The professionally designed PowerPoint template is right up there with company letterhead, business cards, logos and a company website in our book. It’s a huge part of the initial branding platform because presentations are one of the primary vehicles your company uses to communicate with prospects, leads, clients, and the general public after they’ve gone through your marketing channels and entered the sales process. The pre-designed, branded PowerPoint template is how you make sure that all your representatives are stepping into sales and other communications initiatives with their best branding foot forward.
Not only that, but it saves a heck of a lot of time for even the design savvy in your organization. Many of the basic tasks involved in presentation design have to do with slide setup. Slide setup depends on content type, and in the big scheme of things, there are really only a handle of content situations you or your people will need to deal with. When you decide in advance how those content situations need to be handled, whether it’s a chart/graph, an image, an emphatic quote or statement, an objective slide, etc., you save a ton of time and gain a lot of consistency. All anyone with the template has to do is fill in the data, add the image, type in the quote or statement, or otherwise add the relevant content and they’re good to go.
We don’t need to tell many marketing departments that there’s untold value in keeping certain non-design oriented individuals in your company from making their own executive design situations. We’ve all cringed in horror as someone on our own team puts poorly formatted, dense, strange and brand-less slides in front of what had been an interested prospect prior to the pitch. Templates solve that problem for you.
Of course, templates can also be an efficient way to get a truly professional looking deck every time without paying for each individual presentation to be designed. You’ll still want to give special attention to the big opportunities and decks, and things like infographics, flow charts and other graphically intensive content usually require professional help to do right, but for those presentation constants—the sales deck, the general capabilities deck, the training deck, and others—you can cut down on the day-to-day maintenance and cost of sending it out each time.
If you’re presenting even as infrequently as once a quarter on similar topics for the same company, you definitely need to look into building a PowerPoint template. It’ll make your life easier, make you look better, and save you a bit of money, too!
Question: What other presentation efficiency techniques have you picked up over the years?
