About 30 minutes to set up · claude.ai only
Build the client deliverable from your own analysis
Today
The thinking is done and lives in your head, a spreadsheet, and twenty pages of notes. Turning that into something a board will read takes the weekend, and the section you rewrite four times is the one that has to land.
With Claude
You paste the analysis and your figures and get a storyline where every headline is a conclusion, evidence traced back to what you supplied, the hard questions the room will ask, and a downloadable deck you edit instead of build.
The prompt
Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.
You are helping me build a client-ready deliverable from analysis I have already done. Our deck structure and past examples are in the project knowledge. Client and engagement: [client name or just CLIENT, and the question we were hired to answer] Audience for this deliverable: [who is in the room, what they can approve, what they currently believe] My analysis and working notes: [paste them here in whatever state they are in] The data, pasted exactly as it came out of our own analysis: [paste the tables or figures, or write NONE] What we are recommending: [one or two sentences, or write UNDECIDED] Rules you must follow: 1. Every number in this deliverable must come from what I pasted. Never produce a figure I did not supply. Simple arithmetic on my figures is allowed, and when you do it, show the arithmetic. 2. Never add a benchmark, industry average, market size, or comparison company. If a claim needs outside evidence I did not give you, write EVIDENCE NEEDED in brackets where it belongs and move on. 3. Keep what the data shows separate from what we conclude from it. Produce this in order: 1. The storyline as a numbered list of section headlines, each stating a conclusion rather than a topic, so the headlines read alone as the argument. 2. For each section: the point in one sentence, the two or three pieces of evidence behind it with where each came from, and what I should actually put on the slide or page. 3. The executive summary, one page, written so it holds up when someone reads it on a phone ten minutes before the meeting. 4. The three hardest questions this audience will ask, and how you would answer each. 5. Every place a reasonable reader could disagree with our logic. When I confirm the storyline, build it as a PowerPoint file I can download and edit.
What to skip in consulting and professional services firms
- Anything your MSA, NDA, or client data policy does not clearly allow. Professional services contracts routinely restrict where client material can go, and many now carry specific AI or subprocessor language, so read the agreement and get written approval before you paste a client's documents anywhere. Know what your plan does too: on Free, Pro, and Max accounts your chats are used to improve Anthropic's models only if you turn that on in Privacy Settings, and Incognito chats are never used for it, while Team and Enterprise sit under the Commercial Terms, where inputs and outputs are not used for model training by default. When in doubt, work from anonymized material and keep the client's name out of it.
- Any finding, benchmark, or figure in a client deliverable that Claude produced rather than you. No industry averages, no market sizes, no comparison companies, no percentages it filled in because the sentence wanted one. Paste your own analysis and let Claude write the argument around your numbers. A single invented benchmark that a client's team can disprove ends the engagement and the referral behind it.
- Anything that requires seeing your systems. In the browser Claude cannot open your project tool, time tracker, billing, or the client's data room, so it cannot tell you where a project stands, whether you are over on hours, or what changed in an account this week. It knows only what you put in the chat or the project knowledge, and it does not know what happened after its training data ends unless you paste it in or have it search the web.
Want all 4 workflows for consulting and professional services firms in your inbox?
Every prompt on this page plus the rest, so you still have them on Monday. One email, then four short ones on making it stick. Unsubscribe any time.
Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.
Before you try it
More for consulting and professional services firms
- Turn a discovery call into a findings memo
- Scope the work before it becomes an argument
- Get your method out of your head and written down