# Derek Paulsen, Director of Sales Enablement at Meridian People — read of Sales Collateral AI, 2026-05-20 > 8 years in enablement, came up through SDR, now running the collateral and onboarding stack for a 150-person HR tech company at roughly $15M ARR. Current tool stack: Salesforce, Highspot, Canva, Google Slides, Notion. I coach my daughter's U10 soccer team on Saturdays and I listen to enablement podcasts on the drive to practice. I am tired. --- ## How I got here Marketing told me last Tuesday they couldn't turn around a competitive battle card for three weeks because they were heads-down on a product launch. I had a rep going into a demo against our main competitor on Thursday. I went to Google and typed "AI battle card generator" and this came up in the fourth result. I clicked it because the URL looked like a real product. --- ## What I clicked first The pain framing in the hero stopped me: "Stop rewriting pitches. Stop rebuilding decks. Stop losing deals because your sales materials are stale." That's not a generic claim. That's the actual Tuesday conversation I just had. Someone in that room understood what an enablement director actually goes home stressed about. I kept reading. --- ## Where I paused The pricing table. $299 a month for five decks is $3,500 a year for something I could replicate with a Canva contractor and a good prompt. That's not a dealbreaker but it means I need hard evidence before I put this in a Slack message to my VP. The Professional tier at $799 a month is where I'd actually need to live, and that's close to $10K annually. "Unlimited battle cards, automatically updated when your product or competition changes" is exactly what I want. The question is whether it actually delivers that or whether "automatically updated" means I update a text field and it regenerates from scratch. --- ## What I distrusted The testimonials. "Sarah Keller, VP Sales, Zephyr Analytics." "Marcus Johnson, Head of Enterprise Sales, Flux." No headshots. No LinkedIn links. No logos. I searched both companies in about 25 seconds and found nothing. Those names and companies have the texture of placeholders that never got replaced. Then I hit the bottom of the page. "Join 500+ teams that generate winning sales materials in minutes, not weeks." And then, thirty pixels below that: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet." Those two statements cannot both be true. One of them is a lie, and the page knows which one. And once I read that disclosure more carefully I realized this isn't actually a product. It's an idea concept being sold through something called the "Wishdeal Factory" as a $5 dossier or a $99 code starter. The whole product page, the pricing, the FAQs, the testimonials, all of it is a prototype sales pitch for a business someone hasn't built yet. That's the thing I distrusted. Not a claim that felt a little vague. The entire frame. --- ## What would convince me If this were a real product: one verifiable customer I could find on LinkedIn who actually works in sales enablement at a real company, with a company name I can Google. Not a VP at "Flux." A quote from someone whose title, company, and LinkedIn all check out. And a 10-minute screen recording of someone generating a real battle card from scratch, including the input they fed it and the raw output before editing, so I can judge whether "pro quality" means what I think it means. --- ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. The page says "500+ teams" and the footer says "no live customers yet." Which one is accurate and how did both end up on the same page? 2. When you say battle cards are "automatically updated when your product or competition changes," what does that actually mean mechanically? Does the system monitor competitor websites, or does it re-run when I manually update my input? 3. Is there a real product I can trial right now, or is this a build-it-yourself kit? --- ## Verdict: dismissive The top two-thirds of the page earned a conversation. The bottom third ended it. A page that simultaneously claims 500 paying customers and zero paying customers is not a page I send to my boss, and it's not a founder I trust to build tooling my reps will depend on. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-20. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*