Rolling out a new product? Did your company update its services to provide the latest and greatest? Need to make a sale? Whatever message your business is trying to convey, it'll likely end up in a presentation.
Businesses rely on presentations to promote and sell their wares, but these crucial assets – used to drive business – tend to be a hodge-podge of PowerPoint slides, images and videos scattered across network folders, emails and various hard drives.
Whether it was an entry-level marketer or the head of sales, all these assets were painstakingly created for an important meeting and include a well-spring of information that can be reused, if only someone can find them. When presentation assets are scattered across the business network, it leads to employees scrambling to piece together a one-off presentation. Without the proper strategies in place, it becomes too easy to just grab an existing slide with target demographic numbers, even though it has the old company logo on it. Even worse is when they combine that slide with a graphic that includes outdated figures. The business looks sloppy, and it can even result in fines and lawsuits.
What is presentation management?
To rectify the process, businesses across every vertical are turning to presentation management, which puts a strategy behind your company's presentation content. Presentation management starts by housing all presentation assets in one location and ultimately automates and streamlines the creation, distribution, sharing, tracking and updating of presentations content. As a result, your team spends less time making decks, and more time presenting them.
Who benefits from presentation management tools?
While presentation management strategies can be applied to any business, there are a few industries that stand to benefit the most.
Travel
Nothing sells a resort, hotel or cruise better than beautiful images and videos of exotic locations. Having a repository where all videos, images and other files are automatically formatted as slides and ready to present makes it easier for the sales rep to showcase the beautiful beach at sunset, the decadent dinners and first-class amenities. Store these images and videos in your slide library, along with pricing and vacation packages information. Reps will have a quick, easy way to combine (i.e., drag and drop) them for their own meetings.
Pharma
Pharmaceutical companies can benefit from presentation management on three levels. First, the amount of content – some presentations are well over 150 slides of complicated graphs, charts and animations, telling a very detailed, scientific story. The visual slide library with search will help sales reps and medical science liaisons (MSLs) find the specific slides they need. Second, user permissions ensure that the right user, whether it's a rep, an MSL or even a contracted speaker, is directed to the content that they are accredited to use. Third, and above all, is message compliance. Presentation management links slides in a set sequence to ensure that users in the field speak in a legally compliant manner.
Finance
The finance industry is also highly regulated, and disclosure of risk and other legal statements must accompany financial information that is presented to investors. Like pharma, financial institutions use presentation management mechanisms to force those disclosure statements into individual presentations. Second, finance presentations include a lot of research, analysis and other content in the form of charts and graphs sourced from different databases. Banks and other financial institutions can feed that data directly into a formatted, nicely designed slide and then update it directly to the slide library, automatically. This equips bankers and advisers to present up to the minute financial data to a client, in real time.
Media
Media companies have a strong need for both video and data because they sell both programming and audiences – glitzy TV shows combined with research. Therefore, they need a repository that can store gigabytes of video and rich images combined with data, ratings, and delivery data by third-party sources like Nielsen and comScore. Presentation management can provide up-to-minute rating information formatted on an easy-to-preview slide, right alongside a sizzle reel. All the rep has to do is listen to the client and then present the appropriate slide.
Bottom line
Presentation management is a business solution that spans verticals. To get started, an employee – or team – should collect all company assets that can be used in presentations and save them to a place that can be accessed by everyone who needs them. Review, edit and format all the content so they are ready to present. Once you have a central repository, it's easy to see what's working and refine what's not. This provides your business with the insight needed to convert more leads that boost the business.