How to Use Slide Deck Templates to Create Sales Presentations Fast
If hiring an entire creative agency for your next project sounds too pricey and unwieldy, consider trying slide deck templates! Professionally designed and ready at a fraction of the cost and time, slide deck templates are the next best thing to hiring an entire team for your next presentation.
Most modern sales presentation software, like Ingage, feature dynamic slide deck templates and digital tools to help you create presentations fast—they are a must in any presentation software worth its salt. But to optimize these tools, you need to set yourself a straightforward process. With a well-planned workflow and fantastic, speedy tools, your next presentation is sure to be a smashing success.
Organize All Assets in One Place
We’ve all known—or been—the person who jumps into a project head-first, without taking the time to research and organize their materials. This is a mistake.
Diving right into tinkering with slide deck templates before gathering your materials is not unlike cooking without having prepped your ingredients: it’s going to take a whole lot longer, and odds are something will go wrong.
Having all the videos, images, copy and other collateral in one place ahead of time helps you weave your story easily and quickly at the production stage. Don’t waste time hunting specific files as you need them— you need to organize. Establishing and operating from a central hub also adds control over brand consistency in logo, colors, style and fonts. You ensure that only pre-approved collateral (a single source of truth) wind up in presentations.
A brand portal can be as simple as a shared Google Drive folder, a dedicated server destination or a section in your knowledge base. Whatever shape it takes, this hub should be shared with all potential users and, ideally, cloud-hosted for broader accessibility and with varying permission levels. Your hub should follow a logical naming convention based on marketing or sales needs, with easy-to-retrieve and consistently updated files.
You should also standardize specs like color, layout and font style and size when consolidating assets in a hub so that everything fits perfectly once imported into a slide deck template. For example, Ingage allows you to import flexible dimensions for full-page, half-page, two-thirds page and horizontal layouts.
Create a Template Out of a Story First
When we think of templates, we usually think visual design. But consider templating the story around the presentation first to cut down on design revisions. Otherwise, you risk reconfiguring the whole slide deck template later if it doesn’t match the presentation’s final story.
Story templating forces you to focus fully on the most important part of your presentation—the story—instead of distracting yourself with unnecessary bells and whistles. Your story’s slide deck templates are your blueprint for creating future presentations, guaranteeing message consistency every time.
It’s as simple as A-B-C. With dealerships, presentations typically revolve around predictable “stories,” such as demonstrating products, briefing about campaigns and explaining incentive programs. Ingage Storyboard has a slide deck template dedicated to this formula for product demonstrations, sequenced as follows:
- What is the problem?
- How does your product solve it?
- What makes your product unique?
- Key benefits and features
- Pricing model
- Call-to-action or CTA
The Ingage Storyboard allows you to break this text with images and import videos for emotional stops and pivots, helping you to weave a story easily repurposed in the future.
Use Interactive Elements in your Sales Presentations
Once you’re done scripting your story, it’s time to think visually. A picture says a thousand words—60,000 to be exact if we consider how fast a human brain processes images compared with text.
Ingage is packed with dynamic effects that help add a visual impact to your story. A wide array of informational pop-up buttons is yours to explore, prompting features like photos, videos, image carousels, maps, mail apps or even a full-screen browser. Interactive screen displays like compare pages and scroll pages also add flair to your presentation.
Likewise, adding interactive content is easy. Just select options on each slide deck to change the page style and layout or add images, videos, or buttons.
A word of caution: interactive elements are message reinforcers, not the message itself. They should support your story, not the other way around. So use them with balance, avoiding cluttering the presentation with visuals as to, ironically, weaken the message.
Think of Individual Slide Decks Instead of Full Presentations When Designing Templates
Different presentations have different goals, and need flexibility to meet them. Forcing your whole slideshow into large slide deck templates may speed up production but may also leave you less creative. To marry efficiency with flexibility, consider creating templates just for individual slides you use repeatedly, rather than ramming your whole presentation in a reusable framework.
Title pages, logo headers and footers, closing pages, mission statements and contact details—these slides are unlikely to change from presentation to presentation. To save time go ahead and create a branded template for each of these recurring pages. Then you can plug them into new presentations as needed and be ready to go, cutting down on production time. An industry structured with predictable needs, such as a dealership network, allows for more even slide decks to be standardized. Assess your needs and see what works best.
Ingage allows you to create branded templates for Impact, Grid, Deck, Compare, Gallery, Video or Scrollmotion page styles. When making future presentations, simply duplicate the template, drag it to its section and adjust the layout. This process guarantees a consistent brand look in all your presentations.
Whether laboring over presentations excites you or perhaps isn’t so much your cup of tea, advanced sales presentation software like Ingage will scale up your slideshow to a professional level. Templates are guaranteed to speed up the creative process, affording you more time to focus on planning business and marketing strategies.
See for yourself why over 100,000 sales presentations are done with Ingage every month—book your free Ingage demo today.