A PowerPoint presentation can be an extremely powerful business tool. Unfortunately many businesses don’t give them the respect and attention they deserve.
Just like how you had your website built by a web expert, is it time to pass your all-important slides to a PowerPoint expert? Here are 5 reasons to outsource your presentation needs.
Investment
Here’s your choice: either outsource all your presentation needs to an external PowerPoint design agency, or hire your own dedicated in-house team. The biggest thing to consider when making that choice is what kind of investment you’ll have to make in either. That includes the potential investments in time, money, and in the people you take on.
Let’s say you initially opt to create your own in-house presentation design team. You spend the time and effort researching what is needed, then advertising for the positions. You go through the laborious task or interviewing hopeful candidates, before settling on a number you believe will be able to handle your needs.
Then the training starts. Although your new team might be whizzes at PowerPoint, InDesign, Photoshop and whatever else they need to create your presentations, you’ll still need to bring them up to speed with your brand and how you wish it to be represented. You might also have hired a younger designer to save some cost in salary, and their lack of agency experience might hinder their working as part of a team.
Then they get sick. Or they go on holiday. Or they get pregnant. Suddenly you’re left with a stack of down-time that needs filling, while the backlog of presentation design continues to grow. Suddenly what seemed like a logical and cost-effective plan of action becomes a nightmare to manage.
So, let’s consider that you opt instead to go down the presentation outsourcing route.
You search for and talk to a few agencies, potentially meeting with the ones you like the best, then make a selection. Job done.
From that point onward, the outsourced company handles everything, asking the right question of you and your organisation to know exactly what they need to know to start work immediately. As a dedicated PowerPoint presentation design agency, they are used to working quickly and efficiently. Presentation design is all they do, so no additional training is required and you’ll know that their knowledge and expertise in PowerPoint is as cutting edge as it can be. Your only concern will be paying the bill, leaving you time to focus on your actual job.
Credibility
Professional work created by non-professionals looks bad. As we pointed out above, you wouldn’t let any Tom, Dick or Harry design your website. It’s the shop window of your business. So why do so with your equally public presentations?
The problem with relying on an in-house presentation design team is that quite often they are hired, trained, and approved by individuals who are not presentation experts. Including you, we’re sorry to state. Their CV might seem impressive, and the work they initially produce might seem great, but those opinions are coming from people without up to date knowledge of the presentation industry.
Using an outsourced presentation agency means you have access to combined decades worth of experience of the industry.
As a company they will live and breathe PowerPoint and constantly expose themselves to changing design trends and fresh approaches. They will be open to the world of presentations, experiencing and researching them as part of their existence. Your own in-house team will probably be confined to an office concerning themselves only with your brand and your existing way of working.
The result will be a less than dynamic series of presentations – presentations that are being aimed at people who potentially see dozens each week. Your audience will know the difference between a professionally designed and developed PowerPoint slide deck that engages with them, and one that is merely good enough.
Simply put, there’s a chance that your brand could stand out from the crowd for all the wrong reasons, affecting your credibility. An out-sourced presentation design agency will ensure that never happens.
Editing
We don’t mean to blow our own trumpet too much, but mastering PowerPoint is not an easy thing. Microsoft’s presentation maker is deceptively complex, with more and more features added to it each and every year. Although that huge stash of capabilities makes PowerPoint our go-to piece of software, even we have to occasionally retrain ourselves to keep up to date.
Therefore PowerPoint isn’t something that can be quickly learnt.
So you’ve decided to elevate one of your existing designers to the position of PowerPoint developer (as we often see). However, it will take a significant amount of time and money to get them to a professional level. The chances are they will still be relying heavily on their knowledge of InDesign, Photoshop and other traditional design programs until they reach that position, which will lead to a problem.
As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, PowerPoint is great as it allows the user to quickly edit their slide deck and then present – no switching between software and having to export and convert files. A PowerPoint presentation populated with fixed and non editable InDesign images will be troublesome if a change needs to be made.
Your sales rep is about to make an important presentation, but notices a typo. Also some outdated info on a slide. He or she might not be able to easily edit it then and there. Disaster.
That wouldn’t be an issue with a deck produced by your outsourced presentation agency. They would also employ very talented graphic designers who create stunning images in the aforementioned Adobe programs. But that content is always passed on to a professional PowerPoint developer.
The Developer has the experience and talent to seamlessly integrate those graphics into a PowerPoint file, ensuring that text, icons, and all the other content can be edited by the end user. Therefore typos can be quickly corrected, figures updated, and whole slide layouts altered. All in PowerPoint, and all right there and then.
Presentable
No, we don’t mean that an outsourced PowerPoint presentation design agency always looks more presentable. But rather the decks they produce are easier to present with.
Again, this comes down to the experience of the person or people you charge with creating your presentations. An in-house team might be able to demonstrate talent with both design and PowerPoint development, but can they actually present?
As we’ve often found, designers tend not to have a great deal of experience of (or enthusiasm for) public speaking. We’ve time and time again seen the actual speakers, sales people, pitchers, and CEOs bringing notes back to the slide design team for improvements.
‘This transition needs to be quicker’, ‘this text should be larger and clearer’, ‘these colours clashed when projected onto a screen’… these, and many more, are problems that only seasoned presenters will be aware of. There is a huge difference between design and application – between the making and the doing.
In outsourcing your presentation design needs, you’ll be securing the talents of a team that has experience of every single stage of giving a presentation. From story-boarding ideas, to standing up to present. They’ll know first hand what will and won’t work in a presentation environment. They can eliminate the need for the ‘trial and error’ approach of a less experienced presentation creator.
That means the deck of slides will be spot on the first time the presenter stands up to deliver it. They’ll seem immediately more professional and there will be no need to repeatedly tinker with the presentation. Time saved, money saved… embarrassment saved.
Suddenly a previously embarrassed salesperson kicks down your door and demands that you hire an outsourced presentation team.
Support
With a dedicated outsourced presentation service available to you, you’ll have at your fingertips a wealth of support. No matter when you need it.
If you take on a couple of in-house PowerPoint designers, suddenly your demands for presentation work might decline. They’ll be sat twiddling their thumbs. You’ll most probably allocate other kinds of design work to them, from marketing images to web design. You know, to at least get some benefit from paying their salaries.
However, all of a sudden a large and complex presentation is required by the sales department. With your in-house presentation team tied up with other jobs, you’ll have to wait. Either for them to finish, or to allocate their unfinished work to someone else. Either way, it’s not the most effective way to work.
With an outsourced presentation agency, they will start work on the deck as soon as the order comes in. There will be no other deadlines to wait for, nor any currently-occupied staff to organise. Just one call or email to your regular contact with details of the job will be enough to get the ball rolling.
Another example of the kind of support often available via outsourcing your PowerPoint needs, is advice. That external team might have designed, built and developed a killer deck of slides for you as a single unit, many times over, but their individual expertise is still at hand. If you have questions regarding an edit you need to make to a presentation, just ask. A sales rep or investment pitcher needs advice about giving a presentation, just ask. You need to know about changes and updates to the software you’re currently using to present… yes, you guessed it… just ask.
No job too big, no question too daft. After all, they are YOUR outsourced presentation design team.
This post has no doubt spurred you on to outsource your own PowerPoint needs. You’ll be relieved to discover you don’t have to go far to find what you’re looking for.
Future Present can be your one-stop presentation shop, handling all your PowerPoint design and developing needs. Our round-the-clock service ensures that you and your team are well armed to tackle any public speaking situation, from TED Talks to sales pitches.
Talk to us today and find out how we can make your life easier.
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