“Right now, I’m pulling slides from six other presentations to create a proposal, and it’s a big waste of time — if we had a master tool where we could pick and choose, it would be phenomenal. Our EVP would be happy if every presentation looked great, and he’d be happier if his salespeople spent most of their time GIVING presentations, not making them.”
This is from an email I received from an account executive at one of the big cable companies. Let’s call her Jane. Jane is frustrated, and her frustration is shared by many of the people I speak with. She continues:
“And we just spent a couple of hours trying to track down a slide that was created for a specific presentation — our EVP wanted to re-use elsewhere, and nobody knew which slide he was talking about because we don’t have a master database.”
Her company needs a slide library, which is a single location where the most recent version of every approved slide lives. Here are two major benefits:
- Automatically put up-to-date information into the hands of your sales team
- Reduce the time it takes to customize each presentation.
A slide library saves people time and improves the quality of presentations
Let’s take an in-depth look at both of these. First, as Jane points out, sales people spend a lot of time searching for slides that they used in other presentations and then copying and pasting them. Is this a good use of the sales person’s time? Definitely not. Is this a good use of anyone’s time? Definitely not.
A slide library allows a sales person to quickly grab approved slides and drop them into a presentation, so it saves time. It also improves the quality of presentations because the slides are always current. People have a habit of hoarding presentations on their laptops (someone described it to me today as “presenters going rogue”) and simply re-using old, out-of-date slides over and over again.
People also store multiple versions of the same presentation on hard drives, servers, and in email. It’s easy to grab the wrong version of a slide when it lives in that many places. When the latest version of each slide only lives in one place–the slide library–it’s much less confusing for everyone.
Who manages the slide library? For most companies it’s the marketing department, who may get some help from research and design teams. At its simplest level, the library contains two things: the company’s message, and the company’s branding. Marketing can adjust both of these in real-time. An update to a slide in the library, or a change to the logo used on every slide, is immediately shared across the entire company. Goodbye to the “rogue” presenters.
So a slide library saves time and produces better results–that’s an excellent return on investment.
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