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6 signs your organization needs a better presentation template
A good presentation template can work wonders. It can save your people time. It can boost your brand. It can help everyday presentations look clean and professional. It can also make it easy to convey an idea clearly and memorably.
But a bad template? It can do exactly the opposite. It can take up valuable employee time. It can dilute and harm your brand. It can make your presentations look, as the kids say, “cringe.” And it can harm the clarity of your message.
At Duarte, we’ve made thousands of presentations over our 35+ year history for some of the world’s biggest brands. From internal corporate decks, investor pitches, walking decks, sales enablement decks, conference keynote presentations … the list goes on.
Today we’re going to dive into the use cases of a presentation template, and when a company might need or want one.
What is a presentation template?
A presentation template is a set of pre-designed slides already made with a branded, professional look that can be lightly customized for a specific purpose. They typically are made for the purpose of scaling efforts, and in a corporate setting, are used for sales enablement, sales pitches, corporate internal decks, branding and marketing decks, and more.
These templates usually include on-brand design elements like backgrounds, effects, color palettes, layouts, fonts, icon libraries, asset libraries, chart libraries, boilerplate messaging and sample slides for different use cases. They save an organization an immense amount of time as individuals won’t need to design every presentation they make from scratch. They can just select from their pre-determined template the slides and options they want to use for their individual use case.
The best presentation templates are also audience-first. Meaning, they’re designed with the end user in mind so that they are engaging, relatable, and even accessible so all can feel included and welcome during any presentation.
6 signs to know if your organization needs a presentation template
1. People don’t use the template you already have.
If you hear people in your organization say that using your current template is “too hard” or that “it doesn’t have what I need,” you need a better template. Or maybe people use it, but only halfway. If you see people Frankenstein-ing presentations together by inserting their own icons and pictures, using all kinds of different fonts, or pulling slides from a variety of other decks because the current template doesn’t give them the slide layouts or assets they need, it’s time for a better deck.
Why this matters: This is a huge time waster. One example, if your sales team is constantly reinventing the wheel and making a new sales pitch deck for every other sales demo, this is costing you and them valuable time. It’s less time on the phone, and more time working on something that could’ve been handed to them already done, and in a clean, professional, and scalable way, like what we did with Veeam.
2. You need consistency that scales.
Think about if you were running a big conference or event with lots of breakouts, like Dreamforce. It would take an internal design team hundreds of hours to make all those presentations. But the flipside is if your speakers are in charge of making their own slides, it’s tough to ensure consistency across every breakout, as well.
Why this matters: If you had a great slide template that can scale, it would ensure every audience in every room is receiving the same level of quality and user experience with your brand and event.
3. It’s clear your sales team isn’t comfortable with graphic design.
Great salespeople adapt their sales pitch to the needs of the customers. But adapting the pitch oftentimes means adapting the slides. And since your sales team wasn’t hired for their graphic design skills, the new slides can detract from the pitch itself (and probably make their marketing counterparts cringe in disbelief.)
Why this matters: Meeting with potential clients is another touchpoint with your brand. Sales meetings (and the decks within them) should match the professional look of your website, the first-class feeling they’ll receive from your product and service, and the professional experience they’ll receive from your sales team by being a part of your sales funnel. A professional sales deck that doesn’t look like a default PowerPoint template is imperative to not just stand out, but get the point across that your companies cares about details.
4. New technology is limiting technical abilities.
Let’s say you’re making the switch to or from a new slide software like PowerPoint, Google Slides, Apple Keynote, or Canva. There’s always a learning curve when a new technology is introduced. And if there’s not a template that helps users produce quality presentations regardless of their familiarity with the new software, it won’t take long to realize you’re in need of a better template.
Why this matters: Our world-class presentation designers make slide templates in whatever presentation software tool your company prefers. Trust us; we know a thing or two about converting fonts, colors, aspect ratios, and more when it comes to slide presentations built on different platforms. Let us save you the headache and time.
5. Your unique brand needs to stand out.
Whether you sell chocolate or medical devices, your presentation template systems need to be the perfect combination of consistent, business-specific design and ease of use. This means it needs to be on-brand, in your color palette, catered to your audience, and it should include simple rules to follow and easily adaptable templates. One way we help with this is by including icon and asset libraries.
Asset libraries
Great presentations use a variety of visual elements to support content. Our presentation designers will make, and stock your asset library with beautiful, clever, and effective illustrations and images. This way, everyone who will make presentations with your slide template can easily access approved visual elements.
Icon libraries
Our presentation designers are artists. And they often make custom icons for our clients, including custom icon libraries. We take the time to understand the needs of your presentation deck, your business, and your customers, and we tailor everything we do accordingly.
Why this matters: Never send your employees to hunt for a perfect icon or image again, especially when they don’t exist! Equip them with everything they need for all business use cases in advance.
6. Your employees need template training.
You can arm your company with a wonderful presentation template, but that is half the battle. Now, you need to make sure they are oriented on where to find everything they need and how to use it. This will ensure faster adoption.
We provide presentation guidelines, walkthroughs, and mini-tutorials when we hand over our presentation templates to our clients. Sometimes we’ll even do a quick sales enablement training live.
Why this matters: We ensure that our template systems are fool-proof. They can stand up to the worst of conditions, like bad lighting, meeting accessibility standards, projection system variations, and inexperienced users.
How to make perfect presentations every time
Your unique industry requires a presentation ecosystem. This usually includes:
- Ideas
- Images
- Execution
- Audience needs
- Calls to action
We are the experts in presentation structure and have a highly-rated workshop designed to help you become a persuasive communicator. At the conclusion of the workshop, you’ll know how to check that all your presentations have the ingredients needed to be successful. If you want to train a marketing or graphic design team on our presentation expertise, we recommend a learning journey that includes:
But what if you don’t have time to train yourself or your team to be presentation masters? Well, we have an Agency team for that. Whether you need a quick audit of your template, or a full presentation system complete with icon libraries, image libraries, chart examples, and built-in user instruction, Duarte can help.
Talk to a Solution Architect today to discover what hundreds of clients have already: Our presentations are world-class, and we’ve tested them across every type of delivery channel you can think of. Try the Duarte white-glove experience for yourself.
