Your Sales Team Is Wasting Time & Money Building Presentations

Sales teams that create their own presentations from scratch are wasting their time. Even worse, they’re wasting the time of every other department they’re bugging for assets and links to the latest materials in the process. But that’s still not the worst part.

No, the worst part is when their finished presentation isn’t even worth the effort.

Sales reps aren’t designers. They weren’t hired to be designers, and they shouldn’t be designing. Period. They should be selling. And, just to connect the dots, when your sales team is fumbling their way through designing their own presentations, that’s less time spent selling. A lot less.

Here’s how you fix that. 

Audit the Amount of Time Spent Creating Sales Presentations

Auditing time spent on presentations is not micromanaging. It’s a necessary step in giving your sales team more time back and empowering them to do the job they want (and were hired) to do. Skeptical? Then check in with them directly.

If you ask any sales rep in your business what they love about their job, nobody is going to put “creating presentations” at the top of their list. Because for most of them, it’s annoying. It’s a struggle, and they know they’re not even producing anything that great.

They realize it’s a time suck. They just don’t see the solution — or even realize there is one.

So complete a time audit and see for yourself how much time is being wasted on presentations within your company — both departmentally and interdepartmentally.

As you’re scrutinizing the time your sales reps spend creating presentations, cross-reference your findings with these questions:

1. Do you rely on salespeople to create their own presentations?
2. How many times has your sales team asked you for the latest deck?
3. How often are outdated decks being used?
4. Is the number of presentations out there spiraling out of control?
5. Are you tracking presentations to understand what’s actually happening with all of them?

Chances are, you can tell you have a problem just by looking at that list. And that problem isn’t going to solve itself.

However, a closed presentation system can.

Your Sales Team Isn’t Just Wasting “a Little” Time

31% of their working hours. Ain’t nothing small about that. That’s how much time sales reps actually spend searching for and creating sales content. Almost a third of their time wasted on something a closed presentation system could help them do in practically no time at all.

Let’s throw some very conservative numbers out there to help you wrap your mind around this problem a little more. For the sake of this example, let’s say your sales reps are each spending 5 hours a week searching for content and building (shabby) presentations with it.

Over the course of a month, that’s 20 hours of each sales rep’s time down the toilet. Over the course of a year, that’s about 260 hours for a single sales rep. How many sales reps are on your team? 10? 30? 50?

See the problem? With 50 sales reps spending 5 hours a week on something they shouldn’t and don’t want to be doing, you’re looking at about 13,000 hours a year being wasted. And if that number doesn’t shock you, you’re either doing better than most of us financially or you probably shouldn’t be in business.

Control and Manage Presentations Upfront to Make Sales More Efficient

There is nothing inherently wrong with collaborative presentation platforms. The problem is how organizations use them — or misuse them, if we’re being honest. Hell, we still use Google Slides when we’re working on something that requires a lot of collaboration. The difference is we know when collaboration is necessary — and when control is key.

A lot of organizations struggle to recognize that point, and that’s where time gets wasted.

For some companies, like startups where things are constantly in flux, collaborative tools and customization make the most sense. But for more mature organizations that aren’t — or shouldn’t be — reinventing their presentations and telling their story differently every time, a closed presentation system is invaluable.

Ultimately, it all comes down to knowing what your presentation system needs to do. There is a huge difference between presentation design platforms, like Pitch, and presentation control platforms, like Nuvue. With a presentation control platform, every single asset used in presentations is easily regulated and company approved. Underperforming content identified through the platforms analytics can be pulled. Users can edit their presentations to add or remove approved, high-performing materials, but they cannot edit the content itself.

That allows your sales team to create and share company-approved presentations in seconds, not hours. We’re not just talking a couple of hours here and there. We’re talking about institutional change that gives your sales team days of their month back.

Protect Your Bottom Line and Let Your Sales Team Sell

When you have sales people with no design chops crafting ugly presentations, everybody loses. The salespeople lose by missing out on selling time. The designers lose when they’re asked to create graphics to add to existing decks. Everyone involved in the feedback and revisions on those designs loses.

And your business as a whole loses when, after all of that back and forth, your sales prospect is held hostage with another lousy PowerPoint presentation that doesn’t exactly instill confidence.

Everyone involved in your sales process deserves better, especially when you consider it’s not just about creating that one presentation. It’s about all the employees cc’d on the emails. It’s about all the different touchpoints being held up, from the intro email to the presentation itself to the follow-ups. There is no bottom to this rabbit hole of wasted time.

Nuvue isn’t for everyone. If you’re looking to create bespoke presentations that are highly customizable, there are other options out there catering to those needs. But if you’re looking to reclaim time wasted on creating worse and worse versions of the same presentation over and over again, a closed presentation system is exactly the solution you need.

Take a few hours up front to define your sales story and load up company-approved assets, lock them down, control them within the system, and save thousands of hours you’re currently hemorrhaging. Your sales team will be just as thankful as your stakeholders.

If you’re interested in taking control of your sales narrative and its content, let’s talk.