Presentations are the lifeblood of any sales team. How an organization performs when pitching their services or solutions is crucial to the chances of closing a deal. Being in the same room with a buyer and being able to effectively speak to their needs in a clear, effective way can make the difference between you and a competitor. Don Draper didn’t win the Kodak account on good looks alone.
But it’s not only stirring speeches that will transfix an audience and win their business. The content of the presentation needs to be spot-on too. Presenting your case with the proper information in the right order and with engaging visuals is necessary to keep an audience’s attention. Creating these presentations takes a skilled team made up of individuals from both Marketing and Sales. Lots of time and resources will be devoted to crafting just the right presentation.
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Because of all of the hard work poured into creating a presentation, it’s necessary that an organization’s presentation management be in order. For enterprise-level organizations, a wide variety and large amount of presentations will exist. The ability to store them in an easily-navigable system is crucial for maintaining an effective presentation library. Previous presentations will provide good source material for new ones, and certain presentations will be reused in situations that are regularly occurring (intro decks, onboarding processes, etc.)
However, presentation management is not necessarily an easy task, especially now that SharePoint Slide Libraries has been discontinued. Finding a replacement for SharePoint Slide Libraries will be a necessity for organizations with presentations that number in the hundreds or even thousands. The downside of hard-to-find presentations—and content in general—is stark. RingDNA reports that sales reps spend 30 hours a month searching for and creating their own selling materials. These are valuable hours that should be spent selling instead of searching for presentations.
Proper presentation management should be a goal for any organization. Where and how the content is stored/accessed will also play a huge role in the effectiveness of presentation management efforts. A content library is a useful tool—as long as it’s set up and located correctly. If a sales reps spends most of their time in a handful of platforms, but still has to go searching in another system for content, then the problem hasn’t been mitigated. Likewise, if a platform isn’t configured to be easily searchable then reps will waste time searching for the exact piece they need.
To alleviate these problems consider hosting your presentation management efforts within a system that Sales and Marketing are already spending a lot of time within. Both teams should be able to easily access or manage the presentations as they go about their daily activities and not be required to completely shift focus to find what they seek.
Finally, the next level of presentation management is offering Sales the ability to custom build their own presentations. Marketing often frets over giving Sales too much access to customizing presentations with concerns about branding and messaging consistency. But conversely, Marketing also does not necessarily have the time or resources to fulfill one-off requests from Sales for presentations. The solution to these problems is to provide Sales with templates that give them the freedom to change certain aspects of the presentation, but keep other parts static so as not to risk accidental changes.
Presentation management might get overlooked as Marketing and Sales become busy with creating the next presentation or preparing for the next meeting. But practicing proper presentation management frees up countless hours for both departments, offers easy access to a valuable library of content, and improves the chances of the next presentation winning over the audience.
