Sales Enablement

4 Ways Your Presentation Management Strategy – or Lack Thereof – is Wasting Time, Resources and Business

Can you help me put this presentation together? My meeting’s in an hour. I can’t find the slide.
That’s the wrong slide.
$#!* That’s the wrong deck.

Sound familiar?  Then you are NOT using an effective presentation management strategy.  And, as a result, you are losing time, resources and, above all, business.  Presentation management ensures that the right message is communicated at the most critical juncture – when a sales person is talking with a customer.  What does, or does not, transpire during that meeting directly affects the bottom line.  It is win or lose.

Presentation management plays to a win.  By definition, it is the formal means of creating, storing, presenting, sharing, updating and tracking all files used for making presentations.  In practice, presentation management ensures brand and message control for Marketing, all while making it faster and easier for Sales to create and share presentation content.

A sound presentation management strategy will help you avoid these common mistakes – making everyone on your team, across functions, more productive and effective in accomplishing their goals.

  1. Assume that sales people know where to find their content. – It’s been on the S:Drive in some Marketing-Named folder, on Sharepoint, or maybe it was sent out in a mass email, with a big announcement.  The file gets buried on a network, on a worksite or in an Inbox, none of which have advanced search features to zoom in and find that one slide in a million.  None of which offer any utility in creating or customizing a new file for a new meeting purpose.  Presentation management puts the most up-to-date content right in front of the sales person.  It ensures message compliance.
  2. Assume that everyone has compliant, up-to-date content. – It was told to everyone, maybe in an email, Chatter feed, or at the status meeting, that there is a newer, better, legally-approved, version.  Unfortunately, human beings are creatures of habit.  And a common habit for a sales person is to take yesterday’s file that’s sitting on his desktop and re-use it.  After all, he’s familiar with that content, and it was good enough for the last meeting.  The right presentation management solution will make it just as easy for that sales person to create a new deck for his next meeting, as it would have been to use some old deck that’s sitting on his desktop.  It saves time.
  3. Not communicating with Sales.
    – While everyone is working toward the same goal, Sales and Marketing are different disciplines. A good sales person is trying to achieve their number, and bring in revenue.  A good marketer is building brand equity through the company’s product/service offering and messaging.    One is short-term, the other long.  Both are critical to a company’s success.  Using business social features, a presentation management solution will unite Sales and Marketing tasks, so everyone can share knowledge spontaneously, in real time, and adjust accordingly.  It’s a win-win.
  4. Not treating the presentation as an element in the communications mix.
    Marketers spend billions of dollars designing the perfect logo, crafting a position, creating websites, brochures, TV spots and other advertising and collateral, but the sales presentation is an after-thought.  Slap a logo and pretty background on that PowerPoint template and Go, Go, Go… Sell!  What a sales person says, and how they say it, is the difference between winning and losing business.  The sales presentation is a piece of collateral; it is its own element in the communications mix, and should not be treated as an after-thought. It deserves more attention from both Marketing and Sales.

Presentation management ensures that the company’s best resources are at the tips of every sales person’s fingers, and that every marketing person gets a direct line to their target.  It’s about crafting the right sales message, and ensuring that sales people can reproduce and adjust that for their individual meetings, within minutes — not hours and certainly not days.  By elevating the sales presentation and the process of creating those presentations into the marketing mix, a company is further leveraging its marketing investment, and applying it directly to the bottom line.

About Shufflr

Shufflrr is a file management system that marketing and sales can utilize to create, share, and maintain presentations across your organization.

AlexAnndra Ontra

AlexAnndra Ontra is co-founder and president of Shufflrr, an on-demand document management solution for dynamic presentations. New York City-based Shufflrr is the pioneer of Presentation Management. Founded in 2014 by James and AlexAnndra Ontra, a brother-sister team with more than 30 years of experience in developing presentation management software, Shufflrr helps corporations and individual users manage, distribute and update their presentation content, saving them time and money.

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