Does your company have a messy library of slides that no one updates, cleans up, or knows what to do with? As a presentation design company, we know the agony of having too many assets. TeamSlide offers a unique solution to this problem of “way too much,” and we were lucky to land an interview with Kartik Sundar of TeamSlide, who may be able to solve some of your greatest frustrations.
Without further ado, here are the questions we asked Kartik about what TeamSlide is all about, and what kinds of productivity issues it solves:
Can you tell us a little bit more about what TeamSlide is?
“TeamSlide is a slide library solution that helps companies manage, distribute and update their PowerPoint assets.
When building a new presentation, you often start by searching for old slides, charts or images that you can reuse or improve upon. These slides, however, are buried across numerous presentations and across several locations. As a result, finding the specific slide you need is a painful, time consuming process which leads to significant productivity loss.
TeamSlide solves this problem by ensuring you can quickly find specific slides without ever leaving PowerPoint. With our PowerPoint add-in you search, preview, insert, and share content with just a few clicks. TeamSlide provides a secure slide library hosted on your premises or in the cloud to organize and manage all your PowerPoint content.”
How did this idea come about?
“When I worked as a consultant and then as part of a corporate strategy team, we lived in PowerPoint and as a result we were always hunting for old slides. Typically, we’d open several presentations and flip through dozens of slides to find the specific slide we wanted only to realize that it was out of date. Often we’d end up emailing or instant messaging colleagues asking if they had a particular slide. This was always a painful process, and I knew we needed to improve it.
TeamSlide was born out of this need. I remember the panic that ensued when a senior executive once asked me for a slide I had made 6 months earlier. With these real life experiences in hand, we started developing TeamSlide. After vigorously testing the solution and getting expert feedback, we released TeamSlide in 2015.”
What drives your passion in this industry?
“As a management consultant all my work was documented in PowerPoint slides. As a result, I know first-hand how demanding building persuasive and insightful presentations is. Our passion is largely driven by our ability to help PowerPoint users improve productivity so that they can focus on more important things, whether that’s at work or outside work. My favorite part of the job is working with new customers and showing them all the ways we can make their lives easier.”
What makes TeamSlide different?
“TeamSlide’s most important advantage is its ease of use and intuitive interface. We built TeamSlide to seamlessly integrate with PowerPoint so that users wouldn’t even have to ‘alt-tab’ to search, insert, or share content. Similar to Google image search, TeamSlide search results are images of slides that you can just click to insert into your presentation.
The back-end slide library was also designed to enable a clean user experience. TeamSlide can connect with your authentications systems, enabling secure access without creating new logins. In addition, TeamSlide can connect with your content management system, allowing users to quickly access existing content.”
What are some common issues that people currently face with their PowerPoint library of content?
“Most organizations struggle to build and maintain a searchable and always up-to-date slide library. Small- and medium-sized groups might allocate a shared folder where they store presentations, but searching for specific slides is painful – inconsistent naming conventions, versioning issues, and a lack of slide-level access drive productivity and knowledge losses. Large organizations might invest in a content management system, which can be a great tool to manage a variety of information. However, if you value slides, general content management solutions are missing important functionality and are too cumbersome – too many clicks to access content, lack of slide-level previews, and a limited ability for average users to contribute content drive significant inefficiencies.”
In an ideal world, how can TeamSlide help increase productivity for their users?
“TeamSlide helps drive productivity by saving user time, improving output quality, and increasing knowledge capture. With TeamSlide, users can find content immediately, which saves the time they would have spent hunting for a slide and also saves the time they might have spent recreating slides. Arming users with the best content increases output quality, clarifies messaging, and improves adherence to branding standards. This in turn can drive business outcomes including sales success rates and better business decisions. TeamSlide also makes sharing content easy, enabling organizations to better capture data and content.”
What is it like to use TeamSlide?
“Our users tell us that TeamSlide has become a core part of their daily work and that they’d have a tough time trying to manage without it. They love the productivity gains from instantly finding content and often even discover long-lost PowerPoint assets. Many enjoy our sync feature, which ensures that you have the latest version of a slide at all times.
Some customers use it for just a small collection of slides and visualizations that they want at their fingertips. Other use it as a way for marketing and sales to effectively communicate – marketing can ensure sales always has the right slide, and sales can provide slide update recommendations based on feedback from their meetings. Large organizations use it to provide slide-level access to their entire archive of presentations.”
How do you personally use the program?
“We use TeamSlide as a sales enablement solution to ensure that we have the right slide for the right customer at the right time. As we work across a variety of industries, we have specific value propositions we like to point out. TeamSlide allows us to instantly find the slide that will best speak to the specific customer. In addition, we use TeamSlide to store visualizations including images, PowerPoint shapes, and charts.”
Curious to learn more about TeamSlide? Check out their site!
Kartik Sundar is a founder at Aploris (www.aploris.com), a software firm that develops PowerPoint-based productivity and content management solutions, including TeamSlide (www.teamsli.de). Prior to Aploris, Kartik spent time as a management consultant with Bain & Company and then as part of Cisco’s corporate strategy team.
Want to read some other of our Ethos3 interviews? Here are some links!
Ethos3 Interview with Shawn Achor
