How to Measure Presentation Success in 2023: Tracking, Analytics & Beyond

How to measure presentation success and determine whether your investment in creating beautiful presentations for your sales team was worth it is a question that many B2B brands struggle to answer. In today's sales environment, it's essential to understand how to track and analyze the performance of your presentations effectively.  

Before online presentation platforms became available, assessing the effectiveness of B2B presentations posed a challenge as it was unclear how to measure presentation success without analytics. Traditional tools like PowerPoint did not provide analytics, which made it difficult to determine the performance of a presentation. Consequently, businesses had to resort to alternative metrics such as email open rates to gauge the potential success of their presentations.

In this article, we'll dive deep into the importance of measuring presentation success and explore the tools and techniques you need to track and analyze your presentation performance effectively.

3 Reasons Why Tracking Your Presentations Is Key to B2B Sales Team Success

To truly measure presentation success, tracking your presentations goes way beyond simply knowing whether or not your presentation was opened. In fact, there are three key reasons why understanding what's happening with your B2B sales presentations is critical to success.

1. Identify Best-Performing Presentations: By tracking your presentations, you can identify which ones are resonating with your audience and driving the most engagement. This knowledge can then be used to improve future presentations and increase the chances of success with your prospective clients.
2. Enables Better Follow-Up: Knowing which prospects engaged with your presentation and which ones didn't can help your sales team follow up more effectively. They can tailor their messaging to the interests and pain points of each prospect, leading to more meaningful conversations and a higher likelihood of closing the sale.
3. Provides Data for Continuous Improvement: Measuring presentation success provides valuable data that can be used to continuously improve your sales team's presentations. By analyzing metrics like engagement rates, time spent on each slide, and conversion rates, you can identify areas for improvement and define presentation performance benchmarks to enhance future presentations. 

The Yin and Yang of B2B Presentation Tracking: What You Need to Know

When it comes to measuring presentation success, you need to approach it from two different perspectives: the external and internal view.

The external view is focused on how potential clients receive your presentations, and tracking key metrics such as open rates, views, time on page, time across presentation, downloads, and shares can help you measure presentation success. Prezi competitors like Beautiful.ai and Canva have integrated presentation tracking as a standard feature, allowing you to access essential metrics and evaluate the effectiveness of your presentations.

Conversely, the internal view takes a broader perspective and considers how your presentations perform collectively rather than individually. By leveraging sales presentation data, you can assess the overall performance of your presentation content and make data-driven decisions to improve and refine your sales story, ultimately leading to enhanced business results. However, not many presentation platforms offer this capability, as they tend to focus on one-off presentations rather than a system for creating multiple presentations from a single source asset. 

By combining these two perspectives, you can get a complete picture of how your presentations are performing and how to measure presentation success effectively.

Why Monitoring Your Sales Reps' Use of Presentations is Key to Success

To achieve success in B2B sales, it's essential that your team is all on the same page, singing the same song. If rogue presentations are being used, it can lead to stunted growth. That's why it's important to implement a presentation system that allows your sales team to present the same sales story. By doing so, you not only track how the presentations are performing but also how your sales team is using them.

Gaining insight into the utilization of your presentations within your organization and correlating sales with their use can aid sales and marketing leaders in making informed decisions about how the rest of the team should present. By identifying which presentations are successful for certain sellers, you can make data-driven decisions about how the entire organization should approach selling. Conversely, if there is no organized sales presentation system in place and everyone is presenting differently, using a haphazard mix of PowerPoint presentations, it becomes challenging to determine the effectiveness of your presentations.

The Struggles of Tracking: Common Challenges to Measuring Presentation Success

There are two common obstacles organizations face in measuring presentation success. The first is not having the right tools, meaning a presentation platform that provides rich tracking and analytic data. Fortunately, the absence of tracking analytics in traditional tools like PowerPoint should not deter B2B brands from monitoring presentation engagement, especially with the abundance of affordable online presentation platforms available. In fact, some of the best sales presentation software options include baseline tracking data as a fundamental feature, enabling you to track key metrics and measure the success of your presentations. For as little as $10 to $15 per month, you can provide your sales team with a solution.

The second challenge is investing the time to analyze presentation data and create actionable insights to improve presentations based on that information. As there is no job description for "presentation analysts," this often goes under the radar at most organizations. It is the responsibility of sales and marketing leaders to sit down every quarter with the content team to assess how presentations are performing. This involves looking at metrics such as downloads, drop-off rates, and overall engagement to identify areas for improvement. For example, what content should we make more of for presentations, and what should we remove from our presentations that are not being viewed by prospective clients? It is essential to examine why certain sections are not being viewed. Common reasons include having too much information, using bullet points and too much copy, or flat and dull imagery when 3D product rendering is necessary to communicate the story.

Comparing data against real testimonials is an effective way to assess your presentations. By asking prospective clients why they did or did not view a particular section, you can gain insights into how to build better presentations in the future.

5 Presentation Platforms Ideal for Small B2B Teams

If your sales team is fewer than 10 people and you're looking for an affordable presentation platform that provides external tracking data to measure presentation success, there are several popular and cost-effective options available. Here is a list of the five best sales presentation software, ranging from free to $30 per month, depending on your organization's size. However, it's important to keep in mind that while external metrics are crucial in measuring presentation success, there are also internal metrics to consider, as previously discussed in this article.

Prezi: A cloud-based presentation software that takes a unique visual storytelling approach.

Beautiful.ai: An AI-powered platform that generates designer-quality presentations automatically.

Canva: A design platform that offers customizable templates and user-friendly tools for creating presentations.

Pitch: A collaborative presentation software that facilitates real-time teamwork on presentations.

Visme: A platform that enables users to create interactive presentations, infographics, and other visual content.

Discover the Full Picture of Your Presentations with Nuvue's 360 Analytics

If your B2B sales team is growing rapidly, it's crucial to have a presentation platform that can scale with your organization's growth. You need a platform that not only provides external data on how your presentations are performing with potential clients but also offers internal data to assess how your sales content is performing and how your sales team is leveraging these presentations to drive real results.

Nuvue is a presentation platform designed specifically for B2B sales teams ranging from 25 to 1000 members. It is the only hybrid presentation platform on the market that comes with its own presentation designer and dozens of presentation templates, as well as a robust content management system (CMS) for organizing and managing all of your sales presentation content. All of this is packaged with a dashboard that provides you with a holistic view of both internal and external presentation tracking data, which you can use to continually evolve your sales story and improve your presentation effectiveness.

If you'd like to see how leading B2B sales organizations are scaling their presentation systems along with their growth, schedule your hello call with Nuvue today.