Partner Enablement Deck

This genre arms a channel partner’s account executive with what they need to co-sell Verdigris into their accounts. Audience is the partner’s AE / channel manager — a salesperson at another company who will represent Verdigris in conversations Verdigris is not directly in.

The deck must be self-contained. The partner AE will not have a Verdigris technical person on every call. The deck has to teach the wedge, the qualifying questions, the technical answer to the most common objections, and the deal-registration mechanics — all in a form a partner AE can re-use across many of their own customers.

This guide documents only the deltas against pilot-kickoff.md. Read that spec first.

What changes

Density: leave-behind by default

A partner enablement deck is delivered to a partner AE who is not a Verdigris employee. They will re-read it, cite it in their own customer conversations, and use it as their training reference for months. Default density is leave-behind (~150 words/slide cap; sentence-level captions; reader carries narrative; speaker notes not used).

If a Verdigris partner manager is presenting the deck live in a partner-onboarding session, override to density: live-spoken for that meeting’s variant — but ship the leave-behind canonical to the partner afterward. Both versions can exist; the canonical artifact in the partner’s hands is the leave-behind.

See pilot-kickoff.md § Presentation density for the canonical density spec.

What changes structurally

Partner enablement decks are longer because they replace, in document form, the live training sessions a partner AE would otherwise need. Canonical structure:

1. Title slide (required) — Verdigris + partner co-branding
2. The Verdigris wedge (required) — one slide; same as customer 101
3. Why this matters to your customers (required) — partner-perspective framing
4. Joint value proposition (required) — what the partner offers + what Verdigris offers + the better-together story
5. Qualifying questions (required) — 5-7 questions a partner AE asks to identify a Verdigris-fit account
6. Discovery cheat sheet (required) — what answers to listen for; what disqualifies
7. Pricing model (required) — partner-discount tier, deal-registration discount, MDF program if applicable
8. Common objections (required) — 4-6 objections + the technical answer
9. Reference customers (required, 2-3 slides) — case study summaries the partner AE can cite
10. Technical FAQ (required, 2-3 slides) — what the partner AE needs to know without escalating
11. Verdigris technical bench (required) — named technical contacts the partner AE can pull in
12. Deal-registration mechanics (required) — exact steps; URL, form, timing, partner discount triggers
13. Co-marketing assets (required) — one-pagers, case studies, demo links the partner can use
14. Training cadence (required) — quarterly partner training; how to renew certification
15. Close: deal-registration call to action (required) — “register your first opportunity at [URL]”

What stays the same

• 12-column grid; 1280×720 master; footer band 32pt
• Logomark position + size; full lockup variant
• Role labels in templates (“Verdigris Partner Manager” not “Jimit Shah”; produced deck adds the name alongside)
• Table dims, figures, PDF-exportable

Decision framework: where to land in the bounds

If three or more boundaries push to the ceiling, the partnership is probably a strategic rather than a transactional one. Consider a custom partner-launch program rather than a single deck.

Diction adjustments specific to partner enablement

The Z2O-1321 diction rule applies, plus partner-specific adjustments:

• “Partner” — name the partner explicitly when known. Generic “partner” reads as boilerplate.
• “Customer” — refer to the partner’s customers as “your customers” or by named accounts. Verdigris’s customers in this deck are evidence; the partner’s customers are the audience’s frame.
• “Co-sell” — preferred over “resell.” Verdigris partnerships are co-selling motions, not resale of a product the partner ships independently.
• “Margin” — fine to use; partner AEs care about margin on the deal.
• “Pilot” — fine; partner AEs understand B2B technical pilots.
• “SLA” — fine to use; partner AEs need to know SLA mechanics to set their customer’s expectations.
• “Generally available” — name the actual product status (in pilot, in production at N customers, fleet-deployed). “GA” is internal product-roadmap language.

Template vs. produced

Partner enablement decks rotate per partner, so placeholders cluster around partner branding, partner-specific pricing, and deal-registration mechanics.

The template stage is what an agent generates from the spec; the produced stage is what a human (or evidence-grounded agent) fills in. Never ship the produced stage without source evidence for every filled placeholder — partner discount tiers are from the signed partnership agreement; the deal-reg URL is from the partnerships site.

Voice recipe

The partner_enablement_deck recipe in voice/recipes.yaml sets:

• Jimit (primary) — outside-in market positioning (voice/team/jimit-shah.yaml). Partner AEs respond to language that sounds like their own; Jimit’s market fluency translates Verdigris into the partner’s commercial frame.
• Seren (supporting) — people intelligence and diplomatic precision on co-sell mechanics (voice/team/seren-coskun.yaml). A partnership that reads as “you’ll sell our product” instead of “we’ll sell together” fails before it starts. Seren’s voice makes the partner feel like a collaborator, not an extraction target.
• Mike (accent) — industry insider credibility for objection-handling slides (voice/team/mike-mahedy.yaml). When a partner AE is asked a technical question by their customer, Mike’s voice is what they should hear in their head.

The recipe mirrors the pattern in partner_materials (Jimit primary, Seren supporting, Mike accent) — an earlier draft had Seren demoted to accent, which adversarial review flagged as a divergence from precedent without rationale. The diplomatic precision in Seren’s voice is load-bearing for partner relationships, not decorative.

The split intentionally avoids Mark and Thomas as primary voices: a partner AE doesn’t need the founder’s voice; they need a teammate-equivalent voice they can carry into their own conversations.

Voice at a glance

A producer reading this cell should be able to answer “what voice mix am I writing in?” without leaving the page. Pulled directly from the partner_enablement_deck recipe and the linked profile YAMLs.

Jimit — primary (Profile: voice/team/jimit-shah.yaml). Outside-in market positioning. Jimit reads what the industry is publishing and pipes the positioning signal back with context, so Verdigris reads as plugged-in, not insular. His advisor register (“Is your facility on Time of Use billing?”) is the closest match to a partner AE’s own customer-facing voice.

“These come from three inputs:”

Carries: wedge, joint value proposition, qualifying questions, discovery cheat sheet, deal-registration mechanics — the slides where market language has to translate cleanly into the partner’s commercial frame.

Seren — supporting (Profile: voice/team/seren-coskun.yaml). Diplomatic precision on co-sell mechanics. A partnership that reads as “you’ll sell our product” instead of “we’ll sell together” fails before it starts. Seren’s people-first framing makes the partner feel like a collaborator.

“Please let me know if you need any support from my side”

Carries: pricing-model framing, co-marketing assets, training cadence — the slides where the relationship register has to land warmly.

Mike — accent (Profile: voice/team/mike-mahedy.yaml). Industry insider credibility for objection-handling slides. When a partner AE is asked a technical question by their customer, Mike’s voice is what they should hear in their head: specific MW numbers, real conference observations, real installation patterns.

“Interesting that it doesn’t talk about…”

Carries: common objections, technical FAQ, reference customers — about 4-6 slides where field credibility is the trust signal.

Confidentiality

PARTNER-CONFIDENTIAL is the default tier. Pricing details, deal-registration mechanics, and partner discount tiers are not public information. The marking is mandatory on every slide.

The partner agreement should govern how the partner AE shares the deck with their own customers — typically the answer is “no, share the customer-101 deck instead, which is PUBLIC.” A clean separation prevents accidental disclosure of partner-specific pricing.

Why this genre exists

A partner co-sell motion has different rhetorical needs than a direct customer kickoff. The partner-enablement genre captures those differences in a single template; pre-2026, this work was done as bespoke per-partner playbooks. The genre split surfaced during the adversarial-review workflow for the slides cell.

What this cell does NOT cover

• End-customer decks. When the audience is the partner’s customer (not the partner themselves), use customer-101.md.
• Joint customer-facing decks. When the partner and Verdigris jointly present to a shared customer, use customer-101.md plus in-call technical support, not a standalone partner-enablement deck.
• Co-marketing campaigns. When the asset is part of joint partner-marketing (joint webinars, co-branded case studies), defer to a future partner-marketing cell or use the existing partner_materials voice recipe.
• Internal partnership training. When Verdigris is training its own team on partnership mechanics, use internal-team.md.

See also

• workflows/sales-collateral — production guide spanning all collateral types
• Pilot kickoff (primary spec)
• Slides index
• voice/recipes.yaml — partner_enablement_deck recipe (and the existing partner_materials recipe for adjacent collateral)
• voice/team/jimit-shah.yaml, seren-coskun.yaml, mike-mahedy.yaml — voice profile sources