Presentation Management: 5 Tactics You Can Use Right Now to Improve Organizational Performance

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By AlexAnndra Ontra

Presentation Management is more of a strategy than a service to buy. The idea is to create efficiencies. The strategy is to gain efficiencies through the use, reuse, updating, sharing, broadcasting, tracking, and analyzing of presentations. Imagine your files created for a single purpose are being leveraged across your entire organization, always with the correct images and content. How much time, money, and frustration would that save?

Image: Yay Images

There are some presentation management platforms that can automate the process for you. But you can still achieve some benefits from increased productivity without the investment. Here are five things you can do today:

1. Categorize Your Content

Oftentimes, colleagues create a great presentation for a meeting, and then leave it on the network… Somewhere. Anyone is welcome to open, search, and reuse that great content… if only they could find it. Organize your content into general categories. Examples include product, service, research, geography, and company overview. Whatever makes sense for your business.

2. Create a Presentation Library

Once the content is organized, it needs to be easy to find. Try moving to a universal naming convention for file names on your network. Or, even better, use universal tags if your system offers that option. There may be an overlap. For example, a client file will likely contain information about a particular product. When storing them on a platform like SharePoint, assign metatags. This way, users can find files through different search criteria. But if you are using your network folders, where do you put them? In the product folder or the client folder. The answer is in #3.

3. Create a Group of Masters

The Master Presentations are the overarching, up-to-date, compliant information about the main aspects of your business. These are the decks that your team should reference when they are preparing for a specific client meeting. There is no preset number of slides, as every business is unique. But we do recommend PowerPoint decks of 20-35 slides. This provides enough detail about the subject without becoming overwhelming. Think of the last time you had to scroll through a 100-slide deck, looking for one chart. A frustrating waste of time!

Furthermore, it’s easier to manage and distribute updates with a few short decks than one monster deck. So, back to the question of where to store a deck with both product and client information? The presentation was already created with the master product information, so the unique information will be about the client. Store it in the Client category. In the future, when someone is looking for product information, they will go to the Product folder. Because now they know that is where you find current product information.

4. Branded Templates

Don’t expect your sales folks to be graphic designers. Apply your company’s logo, graphics, color schemes, fonts, etc. to your group of “Masters.” This creates brand consistency and polished, professional presentations. Give them the best of breed, so they can focus on the specifics of their meeting.

5. Assign an Owner

Like your company’s website, social media campaign, or PR effort, the message that proliferates through presentations affects your brand and even the bottom line. So treat Presentations as the enterprise communications tool that they are. And not a bunch of ad hoc slides. Assign a person or team to manage, update, distribute, and track them.

Presentation Management is NOT an afterthought. It’s a discipline that makes everyone on your team better and more productive in their meeting.

      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 ongoing software upgrades. She’s hands-on. She is a leading expert in presentation management strategy, implementation, and adaptation.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.