5 Ways Sales Presentations are Costing You Big (& How the Right Platform Will Fix It)

Before you invest in any new tool, you need to assess whether it will add value to your organization. The best tools do two things; increase productivity and provide a solid return on your investment. A sales presentation platform is no exception. The thing is, many sales teams are currently using an outdated approach to sales presentations that is hurting their bottom line, and they don’t even realize it.

This article will explore 5 key signals that your sales presentations aren’t keeping up with your sales team’s needs or prospects’ expectations – resulting in lower productivity, engagement, and close rates. If you find yourself nodding ‘yes,’ it may be time to consider a sales presentation platform that addresses all of the above. 

1. Your Sales Presentations are Long-Winded and Wandering

An ideal sales story is concise, easy to follow, and makes liberal use of effective visuals. Unfortunately, many sales decks are a choppy patchwork of charts and bullet points with the value proposition buried somewhere along the way. 

If the words “wandering” or “aimless” accurately describe your current sales presentation, that directionless deck is likely costing you money. Why? 

Vague value propositions are often the result of an ‘ever growing’ sales presentation deck. New leaders come in, new products roll out, and rather than re-assessing the big picture of how your company presents itself to the world, more content gets tacked onto the existing deck. Before you know it, your sales deck becomes an unruly beast without anyone at the helm working to tame it. 

These “Frankenstein decks” result in a confusing sales story that forces prospects to figure out how your solution will benefit them, rather than demonstrating clear and compelling value.

In contrast, modern sales teams are adopting presentation platforms that incorporate ‘modular sales content’ as the building blocks of a consistent sales story. Reps are able to quickly build tailored presentations with company-approved content that always results in a cohesive value proposition. No need to rely on a single deck to win over every prospect—or, worse yet, to modify that one deck for every potential customer.

2. Your Sales Reps Aren’t Set Up for Success

Chances are, your company stores files in a cloud drive, and everyone has a different way of naming, updating, and otherwise organizing sales content. Instead of quick access to the assets they need, reps waste hours searching for the right product image, the most recent deck, the latest pricing list … often only to end up with the wrong content.

While this is certainly a frustrating situation that can impact sales, it can be downright damaging for businesses in heavily regulated industries, where inaccurate information can have major consequences. 

Without a system to ensure reps always have easy access to the right content, companies don’t just incur unnecessary costs in the name of inefficiency—they expose themselves to legal and compliance risks that are entirely avoidable.

Every department benefits from well-organized content. However, marketing complains about it. Sales complains about it. Leadership complains about it. And too often, nobody is actually doing anything to fix it. Here’s your chance to step up and be the hero.

Modern sales presentation platforms bring simplicity to the messy world of file management. An organized modular sales content library removes the logistical pain of managing sales content assets locally or in the cloud. Every asset is stored in one place with version control that takes the guesswork out updates, and makes it easy for reps to consistently access the right content every time.  

3. Your Reps Go Rogue With Sales Presentations

When it’s difficult for sales reps to find the right content for a particular prospect, they get creative. They’re much more likely to go off script in an attempt to customize a presentation. Unfortunately for sales and marketing leaders, the result is “decks gone wild” and countless versions of the sales story make their way into the field. 

Once a company loses control of its core messaging, costly challenges can take root throughout the entire sales process. A systemic lack of consistency makes it harder to effectively train new reps, improve sales team performance, shorten sales cycles, and more.

While this is a frustrating problem, it’s your sales team’s way of trying to solve a bigger issue – reps simply can’t find what they need, when they need it. A modern sales platform solves this by providing sales with standalone assets that can be combined into tailored presentations, without sacrificing consistency. It also helps by restricting who can make changes to content, meaning everything that goes out into the world has leadership’s stamp of approval. 

4. Updating Sales Presentations is Tedious

Whether you’ve got a whole new line of products launching or you’re releasing new features, there will come a day when your sales collateral needs to be adjusted to accurately reflect your most up-to-date product offerings and benefits. 

But, if you don’t have all content properly organized within a sales content library, and you’ve got multiple versions of sales decks floating around, it’s practically impossible to ensure every presentation contains current, accurate, on-brand content. Performing manual content updates is far from a cost-effective (or reliable) option.

With a modern sales platform, however, sales and marketing leaders can easily keep tabs on all the content out in the field – and can easily perform global updates to that content. That’s because modern sales presentation platforms are entirely web-based. Once a content asset is updated, every instance of that content will be updated in sales presentations, even if they’ve already been sent to prospects. 

5. Delayed Follow-Up is Hurting Your Conversion Rates 

The concept of speed to lead refers to the idea that the faster you follow up, the better your conversion rates. This concept is heavily supported by data and can make a huge difference in your overall close rates. The problem is, when you have absolutely no idea when leads are looking at your content because you don’t have access to engagement intel, it’s very difficult to follow up quickly.

When prospects slip through the cracks and sales cycles grow longer, it’s a costly problem. So what’s the solution? 

A smart sales presentation platform provides your sales team with real-time insights, like what assets leads are engaging with, when, and for how long. This data can be used to trigger faster, more personalized follow-up, resulting in accelerated movement through the sales pipeline and more closed deals.

The True Cost of Sales Presentations Without the Right Platform

We’ve primarily been talking about theoreticals here, but you can apply real numbers to quantify the opportunity cost of your current sales presentations. Calculate the monthly cost of your sales presentations by considering the size of your sales team, the number of presentations they create each month, how long it takes each rep to build each presentation, and their average hourly wage. 

Or, use our handy Sales Presentation Cost Calculator, and we’ll do the math for you. The number may shock you!

The Benefits of a Modern Sales Presentation Platform

At Nuvue, we believe every sales team can benefit from having access to a modern, modular sales content library and a sales presentation platform that makes it easy to build custom, unified sales stories that accelerate your sales pipeline. 

And gives sales reps, managers, and leaders access to real-time lead engagement data so they can make smart follow-up decisions. 

And gives your in-house marketers insight into which assets are performing the best. 

And, well, you get the idea. How can a modern sales presentation platform transform the way your team sells? Schedule an introduction with Nuvue today to experience it for yourself.