If you’re a sales executive, there’s nothing more frustrating than an office full of salespeople working on non-sales tasks. And if you’re a marketing executive, you want to support that sales team, but you aren’t resourced to create one-off sales presentations, leaving them largely to their own devices.

There IS a way to build an internal machine to support the sales team and let them focus on selling. Along the way you’ll save money, and your company’s brand.  In this episode we dissect the cost of doing it the wrong way, and outline the requirements and benefits of building a sales presentation machine that let’s salespeople do what they do best…sell.

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Hi, and welcome to P3, the perfect presentations podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, vice president of Perfect PlanIt.

I’m going in a bit of a different direction today. It’s part of the ongoing conversation about creating better presentations, but It’s focused on one particular breakdown.  It’s part rant about doing it wrong and part impassioned plea, and I’m talking to sales executives, and marketing executives that support their sales teams. This will be of interest to CFOs and CMOs as well.

If you use powerpoint (or any presentation software) to make your sales pitches, the bottom line is you’re wasting money. When I say you’re wasting money, what I mean is you’re wasting gobs and gobs of money. Worse than that, you’re hurting your company and your sales prospects.

I’m not advocating for NOT using powerpoint. Quite the opposite. For many companies, PowerPoint is a core part of their sales process…and not something they’re likely to change any time soon.

I’m going to dive right in today, and talk about the impact of using PowerPoint in most sales teams, but I want to do it in terms of cost and productivity. Then we’ll talk about how it affects your customers, and their likelihood of purchasing, and finally, ways you can solve the problem.

Sales presentations — which typically take the form of PowerPoint slides — are integrated deeply into most large organizations. The problem is that few of those companies ever take the time to evaluate their use of the tool and the quality of its output, or its cost and benefit to the company. As a result, the majority of companies that use PowerPoint are missing a costly source of inefficiency. Along the way they’re causing potential damage to their brand, and ignoring the cost of the wrong people doing the wrong tasks. If we stop, and we rethink how we use the tools, and the overall process of making a sale, we can create immense efficiencies, improve customer interactions and save a lot of money.

PowerPoint is perhaps the ultimate corporate conundrum. It’s maligned and derided as the enemy of clarity, while simultaneously being embraced and used to the tune of 30 million presentations every single day. There’s no piece of productivity software that elicits such passion and debate. The reality, as always, lies somewhere in between.

Organizations that rely on PowerPoint do it for a variety of reasons, but the end goal is the same. To convey information, to persuade or to effect change. Perhaps the most concrete example of this is among sales teams, where presentations to prospects, and updates to customers almost necessitate the use of PowerPoint. Companies like it because it’s fairly easy to work in, and often, sales teams exist in this do-it-yourself environment when it comes to actual customer contact.

But before we just accept that as gospel, let’s ask why sales teams operate like that. Traditionally, the role of marketing in large companies includes support for the sale role. Marketing is designed to sit overtop of the entire sales cycle, and provide the right support and messages at the right time. So, a first contact with your company by a prospect, maybe through your website, is obviously a higher-level conversation than you’d have with someone close to making a purchase, where the conversation will be more detailed, talking about specific features, or services, etc.

In a well-designed sales process the marketing team has created specific messages and support materials distinct to each step of the sales process leading towards the close. If you detailed out each of those steps, and then drop bracket over top of all of them, that’s where marketing should sit. The reality inside most organizations, is that the marketing team is focused almost entirely in creating those materials that lead up to the sales conversation, but once the sales team is talking with a prospect, they are largely on their own.

And I don’t mean to imply that the marketing team is doing something wrong. Marketing teams tend to be under resourced and therefore only have so much bandwidth to pull together the materials that the company needs. We talk with our clients awesome what will hear is that they get multiple requests from the sales team and they want to accommodate them, but they just don’t have the time or the resources to do so. The result of this is that they end up creating PowerPoint presentations at the corporate level which are useful for the sales team for a first meeting, but not once a prospect has moved deeper in the sales funnel.

So what did you end up with? You have a marketing team that’s putting his best effort into creating great looking materials, followed by a sales team that’s largely left on its own to produce its own materials.

The creation of those sales presentations can account for an amazing amount of a salesperson’s time. We conducted a study for a Fortune 50 client that has a US-based sales team of nearly 200 people. Our research revealed that salespeople were creating between 2-3 presentations each week for customers and prospects, with an average time investment of 8 hours/week just to format the presentations. That’s in addition to creating a compelling proposal, writing and organizing the content. If you’re a sales executive, you know the frustration of trying to achieve difficult sales targets, and then learning that 20% of the sales team’s time is spent designing presentations.

The true cost of a business process like this is enormous, and largely hidden. Why? It’s typically seen as “part of the job” to prepare proposals, because the salesperson is already responsible for assessing the needs of a prospect. Because of that, they are in the best position to put together the recommendation. Even when planning involves others, such as product or marketing managers, the salesperson is usually viewed as the one who collates the information to create the actual presentation. What this approach misses is the requirements around design and formatting, typically an area that a salesperson lacks experience or skill. The result is time spent on creative in addition to content.

So, here I go with some math again.  Let’s look at the true cost.

Sales people are highly compensated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the mean salary for sales representatives (wholesale, manufacturing, technical and scientific products) is $86,750. In competitive industries it is significantly higher. Add in employment taxes, benefits and the multiple is generally accepted as 1.25-1.4 times the salary. We’ll use a simple $100,000 salary, with a 1.3X multiple for a total employee cost of $130,000/year.

$130,000 divided by a typical work year of 2,080 hours = $62.50/hour

Now, let’s multiply that $62.50 by the 8 hours per week each person is spending designing sales presentations, and it equals $500. So every week you’re paying that sales person $500 to do a task they are not trained for, and are not good at.

But remember, you have 200 salespeople! So you are losing $100,000 per week in productivity.

The impact of the wrong people doing the wrong tasks goes deeper. In addition to those costs, every hour lost is an hour not spent prospecting, improving customer relationships, completing follow-on sales efforts and hitting sales numbers. In a commissioned sales environment, it’s not just executives who feel the pressure to improve productivity. Salespeople are intensely interested in spending more time on the next opportunity, which directly impacts their own compensation. The typical approach is lose-lose for the company and the salesperson.

But wait, it gets worse! Large teams can create hundreds of presentations. With so much activity there is little coordination across the team, so work is largely produced in siloes with little visibility into what’s available, what’s working and what’s not. One hundred employees creating their own presentations will create 100 variations on a theme.

Even when companies create templates and starting decks, the concept of entropy is almost inevitable. Over time the systems put in place — typically a template, or a standard product or capabilities presentation — will be modified until unrecognizable. After enough time goes by, a sales manager, executive or product marketer will see a presentation that’s wide of the mark, which starts a process of accountability. Salespeople who had a presentation that they were comfortable with, even though misaligned with brand, receive new materials and start from scratch again. The entire effort resets and repeats. Unfortunately, this effort is mistaken for progress, when it is nothing more than running in place on a wildly expensive treadmill.

So that’s the money side of it, but let’s talk for a moment about the impact on the customer.

Most large and mid-size corporations ultimately spend millions of dollars developing and maintaining their brand. That effort — advertising, events, public relations, etc. — goes toward building equity in the mind of customers and prospects, right? Well, that investment meets its final expression in the form of a salesperson making an in-person (or virtual) call on a prospect. The work of brand teams, ad agencies, copywriters, designers and product managers comes down to the tip of the spear, that first customer interaction. And it’s at this critical juncture that, most often, the baton is handed to a person with little or no design experience, who creates a presentation from scratch, often ignoring guidelines and templates in an effort to simply produce meeting materials by a deadline.

The result is a customer meeting that bears very little relationship to the expectation created by the work of the brand team. The damage may be minimal or significant, but just as the lost hours are invisible in the sales process, the impact of poor materials is invisible to management .

Here are three things that companies try to do to solve this problem.

They make start and stop efforts to improve efficiency, without realizing the problem they are trying to solve is one of process. The result is costly and typically unsuccessful. Here’s what they try.

Some companies recognize the need for “better” materials, which focuses on improving the design of presentations. The effort is viewed as a cost, rather than a savings. Typically these companies look externally to design firms or freelancers with varying skills but no eye on the global process. The work most often coalesces around a new PowerPoint template or a new capabilities presentation. Design firms will charge handsomely for the work, and view it as a one-off effort. Once in use, the previous problems simply reemerge.

Often, companies focus on creating better support staff. These companies are closer to the target, viewing the effort as a way to eliminate inefficiency and free up time for their teams. Because internal marketing teams rarely — if ever — can effectively support rapid, ongoing presentation development and still complete their own work, the task most often falls to internal administrative support. These efforts yield varying results, and it mostly depends on the skills of the admin. But they can’t solve the volume problem, the need to produce enormous work output quickly. Or, work that scales up and down.

The software world is moving quickly. And software has emerged with the promise of automation and standardization of Microsoft Office tools including Word and PowerPoint. The idea here is that by creating slide libraries, and locking down the corporate materials, users will have a more efficient and aligned way of generating their materials. Usually, these solutions require the use of a web interface and entirely new process to enter information, create charts and content, with little flexibility. They can’t anticipate every need, but aside from their limitations, the biggest miss for these approaches is one of process and adoption. The entire organization must slow down to systematically transform its business process in order for the new solution to work. Such efforts have failure rates that range from 35-75%. Cultural change, as any large business knows, is difficult at best.

Let’s talk about how you can build a more efficient process to support your sales team. And as you listen, you may think, wow, I’ll never get that funded. But the math is the math, and if you work out the actual cost, even though it feels hidden, you’ll see this approach will be less expensive, and more effective than anything you’re doing now. This is part of our POP program at Perfect PlanIt. We outsource this service to our clients, and it’s the reasons we’ve do so many thousand or presentations so quickly. But it can be built internally as well. Let me tell you the four fundamental principles, and then how you need to structure a team to succeed.

So, what does a support team look like?

It depends a lot on volume. If you do 10 presentations a week, and each PowerPOint takes four hours for a designer to create, you can probably get by on two designers (since sometimes projects will come in at the same time).  When those designers have downtime, they can support the marketing team that will greatly appreciate having a PowerPoint expert available to assist on projects.

If you get much beyond that, you’ll need a project manager to handle intake, review the decks, control the tracking, take care of revisions, etc. When you’ve got 20 presentations coming through each week, someone must be the gatekeeper.

We structured our teams in such a way that a project manager and design “pod” can handle an enormous flow of work, and deliver it back within 24-48 hours in most cases. For some clients, within stringent guidelines, we deliver in 8 hours. An internal team should be able to do the same.

An alternative method is a project manager, one or more designers, and reliable freelancers who are trained on the process who can handle overflow work.

Delivering ROI

Ultimately, a program must either pay for itself, or pay enough dividends with better efficiency and work product that the investment is justified. To give you a sense of what’s possible, after a full year of measurement for our client with the 200 sales people, we calculated that our program had delivered 8,000 work hours back to the sales team, and a gross savings of $400,000 in their own time. When you added back the program costs it still netted a savings for this client, and it sent productivity and job satisfaction skyrocketing. The client expanded the program to a second sales team to increase returns.

There is no magic wand to uncovering and solving the inefficiency problems that likely exist in your organization. There is a better way, however. It takes work, but if you suffer from heart palpitations every time you see a salesperson at their desk trying to add charts or find photos for a presentation, I promise you the effort is worth the payoff.

I hope that’s helpful. As always, I welcome your feedback.

Thanks for listening and talk to you soon.