Let’s suppose you get invited to a formal dance on a Friday night. It’s Friday afternoon, so you don’t have a lot of time to get ready. You know you have a nice blue dress, some formal shoes, makeup, a curling iron, and everything else you need, but your room is a mess. As you step into your room to start looking for what you need, you’re overwhelmed at the state of the place.
“How did it get this bad?” you wonder. “I’ll never find what I need in all of this mess.”
The truth is, that mess didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of many years of clutter and disorganization, with stuff getting crammed in the corners, in closets and drawers, under the bed and dresser. Some of it is trash that needs to be thrown away, but most of it is comprised of your personal possessions that are simply in disarray. You never intended for your room to get this bad; it just happened a little bit at a time over the years due to your busy life and a lack of proper organizational structure.
Unfortunately, all of that disorganization makes the process of getting ready a huge ordeal. You have no choice but to dig through the mess trying to find what you need.While you think you know where your nice shoes might be, you haven’t seen that blue dress in years. Your curling iron is somewhere in the dresser, you think, but your makeup is scattered all over the place. Tracking down everything you need so you can get ready for the dance is going to take hours of frantic effort.
When you finally locate the dress, it’s in bad shape. It needs to be dry-cleaned, and a button needs to be replaced. Since you don’t have time for that, you select a different dress, one that doesn’t look nearly as nice. You know you won’t feel as confident, but you don’t have a choice. Also, you never find the one specific color of lipstick you wanted to use, so either you will have to buy a new tube or settle for some other color. Your dress shoes are scuffed and have to be polished, and the curling iron seems to have vanished into a parallel universe—you can’t find it anywhere.
All of this takes up the entire afternoon, so by the time you finally head to the dance, you’re frustrated and in a bad mood, hardly the best attitude to enjoy the evening.
77 Now, what if your room was neatly organized? What if the trash was thrown away, your makeup was arranged in a makeup drawer with specific trays for each category, and your clothes were hung up and grouped according to styles? You’d know exactly where to find that dress, and it would already be cleaned, repaired, and ready to wear.Your shoes would also be cleaned, polished, and placed in a shoe rack. You would be able to pick out your clothes and be presentable within minutes instead of hours, and you’d be in a much better mood when you finally headed to the dance.
Clearly, such a change could radically transform your life, making you more willing to attend events on the fly, more confident about your appearance when you turn up at social activities, and more responsive to friends who invite you to things. When you get ready for a date or some other event, instead of facing a frustrating messy process of trying to find everything you need, you now have a very simple process of picking what you need and presenting yourself as you see fit.
Many Brands, One Story
That’s how it is with Presentation Management, and that’s exactly what Jessica Bland, a marketing manager at Choice Hotels, discovered. Choice Hotels is a single company comprised of twenty different brands, including Clarion,Comfort, Sleep Inn, Quality Inn, Econo Lodge, and Rode-way Inn. Can you imagine the tangled mess of slides such a company could easily develop over time, with individual sales reps across twenty different brands constructing their own presentations and shoving content into folders all over the place?
And imagine the nightmare of trying to keep all of those presentations consistent across twenty brands with thousands of employees so that the company tells one overarching story about their brand! It would be a monumental task beyond the capacity of even the most talented team.
The marketing manager was tasked with creating a presentation for investors that was supposed to provide a compelling overview of the entire company and each of its twenty brands. Once upon a time, such an assignment would have been an invitation to hundreds of miserable hours of tracking down content, refreshing it, updating all of the brand information, and then bringing it all together.
“Well, I’ll be staying late at the office tonight,” the marketing manager might have thought. “And I’ll be staying late tomorrow, too. Will I even be able to find all of the files I need? How much updating of slides am I going to have to do? How many new slides will I have to create from scratch, and how in the world am I going to get all of these slides to be perfectly aligned for a single presentation?”
That’s how it might have been at Choice Hotels at one time, but not any longer! The company now uses a Structured Storytelling library, so when a marketing manager gets an assignment, they don’t even bat an eye. They know it’s only going to take about five minutes to create and output a presentation, with slides that are guaranteed to be relevant, on brand, and on message. And that presentation will provide a compelling overview of all twenty brands while telling a singular story about the company as a whole. Not only is it much easier to tell that singular story, but reps can also cross-sell other brands with ease. Here’s how the process works:
The marketing manager goes right to their laptop, opens up the slide library, and all of the categories of content are readily accessible right there: master slides, individual brands, promotions, images, logos, videos, and more. They can go under each brand to draw slides for each one, knowing that every slide will already be aligned with the global company.
Within just a few minutes, they have found relevant, well-designed, and well-formatted slides for each of the twenty brands and dragged them into their presentation. 80 Then they add a slide at the end about the Choice Hotels corporation. They can also find content that shows what hotel rooms look like, what the restaurants look like, and slides that highlight the differences between each brand.The look and feel of every file they use is consistent, so slides already flow perfectly from one to the next. Plus, all photos, videos, logos, and information are current.
All the marketing manager has to do is click and drag each slide, put it into the equivalent of a shopping cart, then reorganize it into their presentation. From there, they can export it, and it’s ready to go. They can now put it into their own presentation folder to be used when and where they want to use it.
“Well, that was easy,” the marketing manager thinks.
“Fifteen minutes and I’m ready for my presentation. No more late nights at the office!”
Two Simple Steps
So, how would you react if you found out right now that you had a big presentation tomorrow morning? Would you panic? Get frustrated? Frantically start trying to find relevant content for your slide presentation?
“Well, I’ll be working through the weekend,” you might think. “This is going to be a nightmare.”
With a Structured Storytelling library, getting ready for a presentation is a simple two-step process: pick and present.
That’s it.
First, you access the slide library, where everything is neatly organized in chapters, so you can find what you need quickly and easily. Pick your slides and add them to your presentation. As we said, it’s no more complicated than clicking and dragging an item into your shopping cart on an e-commerce website like Amazon. Then you save the presentation in your own presentation folder.
Now you can present your presentation at a moment’s notice. And as we said in a previous chapter, you can use your slide deck to present in person, online, or by providing a secure link to your audience.
See how easy that was? Suddenly, it’s not such a big deal for a global corporation like Choice Hotels to create high-quality presentations, even though it’s a company comprised of twenty brands and thousands of individual hotels all over the world. All of the best content for all of those brands can be curated and brought together into one place, where anyone with permission can pick and present their own slide presentations as well.
Even if you suddenly discover that you have to present to your biggest client in one hour, you have no need to panic.
Everything you require for the presentation will be easy to find, organize, and present without any need to hunt around, panic, or create new slides. Just pick and present!
And if you have to respond to a client on the fly during a presentation, you can access additional content without any prep time at all. For example, let’s suppose a salesperson representing Choice Hotels in a B2B environment meets with a group of travel agents to show them a slide deck depicting all of the different brands they offer. Suddenly, in the middle of the presentation, one of the travel agents asks an unexpected question.
“Sorry to interrupt, but do you have any hotels in Little Rock, Arkansas? That’s where I’m located, and I’d really like to know what you have to offer in my area.”
Again, there’s no need to panic. The Choice Hotels salesperson simply opens their slide library, instantly accesses slides for the company’s Little Rock hotels, and pulls them up.
“Yes, here are our hotels in Little Rock. As you can see, we have multiple Comfort Inn and Quality Inn locations. Plus, we have some Econo Lodge locations, if you have a tighter budget but still want a comfortable stay.”
“How many of your Comfort Inn locations have conference rooms?” the travel agent asks.
“Let me show you that right now. Here are those locations, along with pictures of their conference rooms. And we’ve got pricing information for renting those conference rooms, as well.”
“And can you show me a list of the amenities for each of those hotels?”
“Yes, of course; that information is right here on this other slide.”
Again, it’s no more complicated than pulling up pictures of your latest vacation on your phone. Just open the appropriate folder, scroll through the available content, and pull up what you need right then and there. The process of using a Structured Storytelling slide library couldn’t be easier or more flexible. Freed from the inconvenience of the old linear slide system, you can now concentrate on making better presentations for everyone.
Indeed, with a bit of practice, you could easily become the Martin Scorsese of presentations. We’ll show you how in the next chapter.
