How to Choose the Best Sales Presentation Software in 2023
As a B2B business, whether you're a startup or a rapidly expanding brand, it's crucial to equip your team with a sales presentation software that makes their job easier and helps you maintain control of your sales narrative. The market is flooded with modern sales presentation software options, but how do you know which features to prioritize for your business and clients? This article will guide you through the selection process, exploring key factors such as scalability, pricing, and user adoption, as well as the benefits that come with the right tool for your B2B sales team
Essential Features of a Modern Sales Presentation Software
With so many sales presentation software options on the market, it's important to look for a platform that will grow with your company, help you maintain control of your sales story, and most importantly make it easy for your team to present your brand in the best light possible.
Five must-have features for B2B sales teams in sales presentation software:
- Template System: Providing your team with a system is key to enabling them to do their job more efficiently. Keep in mind that many of the modern sales presentation software on the market come with templated pages that your team can use as a starting point for their presentations. You have to be cautious with these templates because you don't want your B2B sales team to recreate your sales pitch every single time. Ideally, you're looking for presentation software that allows you to provide your team with a locked-down templated system so that they can access pre-approved content to use in their presentations, thus taking away the need for them to recreate content for every single meeting.
- Visualization Integration: In today's remote sales environment, it's imperative that you use sales presentation software that supports enhanced visualizations, such as video interactivity and AR/VR experiences. This will help your prospective clients truly understand what your product or service does and how it can benefit their business. This is especially important for brands that are selling large-scale devices, such as medical devices or manufacturing equipment. The ability to demonstrate how a product works without actually having to be there or bring the product to your prospective client will save your team not only time but also a considerable amount of money.
- Analytics and Tracking: Long gone are the days of sending a company deck and hoping that your prospective clients viewed it. Pretty much every sales presentation software you research will have analytics and tracking capabilities to show you who viewed your presentation and how they viewed it. But keep in mind that as a sales and marketing leader in your organization, that's only a small piece of the puzzle. You want insights into how your team is performing with your sales presentation and how the content within is performing. So, it's not only important to have tracking for your sales reps, but it's equally important to have tracking insights into how the system you're using is performing as a whole. This will allow you to make informed decisions on what content you should be adding and removing. It'll also give you insight into who's performing well, how they're doing it, and mimic it for the rest of the team.
- Collaboration & Sharing: If you're working at an organization that has between 50 and 200 sales reps, you don't always want them to see all of your sales content. Certain divisions may need access to specific content, while others need access to other content. You don't want to get into a situation where you're using platforms such as Dropbox or Google Slides to manage this content for different divisions because that's where your sales story becomes messy and inconsistent. So, when researching sales presentation software, make sure it has collaboration and sharing permissions that allow you to share certain presentations with specific team members, giving you total control over how your content is being shared and distributed.
- Mobile Responsive: This is number five but should probably be number one given the remote landscape we live in. Your sales reps should always assume that your presentations are being viewed on a mobile device or a tablet. Therefore, all the content that you're sharing should be responsive to these viewing scenarios. Gone are the days of asking prospective clients to download large PowerPoint or PDF files and pinch and zoom on their mobile devices to read them. This does not leave a good first impression with your prospective clients, nor does it give you the ability to track and engage with how that content is performing.
Future-Proofing Your Sales Story: Why Scalability Matters
When looking for the best sales presentation software, it's important to consider how big you want your business to be. If you're a brand with a goal of being a 10 to 15 person organization, as opposed to a 50 to 500 person or salesperson organization, you'll be looking for two different types of sales presentation software.
For larger-scale organizations, it's crucial to choose a sales presentation software that allows you to control your sales story early on. This is particularly important if you're in a growth phase. Many growing brands rely on cloud-based storage systems like Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive to manage and distribute sales presentation content. However, this can result in an inconsistent sales story, so it's necessary to have an efficient and consistent way to distribute sales presentations.
On the other hand, if you're a smaller organization, presentation platforms that are similar to PowerPoint, such as Prezi, Canva, Beautiful.ai, or Pitch, may be suitable for your business. This is because your organization is small enough that you have greater control over how your sales presentations are managed and delivered.
However, regardless of your business size or type, we recommend that you cross-reference our list of five must-have features for sales presentation software to ensure that you're meeting the needs of today's modern sales reps and your prospective buyers.
Sales Presentation Software Adoption: How Challenging is it for Your Team?
Change is challenging for any B2B sales team. Sales is a highly personal process, with each sales rep utilizing their unique tips, tricks, and techniques for selling. Some use presentations, while others don't. Some prefer presentations with 50 pages, while others like presentations with just one. As a sales and marketing leader, it's essential to appreciate and embrace this diversity. Your sales reps are not robots, and each one has their way of working that makes them most comfortable and successful.
Implementing a new sales presentation system is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. Plan for a 4 to 6-week window to regularly meet with your team to train, Q&A, and assess how the platform is performing. Plan to provide them with the support they need to ensure a successful transition.
How to Budget for a Sales Presentation Platform: Beyond the Monthly License
As you research and trial numerous sales presentation platforms on the market, you'll notice a consistent pricing range of $10 to $20 per user per month. For larger organizations, some platforms may require you to call for enterprise pricing, which could potentially lower your monthly costs.
However, what's often overlooked when researching sales presentation platforms is the cost of the content that goes within these tools. At the end of the day, a tool is only as good as the content you put inside it. The right content can make your brand stand out, make your sales reps look like stars, and ultimately push your prospective clients down the sales pipeline.
When looking at your sales content, consider the type of content needed to better tell your sales stories, such as explainer videos, 3D product visualizations, interactive demos, or ROI calculators. These tools make the job of your sales reps easier. However, the price range of these tools is hard to determine without understanding your exact needs.
Based on our experience in creating sales content, here's a good pricing guide:
- Presentation rebrand: $1500-$4000
- Explainer video: $3000-$12000
- 3D product visualizations: $6000-$15,000
- ROI calculators: $1500-$3000
Nuvue: The Synergistic Solution for Sales Presentations that Combines Features and Creative Power
Today's scaling B2B sales teams are seeing success in their sales presentations when they combine technology with creativity. As stated earlier, having the key features to meet the demands of your sales reps and prospective clients is only part of the puzzle. Having powerful creative content to support your sales presentation software is the other. So when researching the right solution, you're looking for one that not only offers great technology but also has an experienced B2B creative services team behind it.
Nuvue is a creative-first technology brand. We've been working with B2B sales and marketing leaders for over 20 years to create engaging B2B sales content that we integrate into our sales presentation platform to help B2B sales teams better deliver their sales story and close deals faster. If you'd like to see how we've redefined the sales presentation software landscape, schedule your HelloNuvue call today.
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