Good Presentation Management helps organizations seamlessly manage everything from brand assets to communication and much more. It can be the turning point in a winning pitch, the most common form of customer communication and the winning strategy that powers your training across teams and around the globe.
On the flipside, bad Presentation Management leads to frustrated and confused customers, tons of rework, and stale content. When your approach to Presentation Management is lacking, it can be difficult to reuse your marketing assets, be consistent with your messaging, keep your sales and marketing teams aligned and ensure that everyone in sales is always prepared to give that transformative presentation among other things.
If your organization is consistently facing these challenges, then you likely have an issue with Presentation Management.
But let’s take a step back. Where should you look to determine how well you’re executing Presentation Management? And, if you uncover any opportunities for improvement, what can you do about it?
Start by asking yourself these four questions.
1. Are you maximizing your marketing spend by reusing assets?
Finding, tagging and accurately reusing files is a significant challenge for large enterprises. They spend millions creating content that their teams cannot find or doesn’t know exists. By proxy, marketing can waste money on content that doesn’t get used. Meanwhile, the average company spends $1.8 million producing content¹. Based on the before and after utilization rates we see from our clients, here at Shufflrr we believe that up to 29% — or $522,000 of that spend — is wasteful.
By making your assets easily searchable, they are inherently more likely to be found and therefore reused. A change online needs to be instantly reflected in your decks in order to remain consistent (or even compliant). With no way to share global updates, you would need to contact endless managers, stakeholders, and asset systems to make sure everyone is on the same page. But with Presentation Management in place, you can keep your field-level players armed with the right information — always.
A great example of implementing Presentation Management across teams can be found in our ADP case study.
As new graphics, images, videos and other assets are produced, they are often never even considered for use in presentations. This is a substantial missed opportunity as presentations are often used as one of the few touchpoints after a prospect becomes a lead.
Marketers and folks in the field often see new information for the first time during presentations. Therefore, it is a worthwhile investment to ensure that your digital assets are instantly distributed with the most accurate and up-to-date information. Without this, the people in the field are forced to recreate some imperfect version of a message that already exists somewhere else.
Unsure of how to answer this question? Ask a recent customer to share a deck with you. Often, you will be shocked with what you see. If that is not realistic, ask someone in the field to share a recent deck and brace yourself.
2. Does your brand look, feel and sound the same everywhere?
The numbers are absolutely staggering. According to recent research, 70% of content created by marketers goes unused and over 90% of it is never reused².
While a fortune is spent on websites, email, social media and other channels, presentations are usually handled at the regional or team level. This seems almost impossible to reconcile with the fact that a presentation is usually the last thing a customer, prospect, or senior executive sees before making their ultimate decision.
Compliance is also a serious consideration in this arena. What you say and how you say not only sets expectations but is also committed to print when in a presentation. Any claim, benefit or feature needs to be managed and updated in a timely manner and disseminated quickly to make sure all branding complies with laws, regulations and approved messaging. Sharing some old pricing information is an honest mistake if you never knew that your Center of Excellence updated it. But the customer will never see it that way — especially if they’re your internal champion and your relationship is built on trust.
In addition, good Presentation Management ensures your brand colors, fonts and everything that is visual or creative is consistent across assets. It is a good feeling (and even better business) to know that your company looks and feels the same everywhere it is experienced. Consistency across touchpoints is the hallmark of a well-run company; Presentation Management can be one of the fastest ways to make substantial improvements in this area.
It is also easiest to ask for a deck from the field to address this question. However, you might also start by asking for field materials to be sent your way from a manager or another sales leader.
3. Are your sales and marketing teams operating in a seamless feedback loop?
The dissemination of brand information at the executive level is critical to successful operations. But it also just as important to have an iterative feedback loop at the execution layer of your company.
There are three areas under this idea that are all addressed simultaneously with effective Presentation Management:
Qualitative Insights. We see our clients using Shufflrr as a means to share insights from the field directly on the assets that are being used. These comments and dialogues serve as great streams of feedback. Oftentimes, new and innovative ideas are presented directly in line. The ability to “like” certain slides enhances this feedback further. Once the feedback is collected, the marketing team can make the necessary tweaks and a more accurate or compelling piece of content emerges. This is valuable feedback that can substantially improve all kinds of content, from product features to pricing to branding and everything in between.
Quantitative Insights. Marketers and researchers can see which slides are being most frequently used, viewed and downloaded, indicating what their reps like and what their customers are looking for. This is also true by role and by team, which will help you quickly uncover any waste in production and opportunities for improvement. When looking at data over time (e.g., utilization rates), you can see seasonal spikes, predictors of future sales and many other insights.
Better Macro Decision Making. Not only are there granular bits of data that can be useful in Presentation Management, but you can also leverage data at the macro Presentation Management level. By combining reports and data points, for example, you can get a sense of when something is getting stale, when your sales team is going rogue and doing it on their own, or when it is time to do a refresh of your assets.
To further explore this question, sit down at a joint sales and marketing sync and see if presentations are ever brought up. Generally, these meetings are spent discussing leads and campaigns — not digital assets.
4.Are your business development and/or sales people ready at a moment’s notice?
By having access to the most up-to-date materials, your reps in the field have all company and product information at their fingertips. By virtue of this access level, they can talk intelligently about any aspect of the business, regardless of whether they were prepared for it or whether it’s their particular area of expertise.
Typically, that level of fluidity is reserved for the C-level executive, who can talk about any aspect of the business at any time off the cuff (after all, that’s how they made it to the C-suite).
Good presentations are both the armor and the weaponry of a great, successful sales pitch. When you have every point laid out in a compelling manner — and every objection addressed just as well — then you need only use convincing language and positioning to advance your agenda. This non-linear approach to sales and conversations enables your people to either be proactive or respond with the right information at the right time. Anytime.
A Closing Thought
In today’s digital age, many companies are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of electronic assets they have to keep track of. This results in a considerable amount of organizations having a hard time reusing marketing assets, maintaining brand consistency, ensuring sales and marketing teams are aligned and enabling sales folks to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
The good news is that by developing a strong Presentation Management strategy and using software designed to provide deeper insight and more clarity into your digital assets, you can stretch your marketing dollars out even further while ensuring your sales team always stays on script.
The end result? A more effective sales team and a healthier bottom line.
