Reporting

Reporting makes presentations smarter. It gives you real intelligence about what’s working and what’s not. Data can be tracked across multiple variables: slide, file, user, group, time frame and action. Actions are whatever you can do with a slide or file, such as upload, download, delete, update, view, share, broadcast, comment, like, rate, etc. You name it, it’s all tracked and time-stamped. Then, you can customize reports against any of these variables.

The reporting gives you real information that against which you can make real decisions. It helps determine what files and slides are used most often, by whom and presented to whom. What are your most popular products? What messages have your clients been exposed to? And what have they actually purchased? From there you can determine best practices and encourage those practices across other members of your team.

Charter Communications used reporting to cut the fat. The presentation team used to create brochures, rate cards and long-form decks for every single business category across 91 local markets. When the presentation team looked at their usage reports, they learned that their team of 1,500 reps barely used any of that content. They were successful without it. As a result, the presentation team cut down the material they created to just one three-slide deck for each category. They stopped wasting time and money creating content that wasn’t needed. And the reps got a smaller, better-organized, library of content that was easier for them to search through.

The value of feedback in presentation management multiplies when the quantitative data in reports is combined with the qualitative feedback from social. A data log will tell you that a file was never used. But a comment from a user will tell you that the slide is butt ugly, and they are embarrassed to show it. The product wasn’t bad, just the messaging. And now you know how to fix that slide, and give your team better content. Feedback and analytics give a current and ongoing view of your marketplace.

And that brings us to…