Presentations don’t end. They just evolve.
Yesterday’s presentation is merely an iteration for tomorrow’s presentation, much like software is released in versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, and each iteration ideally makes the software better. When you implement a structured slide library, your slides become iterative, getting better and more impactful over time, and once you’ve started asking the fi ve questions from our last chapter about every slide in your library, every slide is transformed into a powerful piece of a narrative that helps to tell the story of your company to whomever your target audience happens to be.
Why does every slide get better and better? Because you reevaluate it every time you use it. Each slide gets tweaked over time in order to make it more eff ective. At the same time, your content admins use analytics to see which ones are working, which aren’t working, and which are getting used the most.
Of course, slides play different roles. Some need to show the data: 2+2=4. Others need to be tearjerkers that bring your audience back to the human experience. Some need to provide pretty pictures that serve as transitions into or out of the data. However, over time, with analytics, tweaks, and adjustments, they will each get better at their individual roles.
Shopping For Better Slides
According to Yvonne Stacherski, Comerica’s structured slide library has created a process of continual improvement that allows them to reuse marketing content repeatedly. Slides created for specific events or messages, including marketing data, images, graphics, and reports, are placed in the slide library for further use, which turns the library into a repository for the best curated content in the organization.
Now, when someone sits down to create a presentation, they can delve into the slide library, where all of the best content is already formatted, compliant, and ready to present, and they can, as Yvonne put it, “Go shopping for slides.”
Each division within the same company uses the structured slide library, and while each of those divisions is managed independently with their own users in mind, the library enables the company to create a unified enterprise that is consistent, on brand, and on message. Cross-selling and upselling to clients are both easier than ever because the best content from each division is readily available at all times.
Every relationship manager has access to the slide library for their sales presentations, so any of them can conduct a quick search to pull relevant sales materials from another division into their presentation and speak intelligently about it. At the same time, they can conduct granular analysis of presentation usage, which allows for better strategizing.
However, perhaps the most compelling aspect of Comerica’s transition to a Structured Storytelling library is how it helped them navigate their rebranding effort. They didn’t want to present multiple brands in the marketplace, because that could confuse clients and customers. They had to rebrand quickly across all of their materials out in the marketplace, an especially daunting task with so many divisions.
Updating the brand, logos, and look of the slides in their library caused an evolution in presentations that impacted 106 the entire organization. The updates flowed out to every user in every division as a kind of natural evolution. At the same time, Comerica had to update all of their print ads and public signage, which took a lot longer and proved quite a bit more challenging.
Initially, they expected the rollout to take close to a year, but ultimately, it only took a couple of months to move their business units through the new branding experience.The overall graphic design of every slide was immediately changed and distributed in a very efficient manner—something that would have been unthinkable with the messy old approach to presentations.
Indeed, it took longer for their internal technology partners to push the new template out in PowerPoint than it did for Shufflrr to transition hundreds of slide decks. This is just one example of how improvements made in a structured slide library become improvements for the entire organization, and since slides are constantly getting tweaked, refined, and adjusted, presentations are constantly being improved for everyone in the enterprise.
Let’s suppose you gave a presentation last summer that included an anecdote. A few months later, you realize there’s an even better anecdote you could have used to make the same point more effectively, so you change the specific slide. From now on, anyone who pulls that slide for a presentation will have the better anecdote, and anyone who has used it in the past will now have the newest version.
But what if a change is made that isn’t an improvement? Suppose, for example, that you discover your CEO’s name has been misspelled on a key slide. Because of the analytics in your slide library, you can look and see exactly when that change was made and by whom. In fact, you can see an image of each slide before and after a change was made. In this case, you can see exactly how the spelling of the CEO’s name got changed. This makes it easier to update slides for distribution, weeding out bad or old versions and replacing them with newer and better slides.
This pinpoints the exact moment and cause of any problems and makes it easier to both fix the problem and prevent them in the future. The permission structure of your slide library allows you to decide who has access to make changes to particular slides, which creates a chain of custody. That way changes aren’t being made haphazardly without any oversight, and because you know the chain of custody, you know how to avoid it going forward.
In the past, if a slide got changed in a bad way, you usually didn’t know how it happened, how long it had been that way, who did it, or why. That made it very hard to introduce better processes that would prevent mistakes and improve communication.
Managed Evolution
The big-picture value of this kind of slide evolution is clear: your presentations become marketing assets that change, improve, and evolve along with your business. Much like your website, where you can track views, requests, and progress; make changes accordingly; and do it all again next month. When you release a new product, it gets added to your website, and your website evolves. The same goes for your presentations.
Every slide and every presentation becomes a continually evolving marketing asset. They are no longer “one and done.” You don’t create a presentation from scratch for next week’s meeting, then throw it away once the meeting is over and create a whole new presentation for the next meeting.And because it’s a core communication tool, it affects your bottom line.
Just like your website, PR strategy, and advertising strategy, your Presentation Management strategy should be planned at the highest level of your company, not left to account executives to constantly wing it. After all, presentations are given when someone is being asked to make a decision about buying your product. Why would you leave it to account executives to constantly start from scratch and try to figure it out? The messaging, imagery, and graphics in your structured slide library need to be planned at the highest level, and they should be constantly evolving.
Presentations are now a vital element in your marketing mix, not an afterthought. Put another way, Presentation Management ends up becoming a line item on a corporate balance sheet, just like CRM, advertising, billboards, your website, and other forms of marketing. And if it’s a line item, then there should be a real budget allocated to it every year from now on.
Since presentations are used during key moments of decision-making, they are worth the investment of time and resources to ensure that your global organization is in sync, everyone telling the right story in the right way with the right information at all times. They’re communicating consistently and they’re communicating better and better over time.
Unlike natural evolution, which is the result of unguided natural selection, the evolution of slides should be managed so that they change along with the company, stay on message, and become more effective over time.You have the knowledge and analytics to see what is working and what needs improvement, so you can tweak and improve slides to keep them current and make them better.
You can also communicate to your people about which slides are working best.
James has owned an iPhone since 2010, so when he opens the Photos app, he has immediate access to pictures of his son from age four to age fifteen—the entire time frame that he’s owned an iPhone. The history of his son is all right there, already placed in folders according to name, date, location, and more.
In seconds, he can pull up a picture of his son at a Rangers game in 2010. Then he can pull up a picture of his son from his sophomore year in high school. It’s all available and accessible within seconds, and because he still takes pictures of family activities, the photos stay current.
The same is true of your slides in a Structured Storytelling library. They’re staying up to date, evolving to get better and follow changes in your company, but you can also track changes and see the whole history of your presentations. You know what’s changed, when it changed, and who changed it.
That’s the power of Presentation Management, transforming your slides into real marketing assets that grow and improve over time, an ever-evolving tool that you can use strategically just like any other marketing asset.
