Presentations Cost Salespeople 50+ Hours Every Month

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By AlexAnndra Ontra

The average salesperson spends way too much time managing presentations of all sorts, including proposals, sales, training, and financial presentations. In this post, we’ll help you learn how your organization can streamline presentation management and reclaim thousands of hours—increasing your team’s effectiveness and boosting your bottom line.

Some key ideas we’ll discuss below are:

• Salespeople spend 31% of their time every week tracking down and updating content and other sales collateral.
• This is an outdated approach which prevents organizations from reaching their full potential.
• By using modern presentation management solutions, organizations can help their sales teams reclaim upwards of 50 hours each month.

Introduction

How many hours does your sales team waste each month searching, editing, tweaking, and sharing materials they need to make their presentations?

If your company is anything like the typical organization, the answer is probably a lot higher than you think. In fact, the average salesperson spends 31% of their time each week, that translates to 12.4 hours of a 40-hour workweek—searching for content and customizing it to their exact specifications.

Source: Salespeople Only Spent One-Third of Their Time Selling Last Year by Hubspot

The Current Workflow: A Dead-end

For the most part, a majority of organizations follow the same four-step workflow to put presentation materials in the hands of the sales team.

1. The marketing team creates the sales assets—which then tend to sit in repositories for an extended period of time before they’re ready to be used.
2. When the time is right, marketing sends the assets over to the sales team—or the sales team spends however long tracking them down.
3. Each member of the sales team then customizes the assets to their own specifications.
4. Once that’s done, each salesperson presents their pitches to prospective clients.

While this approach might work just fine for the luckiest companies that have insanely effective sales teams, it’s completely inefficient and leads to a dead end for the vast majority of businesses.

Plus, organizations that use this kind of approach are unable to control the tweaks their sales teams make to each asset. Who’s to say if every change stays in compliance with laws, regulations, and internal messaging?

What’s more, there’s no guarantee that the customizations each salesperson makes will be beneficial to the company. Unfortunately, when bad changes are made, there aren’t any mechanisms in place that enable sales managers to provide feedback and oversight so as to ensure each presentation adheres to company standards.

Making matters worse, companies can’t track the effectiveness of their sales materials to see which slides are delivering results and conversions. And on top of that, once customized, these presentations are unlikely to be used again by anyone else—which isn’t the most efficient use of content. What a waste!

The good news is that by taking advantage of modern presentation management systems like Shufflrr, companies can unlock the true value of their sales collateral while using data to ensure their sales teams’ pitches translate into conversions.

Presentation Management: A New Way Forward

Shufflrr’s presentation management solution saves companies time and money while increasing the effectiveness of their presentations. Instead of having each member of the sales team customize collateral to their own preferences—with no way to tell whether those preferences will drive further sales—companies can use Shufflrr to ensure that only the presentations that have proven to generate revenue are used in pitches.

Whereas the current workflow that many organizations rely on to facilitate presentations leads to a dead-end, Shufflrr delivers a circular workflow that ensures presentations continuously improve. Here’s how it works:

• Marketers create sales collateral in a collaborative process.
• They then send those assets to members of the sales team.
• Salespeople can easily share that content with their colleagues. Say goodbye to scrutinizing a hundred folders to find that one PowerPoint presentation.
• Members of the sales team then leverage feedback and update the presentation materials, so they are more effective.
• After the collateral has been updated to incorporate elements from the feedback, it’s time for the sales team to make their pitches.
• Using the Shufflrr system, the effectiveness of each asset is then tracked.
• Thanks to the analytics that result from that tracking, the team can then use data to inform their content creation moving forward—and the cycle repeats itself.

Thanks to Shufflrr, presentation management shifts from a dead-end workflow to a payoff cycle that enables teams to reclaim a significant amount of time each week. Once Shufflrr is deployed, salespeople won’t have to spend several hours each week searching for sales collateral, customizing the content, and setting up their presentations. Instead, they’ll be able to easily find the materials they need to close deals.

Shufflrr provides sales teams with a number of benefits, including:

Improved individual performance

Less time searching for sales collateral means more time pitching to clients and more closed deals—which means more commission. Since people work for money, it’s safe to say that more commission produces a happier sales team.

Improved company performance 

As each member of the sales team is able to close more deals, the company’s collective financial performance improves, too. With more money in the bank, the organization can invest in growing their operations.

Increased employee engagement 

Not only will salespeople spend less time looking for content, but they also won’t have to deal with the frustration that comes with using clunky and outdated systems. With a modern presentation management system in place, employee engagement will shoot up—making your team happier and more productive.

The end result? More deals, more revenue, and fewer expenses.

    AlexAnndra Ontra, the 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, she oversees all client services and 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.