Presentation Management: A Foundation for Business Success
AlexAnndra Ontra, Co-founder, Shufflrr Presentations are important assets that directly affect the success of your business. But too often, large organizations treat presentations as throwaways - used only once before they are lost in an email or buried in a desktop folder. This is a waste of valuable employee time, a waste of content and it also hinders collaboration. For example, sales people are often expected to piece together PowerPoint slides in the field, on the fly, but, if the sales rep on the road has no idea that that marketing team back at HQ just updated the market research figures, he will go into his meeting with outdated, wrong information. Not only is the poor sales rep presenting inaccurate information, his time was just wasted. Time that could be better spent speaking to potential clients was instead spent scrambling to put together a fresh presentation from bad assets. Instead, businesses fit for the modern age should implement a presentation management solution that gets all of the company’s digital assets in order and allows all employees – from C-level executives to entry-level marketers and salespeople – to easily access, share, present and collaborate on every piece of content the company uses. This strategic approach to presentations equips everyone at an organization to speak intelligently about the business while also driving a competitive advantage that strengthens the bottom line. Companies that execute a presentation management strategy enjoy a number of benefits their slower-moving competitors could not dream of, including:
Improved Productivity
One critical aspect to an efficient presentation management strategy is that all files – not just PowerPoint slides – are visualized. Humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, so presentation management solutions that offer a visualization function allow for a much more streamlined experience, and results in employees saving time they would otherwise be spent digging through folders and clicking through past presentations. Visualization makes creating presentations faster. A presentation management strategy makes everyone in your organization more efficient and productive. According to an IDC study, more than 45% of workers’ frustrations are related to conducting time-consuming searches through email attachments, while 30% of frustrations are due to how much time workers have to spend following up with people to get documents reviewed. They are either digging through email or asking around to find the content they need. That’s frustrating! Presentation management puts the content in front of the users, streamlining the process and therefore allaying their frustration and increasing their productivity.
Ensured Compliance
Ensuring compliance goes beyond making sure that the proper employees have access to slides and information that may be sensitive or confidential. While it is important to house all up-to-date, approved content in one location, a presentation management strategy not only provides access to the appropriate employees, it also lets employees take control of the presentation depending on their job function, meaning the proper employee has the ability to share, review, edit, present, etc., depending on their role. So, an organization can grant presentation permissions to sales team members while a copywriter has editing permissions. Presentation management directs the right content, to the right person, for the right purpose.Automated updates push out new content and deletes retired content, so that everyone stays current by using the most up-to-date and effective slides and files. You can also lock messaging and force required disclosure statements into presentations further securing your company’s message. In highly regulated industries like finance and insurance where compliance is crucial, regulatory fines because of non-compliant content is an unnecessary risk -- not worth taking.
Optimized Sales and Work Hours
According to IDC, 22.7% of an employee’s time is spent dealing with challenges related to documents, which results in a 9.8% loss of organizational productivity. Presentation management solves this problem by cutting down the time it takes to create new presentations while making all branded, compliant, up-to-date content that is proven to convert, accessible, whether the employee is in the office, on the road or wherever the job takes them. Many large businesses have its best sales employees on the road, where they meet with, learn from and present to prospective customers – making them more knowledgeable than any focus group. Sales team members get first hand feedback of what a paying client needs and wants, and with an efficient presentation management strategy, they can proactively edit, update and distribute new material accordingly – as opposed to waiting until the next status meeting to make changes. Large organizations that apply a presentation management strategy are investing in the long-term company brand, while making sure that presentations are fueling day-to-day sales activity. With sound presentation management, businesses can finally employ a complete and effective solution that works across your company and provides you with the support you need to drive business.
About the Author: AlexAnndra Ontra is the co-founder of presentation management company Shufflrr, and author of the book Presentation Management: The New Strategy for Enterprise Content.
