Tips from PowerPoint Presentation Professionals: Increase Your Team’s Productivity and Impact
Creating and delivering presentations is an everyday part of corporate life. Studies show that meetings are better with slides, and many business leaders attribute some part of their success to their ability to present well. But when you’re managing a team, how can you be sure that everyone is not only building effective and informative slides, but also being efficient with their time rather than going down the “PowerPoint rabbit-hole”?
In 20 years of working with fortune 500 clients, the PowerPoint presentation professionals at eSlide have plenty of best practices to help with exactly these issues. Here are some of our best tips on the subject:
#1. Give your team a professional template
The most important thing you can do for your team members is give them a good PowerPoint template to work with. We’ve written about templates before but it bears repeating – a good template literally gets everyone on the same page, so that their presentations all go together seamlessly. This means that your team’s materials will have a branded look which helps with recognition and reputation. But, more importantly, it means colleagues can easily share slides and reuse good pages rather than starting from scratch. This saves everyone a lot of time, and makes it much easier to create high-quality PowerPoint decks.
#2. Create a shared location for storing PowerPoint decks
Another big efficiency boost comes from creating an accessible and organized location for storing good presentations. Many of our clients have the ability to create group folders within SharePoint, OneDrive, or in private locations on their corporate servers. Making a folder dedicated to storing and sharing your team’s PowerPoints is a huge help for optimizing your PowerPoint workflow, but it’s vital to keep that folder organized.
#3. Organize your library logically
The eSlide PowerPoint presentation professionals find that the best organization system is to create a series of nested folders, with the top level being topics (e.g. Budget Meeting, Leadership Presentation), with subfolders organized by year. It’s also important to establish a logical file naming convention like “topic_presenter_date_time.pptx”. Every team is different so the best structure may vary, but having an organized system will help everyone find what they need quickly.
#4. Identify your best slides and reuse them
Within each topical folder, you should create a subfolder called “MVP” or “Most Valuable PowerPoint”. Only slides or presentations that the team agrees did a great job showing or explaining a topic – or received a particularly good audience reaction – should go into this folder. This gives everyone an easy place to “shop” for great slides to start building presentations from, or to use as role models for new slides. Reusing your most effective slides is the best way to ensure you’re getting the best presentation results in the most efficient way possible.
#5. Get your best slides professionally enhanced
A couple of times a year, it’s a good idea to review the MVP folders and select some key slides for enhancement by a team of PowerPoint presentation professionals like eSlide. We can ensure your most critical slides communicate effectively and make an impact on your audience by adding visual enhancements that make them clear and easy to understand. You can then easily update these “greatest hits” slides with fresh data or information whenever you need to present.
By doing all of these things, you can help your team create great presentations, so you can get great results – without wasting time starting from scratch or fighting against tight deadlines.
To learn how eSlide can help you get the most from your presentations click here.
