates, security answers, references. Boring, and it’s the piece that stops a deal in its last week.
Five pieces, written in that sequence, cover more ground than 23 written in whatever order the requests arrived.
Write it for the person who forwards it
A rep sends a document. Somebody inside the buyer forwards it, or doesn’t.
We wrote about that test in unused sales content, and it’s the one measure worth keeping on the shelf: a piece that never gets forwarded is a piece the deal didn’t need.
Three habits make forwarding easier. Put the scope in the first 60 words. Keep one document to one question. Make sure the file makes sense on its own, because it will arrive with no covering note.
And drop the gate on anything a champion has to circulate internally. A form in front of the business case is a form in front of your own advocate.
Give every piece an expiry date and an owner
Collateral doesn’t fail all at once. It goes stale in a predictable order.
Prices and packaging go first. Then integrations, capacities and lead times. Then named customers, some of whom have churned. Then screenshots. Then the team page.
So put two lines in the footer of the source file: the date it was last checked and the name of the person who checks it. Not a department. A name.
Then set the interval by how fast that fact moves. Pricing pieces get a quarterly look. A case study can hold for a year if the numbers are dated inside the text.
One test settles most arguments about whether a piece is still good: read it out loud to the last customer you lost. If a sentence would embarrass you, it’s expired.
This blog carries a date on every post and no byline. That’s the weaker version, and it holds only because 1 person checks the whole shelf, which our about page says in as many words. Your collateral has more hands in it than that, so write the name.
The documents we write, and the ones we leave to you
We write the documents: the scope-and-price page, case studies, comparison and objection pieces, the business case your champion forwards, email sequences that carry them.
We don’t build decks, run your enablement platform, or write the security questionnaire answers your compliance team has to sign. We also won’t put a customer’s name or numbers into a piece without their written permission, which is why our own portfolio is our own work.
If a claim needs your data, we ask for the data. If it doesn’t exist, the claim comes out rather than getting softened into something unfalsifiable.
Briefing a set of collateral
Send four things, and the second is the one that changes the draft most.
The last three deals you lost, and the sentence each buyer used when they said no.
The questions your buyer’s procurement or committee asked in writing, if you have them. That’s the closest thing to their list you’ll ever hold.
Your current pieces, however old. Deciding what to retire is half the job.
Who signs off claims, by name, and how long they take.
An article or a written piece runs $149, or $549 for four a month, delivered five working days from an approved outline. Case studies and longer documents are quoted per project. The detail is on our rates page and in our terms.
Sources
- FAR 15.203, Requests for proposals. The four things a competitive RFP must describe, quoted from paragraph (a). Applies to negotiated acquisitions by US federal agencies, and to nothing else.
- Our own search on 8 September 2026 for the phrase in the title. The counts of 23, 17, 13 and 10 are taken from the titles on the first page of results, not from reading each article’s contents.
- Our portfolio, rates and terms. $149 per article, four for $549, five working days from an approved outline, 1 revision round as a written list of points.
Send us the sentence your last lost deal ended on. We’ll name the document that was missing, and what it costs to write, and you’ll have both inside 1 working day.