Check Your Own Claims Before the Buyer Does. A Pre-Send Fact Check for Decks and Proposals

A decision-maker may verify a striking number or search the company before the next meeting. Both checks are easy to anticipate, and the team should not depend on a reader overlooking a mismatch. A market figure the cited report never contained, an incorporation date that disagrees with "founded in", or an old press release about a partnership that went quiet can move a reader back from conviction to doubt. The company rarely hears why.

The Belief Gap, the 2026 guide by Aaron C. Leaman, names the first thing to check at the crossing from clarity to conviction. It asks whether the claim is true at the size stated and whether it applies to the reader's case. The reader will run that check anyway. This guide shows how to run it first, on the document you are about to send and on the public record around it.

Our claims register keeps a company's claims accurate over time, and ten website claims covers the words that drift on a site. The check below runs once, on one deck or proposal, before it goes out.

The reader checks two things

The first is outside figures, the claims you borrowed, such as a market size, a regulation, a benchmark or a statistic about the problem. Each carries a source the reader can open.

The second is the record, everything a stranger finds when they search your name.

In reviews, both areas produce corrections worth making before the document leaves the company. Some are small. A figure from a global report gets applied to one country. A regulation is described as adopted while it is still a proposal. A rounded number grows each time it is repeated. Each is quick to fix before sending. A reader who finds one afterwards starts to wonder what else is loose.

Check every outside figure against its source

Go through the document page by page and list every claim that rests on someone else's work. Open the primary source and the edition relevant to the claim and its date. Check for later corrections, changed definitions and superseding releases, then find the exact passage the figure comes from. An article quoting a report is a lead to the report.

Where	Claim as written	Source and date	What the source says	Verdict	Action
Slide 4	The figure and its wording	Title, publisher, edition	The sentence, with its scope	One of four	The move you will make

Give every row one of four verdicts.

• Checks out. The source says what you say, at the size and scope you say it.
• Partly true. The figure is right and the scope, year, geography or unit is wrong.
• Overstated. The source supports a smaller or more conditional claim.
• Not verified. You could not find or read the source.

Three checks catch most problems. Scope, so a global figure stays global and a figure for one sector stays in that sector. Date, so the edition is the latest and no forecast has been revised or deadline passed. Status, so proposed rules read as proposed and a partner's pilot reads as a pilot.

Then recompute your own arithmetic, including sums, percentages, unit conversions and any total that appears twice. Compare each figure your case depends on, such as a yield, an efficiency or a price, with published benchmarks for the same category. If yours sits well outside the published range, put the reason beside the number or change the number.

Compare the same claim across surfaces

Source checking catches a wrong number. A cross-surface check catches a company telling two versions of the same fact. Build a small matrix for the claims that matter most.

Claim	Deck	Website	Older public file or partner page	Owner	Action
Capacity	Current figure and status	Current figure and status	Older figure, if still public	Operations lead	Align the stage and date
Customer relationship	Exact label	Exact label	Announcement wording	Commercial lead	Keep the relationship state consistent
Performance	Result and test condition	Result and boundary	Published study or case	Technical lead	Narrow to the shared evidence

Consistency does not require identical detail. It requires compatible stage, number, date and relationship status wherever a buyer checks.

Search for your company the way a stranger would

Open a private browser window, signed out. Search the company, founder and product names, note what the first page shows, then work through the record.

• Website. The same product, stage and numbers as the document. A team page that matches the team slide. No live page promising a date that has passed.
• Company registry. Companies House in the UK, or the commercial register where you are incorporated. Check the legal name, incorporation date, status, directors, registered office and filed accounts against the document. If the work began before the company existed, say so in the document.
• Press and past announcements. Every partnership, pilot, capacity figure and date you have announced. The reader will set the old announcement beside the new deck. The Belief Gap names this shape "a story that will not hold still", and it reads as indecision unless the reader can see what stayed fixed.
• People. Titles and dates on professional profiles that match the document. Advisers who are still involved and have agreed to be named. Referees who know they may be called.
• Partners and customers. For each logo on a slide, whether the partner mentions the relationship anywhere public and what it calls it.
• Registries and certifications. For each project you call listed, registered or certified, the public registry entry, with its name, status and date.
• Old PDFs and third-party pages. Open old proposals, reports, cached announcements and partner pages when they appear. Record any number, stage or relationship label that no longer matches the current case.
• Name collisions. Another company with a similar name, or an earlier entity with the same founders. One clear line can keep them apart.

Write down every mismatch, including the ones that look harmless.

What to do with a claim the record does not support

Choose one move for each claim that fails. They are listed in the order we try them.

1. Correct it. Use the figure the source gives, with its year.
2. Narrow it. Match the scope of the claim to the scope of the source.
3. Attribute it. Name the source and year in the line, so the reader knows whose claim it is.
4. Label it. Mark it as an estimate, a target, a model output or your own reading.
5. Support it from your own records. Some claims are true and only your records show it. A signed letter, a test report or a customer's written confirmation can go in an appendix or the data room, with a pointer from the claim.
6. Cut it. When no source supports it and the case stands without it.

A worked example, in general terms.

Before. "New EU rules require every brand to use recycled fibre."

After. "[Regulation], adopted in [year], requires [scope] from [date]. The rest of this slide is our reading of what that means for buyers."

The second version names the rule, its status and its scope, and marks where the company's interpretation begins.

Fix the public pages and files the organisation controls, with a dated correction where the historical record needs to remain visible. If a third-party page is inaccurate, ask its owner to correct it and state the current position in material you control. An old announcement may remain online, so add a line explaining what changed. Our guide to repositioning after a pivot covers the larger version of this.

Sometimes the claim that fails carries the case. A better sentence then leaves the gap where it was. The Belief Gap puts evidence first among six gates and gives the rule. If the evidence does not support the decision being asked for, stop the communication work and redesign the decision, park it or drop it. The redesign is often a smaller ask that the evidence does support. When Better Communication Is the Wrong Answer works through each gate.

Where a specialist or counsel takes over

A communications check finds the mismatch and writes the question. Some answers belong to people qualified to give them. Mark those rows "For counsel" or "For specialist" in the verdict column, and hold the wording until they reply.

• Legal counsel. What a regulation requires of you or of the buyer. Environmental claims a consumer will see. Comparisons that name a competitor. Statements about patents and their status. Anything about raising money, where your jurisdiction has rules on how investments are promoted. Disputes or litigation the search turns up. Naming a customer or partner covered by a confidentiality agreement.
• Technical specialist. Yields, efficacy, safety, life-cycle results and carbon quantities, wherever the benchmark question needs judgement in the field.
• Finance lead or accountant. Any total you recomputed that disagrees with the model or with the filed accounts.

Write each question so the specialist can answer it in a line. "Slide 9 says the rule applies to all buyers from [date]. The text we read limits it to [scope]. Please confirm the right reading and the wording we can use."

The pre-send check, in order

Run it before the document goes out, and again if it changes.

1. Name the decision this document asks for, and who reads it first. Start With the Decision sets out how. A reader deciding on a first meeting skims and searches. A diligence team reads every line and opens every source.
2. List every outside figure. Open each source, record what it says and give it a verdict.
3. Recompute the arithmetic. Compare the figures the case rests on with published ranges.
4. Run the stranger search. Record every mismatch between the record and the document.
5. Choose a move for each failed claim. Fix the website and other live pages in the same pass.
6. Send the counsel and specialist questions. Hold those lines until the answers arrive.
7. Strip the file. Remove comments, speaker notes, tracked changes, hidden slides, internal file names, private links and anything carried over from another project.
8. Give it to someone who has not seen it. Ask them to read it, search the company and tell you what they found and what they doubted.

Keep the worksheet. It becomes the source layer a champion needs to defend the case after you leave the room and the index for a data room. For the next document, start from it and check what has changed.

The Belief Diagnosis includes this check. We test your claims against published sources and against what a decision-maker finds online as part of finding where the case stops moving, and the Prescription names the points that need a specialist or counsel. When the deck, proposal or funding case itself needs building with every figure sourced, that is our pitches and decision materials work, and for buyer proposals and offers, our Buyer & Commercial Cases work.

Sources and further reading

• The Belief Gap, Aaron C. Leaman, version 1.1, Brighter Future, 2026