Presentation Management 08: Increases Productivity

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Original content by AlexAnndra Ontra and James Ontra
Enhanced by Geetesh Bajaj

This post is part of a series on Presentation Management, and is the eighth post in this series.

In the last post, we looked at how Presentation Management helps you evolve from One-and-Done to Enterprise Assets.

This set of serialized posts is based on original content, the Presentation Management: The New Strategy for Enterprise Content book, authored by AlexAnndra Ontra and James Ontra.

Make Your Content Productive

The core benefit of presentation management is the ability to create great content once, and then make it available to anyone in the organization to use over and over again. Typically, that content is a PowerPoint deck, but it could also be a video, PDF brochure, white paper or infographic. The format doesn’t matter. What matters is the ability to take any piece of content and unleash it across the organization.

Explore these findings:

• Consider the cost of paying all those highly skilled marketers, writers, designers, producers, analysts and other subject matter experts to plan, produce, execute, measure and then revise presentation content. It adds up to an estimated $1 billion per year.
• Organizations are making a monumental investment in their content. Unfortunately, some 70 percent of content created by marketing goes unused, according to Translations GlobalLink. And over 90 percent is never reused.
• Companies are squandering $900 million of marketing assets annually. Yikes!

Here are some thoughts:

• Put that content to work.
• Put it in a cloud location, where presenters can easily find what they need and drop it into decks. That will get you a better return on your marketing investment.
• An effective presentation management strategy will direct the best content to the employees who need it, when they need it. Presentation management will make it easy for the user to find files and slides, and then repurpose them for their meeting.
• They don’t have to start from scratch re-creating a slide that already exists somewhere, if only they could find it.
• It also means presenters can access content when they are actually in the meeting, face to face with the client. So when the client throws a curve-ball question that the presenter hadn’t anticipated, she can go to the presentation library on the fly and present content that answers the client’s question. She doesn’t have to “wing it” or tell the client that she’ll send that info over later.

Presentation management means the right content is directed to the right person at the right time.  So naturally, the content gets used more – and more effectively. The more content gets used, the more value it has.

Presentation management gives a higher return on your company’s investment in content.

Make Your Team in the Field More Productive

If the content is more productive, the team will be more productive as well.

Client feedback has told us that presentation management can save two to five hours in preparation for a meeting. Royal Caribbean Cruises Lines estimated that their presentation management solution saved 300 business managers 2.5 hours per presentation. Multiply that over 50 weeks, and you’ve just unleashed an additional 86,000 hours of productive time. That’s time that can be spent building relationships with clients and partners, solving clients’ unique problems, innovating for the company, or working on initiatives that actually build the business, as opposed to the tedious administrative task of creating a new deck that already exists somewhere.

Every sales person saved 5 hours per week.

Presentation management takes workers out of their cubicles and puts them back into the world. But what happens when they are already face to face with a client, partner or other colleague? It lets them approach presentations in an entirely new way.

The presentation follows the conversation. The best salespeople listen, then respond and react to what their clients are conveying. A one-and-done slideshow forces the speaker into a rigid, linear story with little room for spontaneity or creativity. But successful business is conducted through relationships, and relationships are built through interactive dialogue – a volley where both sides share and build on each other’s last comment.

Today, when a real discussion starts in a meeting, the slideshow is typically left behind. One slide just languishes, ignored on the monitor. Presentation management allows on-demand access to a comprehensive library where users can actually search and present a slide or file. When the client redirects the conversation, i.e., the presentation, the presenter can present the content accordingly. And this content is already compliant and up-to-date.

So the presenter can follow through with the right materials and advance the relationship. No longer does he need to schedule another follow-up meeting, or chase the client down for the next couple of months to get that second (or third, fourth or even fifth) meeting. The presenter can address all of the issues on the spot.

Presentation management reduces the number of meetings and time needed to close a deal, allowing the rep to chase more deals in the same time frame. Furthermore, when you can answer a client’s question on the spot, you look smarter, and are indeed smarter. You build credibility for yourself and for the company. Trust builds long-term profitable relationships.

Elevate the Value of Content Creators

When the content generates a higher return on investment, and your team is more productive because of how they are using that content, then that trickles right up the ladder to the content creators themselves. From the writers to the designers to the strategists and producers, many people from different disciplines contribute to a piece of marketing collateral. Presentation management increases the value of their work and how it’s perceived across the organization.

As a high-level example, let’s consider materials prepared for a huge conference, where the CEO is the keynote speaker. The budget and profile is typically pretty big for such an event, easily running into the six figures. The marketing department creates a presentation, using professional copywriters, graphic designers and animators. Other department leaders also contribute content. Then, perhaps, a video is produced – again with professional writers, directors, videographers, makeup artists, etc. The costs keep rising.

With presentation management, elements of that presentation can be reused and re-purposed, quickly and easily.

We’re not implying that everyone in the company can give the CEO’s keynote presentation. But with a presentation management strategy in place, it will be much easier and more common for the rest of the company to reuse and re-purpose assets from that presentation for their own meetings.

The same results hold true on a more mundane level, since we know that most presentations don’t have a $100,000 budget and are not given by the CEO. A presentation created for a sales call is actually used multiple times across the entire sales team. The content creators’ product affects 300 people in the company over the course of a year, versus two people in the company over the course of one meeting. With presentation management, the effort of content creators is elevated from a one-and-done tactical exercise to a strategic initiative benefiting the entire organization. In so doing, the content creators get more exposure and contribute more value throughout the company.

On top of that, presentation management directs the content to the presenters in the field. The content creators field fewer last-minute, panicked requests, like:

Hey, I have a meeting in one hour, where is the new pricing?

I can’t find the slide!

Do you mind, just, putting these few slides together for me?

Marketing puts out these fires every day. Every time a last-minute request comes in, everything else drops. The day is derailed. Worse, the day is derailed by a request for something that already exists! Fewer fires to put out means the marketing team can put their resources to strategic initiatives that build the brand and push the business forward.

In the next post in this series, we will look at how Presentation Management ensures compliance.

 AlexAnndra Ontra, co-founder of Shufflrr, is a leading advocate for presentation management. She has been providing presentation technology and consulting services to global enterprises for over 15 years.

At Shufflrr, Alex advises Shufflrr clients through the process: from trial, to content architecture, through the launch, training and then on-going software upgrades. She’s hands-on. She is a leading expert in presentation management strategy, implementation, and adaptation.

 James Ontra is co-founder and CEO of Shufflrr.  His 30-year career has focused on the highest profile presentations for world class companies.  His clients have included:  American Express, Bloomberg, Epcot Center, Mercedes Benz, NBC Olympics, Warner Bros. and many more.

His vision and strategy have been driving Presentation Management to become a recognized communication discipline.  James combined this passion with technical development to build Shufflrr. Presentation Management is smart communication strategy.

 Geetesh Bajaj is an awarded Microsoft PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional), and has been designing and training with PowerPoint for more than two decades. He heads Indezine, a presentation design studio and content development organization based out of Hyderabad, India.

Geetesh believes that any PowerPoint presentation is a sum of its elements–these elements include abstract elements like story, consistency, and interactivity — and also slide elements like shapes, graphics, charts, text, sound, video, and animation. He explains how these elements work together in his training sessions. He has also authored six books on PowerPoint and Microsoft Office.