How Your Team Can Be Better Presenters And Improve Presentation Skills

So much business success depends on the quality of team presentations. A presentation, whether it’s about onboarding, a pitch, a business update or any number of other topics, greatly influences both internal and external clients’ – or the entire public’s – perception of a brand, and a poorly designed or poorly executed presentation carries connotations of disorganization, lack of credibility and unprofessionalism. The presentation is a reflection of how the team, and the business, function.

What makes an effective team presentation? Obviously, the basic principles of good presentation design remain a vital element of success, but even a team of skilled individual presenters can have issues when it comes to unity and collaboration.

A variety of challenges face teams as they work to create and deliver stellar presentations. How do you ensure all team members use the same design elements? How do you make sure presenters of different skill levels appear confident and competent next to their colleagues? How do you make sure multiple designers create a unified and cohesive package? How do you keep everyone on the same page?

Want your team to be better presenters? Check out the following ways to improve team presentation skills:

Corporate branding

The last thing your company needs is a bunch of mismatched frankendecks floating around the office – or worse, being available to the public. Different color palettes, disorganized fonts, misplaced logos… yikes! Your business probably already has its own brand style guide, so why not integrate that into your company’s presentations?

Presentation management is essential to achieving unified team presentations. Beautiful.ai users have always been able to create consistent designs thanks to customizable themes. They can start every presentation by setting personalized color palettes, typography, logos and other design elements that automatically apply to every slide added to the deck. But the Teams program takes that thematic customization to the next level with the ability to create a custom company theme based on the brand style guide.

A custom company theme enforces corporate branding, ensuring that all team members are creating presentations that combine into a cohesive package. Beautiful.ai Teams also features shared templates and shared slides, ensuring teams remain consistent with every pitch.

Content control

How do you keep entire teams on the same page when everyone has different skill levels and experience when it comes to design? How do you make sure that every presentation looks like it belongs alongside the next, and how do you ensure quality control of every slide deck? Proper presentation management requires content control.

If every department boasted its own deck designers, primarily responsible for presentation design but also able to create custom templates, then even less confident team members will be able to deliver the same stellar level of presentation as the company’s premier sales rep. 

Beautiful.ai’s pre-built presentation templates offer every team member their own deck designer, with customizable deck examples curated for a variety of topics by industry experts. Teams can create their own custom template libraries, with ready-made decks already designed with the company’s message in mind. The Shared Slides Library takes presentation management to the next level.

“The client favorite at the moment is our Shared Slides library. It was designed with the idea that every company has critical content to keep everyone on brand and on message,” Beautiful.ai President and COO Jason Lapp said in an interview. “To be effective this needs to be easily accessed and distributed to the rest of the workforce. With Shared Slides, marketing uploads their content into the library then every user can easily drop those slides in when they need them. The thing that makes this feature really unique is that when it’s time to update that content, you simply make the change in the library, and it simultaneously pushes the new content out and replaces the old version across all presentations. It keeps everyone up to date and on the same page. You no longer need to worry about old content being circulated for reuse.”

Collaboration

So much can go wrong during collaborations. Someone might update the wrong version, throwing off days of other changes in the meantime. Wrong templates and design elements can be added by a team member, or people might work with entirely different color palettes. Heaven forbid someone accidentally deletes weeks of work!

At the same time, team collaboration is key to modern business success. It certainly doesn’t come from everyone walking to their own drummer, at least not when it comes to pitches and presentations. Presentation management means ensuring every team member and all decks are always on the same page. 

With features like advanced team sharing and role-based permissioning, teams using Beuatiful.ai can access, work on and present their decks as a cohesive unit. Beautiful.ai’s Teams program syncs every slide, every deck and every user in real time. Advanced collaboration tools and priority support promise that everyone is on brand, on task and on the same page.