Saving Time with Slide Libraries

Companies of all sizes waste hundreds of hours on sales slide decks, pitches, and proposals throughout the year.

Furthermore, creating these behemoth documents is often demoralizing for teams already saddled with too much to accomplish in too small of a timeframe.

But slide decks are often critical for sealing big deals.

You’ve built a relationship with a prospective client and get asked to put everything together in a deck. What do you do? 

Make Your Deck Irresistible 

Decks are where decisions go to die.

Building tons of text-heavy slides is the worst way for a brain to process information, especially when your prospective client is already weighing a big investment. 

So, how do you balance the need to answer client questions without creating more questions in the minds of your prospective clients?

If decks are where decisions go to die, how do you put together a deck quickly without killing the deal?

Remember: Sales Should be People-to-People

You should be focusing on your relationship with the client instead of fiddling with PowerPoint.

You should be writing an on-point executive summary instead of guessing what your decision-makers value the most.

And you should be able to easily start a deck from a beautifully designed, pre-vetted slide library that’s ready for customizing with the ease of a click.

Pitches & Proposals Are a Necessary Evil

They’re the last gate to money.

The last gate before the VC writes a check.

The last gate before your client signs an MSA.

Companies that do pitches well have minimized the pain they cause by hiring dedicated team members, standardizing commonly-requested content, and investing in proactive business development to increase the chances of getting deals outside the procurement pipeline.

Before founding my own company, I wrote hundreds of these documents for deals ranging in size from $20K to $2M.

In the process, I developed my own shortcuts that proved successful. 

5 Things You Need to Save Time with Slide Libraries

When creating a slide library for your organization, these are the things you need to have.

1. Beautifully embedded branding

Your brand comes through your company voice, colors, slide elements, and other design choices.

Are you bold and independent? Or are you serene and collected?

Branding increases the amount of trust your prospective client will have in your company. Branding makes you and your prospects feel confident about moving forward.

2. Accessible platform

Your team needs ready access to be able to create decks.

Keeping your documents preserved in InDesign adds an unnecessary burden to the people trained to use the program.

Your sales team should be in the field with prospects most of the time—not answering RFP questions to RFPs in decks.

Choose a platform that has collaborative editing capabilities so that more than one person can be working on the deck at a time. My personal favorites are Google Slides and Pitch.

3. Dedicated support

It may be a marketing team, freelance designer, or superstar assistant, but have one person own the document and see it through to completion before the deadline.

Please don’t make it the same person for every deal. Doing so is a fast path to burnout, regardless of the company's size.

4. Content edited for brevity

Through the process of multiple reviewers, content unnecessarily gets too long and rambly.

Multiple people writing in one document means everyone is adding while no one is cutting.

Appoint someone on the team who can be a ruthless editor for brevity and clarity, and expect to shave off about 30 percent of unnecessary verbiage at the end.

5. Single source of truth

One master template to rule them all. Company stats, highlights, testimonials, etc., change over time. Replicating the latest version is essential to saving time with slide libraries. Implement a process reviewing every document to ensure the latest information is included and any new information captured.

Where do you go from here?

Does your team want help standardizing and lifting your starter sales deck?

Schedule an Outspoke Roadmap today. We’ve worked on sales decks across many industries and have a track record of success applying best practices to save your team time and sanity.