[GiuseppaAcciaio]

I wouldn't think this as an "either / or" approach: in my experience, a sales pitch and a deck are very rarely the deciding factor in closing a sale, however they can help tremendously.

The key aspect here is that a pitch like the one described is usually made to very senior people in an organization, who have little time and mental bandwidth to endure through a list of facts and figures and shudder product features: getting them invested in the result that would come from adopting the product/service is the ultimate goal, not closing the sale at that stage. You still need to do all of the good (i.e. fact-based) salesman work, but that is done at a different time: either ahead of the executive presentation (in which if you did things right you may have the buyer on your side in making a case for using your product/service), or as a consequence of it.

To me what's interesting is not the deck itself, but the focus shown by the company on sticking to their marketing points and on enabling their salespeople to do their job more effectively (you have no idea how many times I have had to figure out on my own what to answer to a prospect that was asking "what makes your company/product/service different from any of your competitors?"...).