As a marketer, you want your sales team armed with your best, up-to-date, and on-brand slide templates so that they put their best foot forward with prospects.
You want your sales team to have room for improvisation and creativity. However, without guard rails, they’ll often end up with ‘franken-decks’ that include stale information and colors and designs that don’t match your corporate identity.
That’s where marketing-approved Powerpoint slide templates come in handy. A slide library of templates and core slides gives your sales team the components to build customized presentations while maintaining accuracy and staying on-brand.
So, what types of PowerPoint templates are best for your slide library? To answer that, here are six slide templates that every marketer must include in their slide library.
1. Core Company slide templates
These slide templates provide essential information about your company and brand. Here you can include details like:
- Number of employees, revenue, office locations
- Key biographies
- Mission statements and customer value proposition
- Timeline with milestones/achievements
- Contact us
Rather than plain text, these slides can use images, charts, timelines, and other design elements to create visual appeal and set the right tone.
There’s nothing more embarrassing than introduction slides that have the wrong information, and you quickly lose your prospects’ confidence. With a slide library, you can make changes to these slides and ensure your entire company always has the latest version at their fingertips.
2. Product & Service templates
Similar to the company slides, product or service template slides detail your offerings. These slides can quickly multiply when considering the combinations needed for each product/service and target market. As such, a slide library is critical to keep them organized and easily searchable.
With product and services slide templates, you can:
- Detail the attributes of each of your offerings
- Educate your team, investors, or prospects on the benefits or value
If you have many slides, metadata can help you stay organized and allow your team to locate the slide they need quickly.
3. Frameworks slides
Framework template slides give your team a foundation to organize and effectively communicate their thoughts and ideas. Not every presentation can rely on standardized slides. Often, especially in B2B settings, sales teams need to adapt to their prospects’ needs and build compelling content. In these situations, frameworks provide standard ways to present information, including:
- competitive analyses
- industry topics and discussions
- agenda slides
- processes and flows
- organizational structures
Offering framework slides helps ensure that prospects get presentations with a consistent feel regardless of who builds them.
4. Data visualization options
Data visualization slides allow your team to represent information using concise, impactful charts. When used correctly, they are a powerful tool. However, charts and graphs are often misused and, in these circumstances, do more damage than good.
Including data visualization slides in your slide library with instructions on using them can help drive engaging and impactful presentations. Here are some key slide types to include:
- Column/bar charts
- Line charts
- Scatter and bubble charts
- Waterfalls
- Mekkos and area charts
Here’s a great guide on how to pick the best chart based on the data you have.
5. Icons and other commonly used graphics
Your templates can also include components of slides, including icons, maps, graphics, and images. Like the data charts and graphs, these elements are an eye-catching way to grab your audience’s attention while staying within your brand guidelines.
Icons, for example, can effectively replace the traditional bullet points and quickly help define the significance of the bullet.
A slide library helps you significantly increase the number of options you give your team. Rather than rummaging through old presentations, slide libraries keep these graphical components organized and searchable.
There are many sources to get graphics and icons. Here are two of our favorites:
6. Customer testimonials
Customer testimonials can dramatically impact conversion rates, elevating your brand reputation and value. Online testimonials function similarly to word-of-mouth advertising. With testimonial templates, you can include the positive impact of reviews in your sales presentations too.
In addition to quotes and contact details, testimonials should ideally include the customers’ pictures, company logos to help bring them to life.
Conclusion
There you have it. Six intriguing types of slide templates that you should add to your slide library. Did we miss any?
Start creating your slide library now and see the difference it makes.
