For proposal managers, building well-structured PowerPoint proposals that balance client requirements, key selling points, and standard marketing collateral is a critical task. However, building presentations takes time away from selling and is an art form that may not be mastered by the entire team. Careless mistakes, poor messaging, and stale content can have a significant negative business impact.
Slide library solutions help proposal managers streamline the presentation creation process, ensuring that all team members build winning proposals. They enable high-performing slides to be shared and help create strong presentations.
The problem with managing PowerPoint proposals manually
While preparing for a meeting, proposal managers edit and modify proposal presentations that align with their client’s requirements. In these situations, however, there often isn’t much time to make edits or create new slides.
Hunting for old presentations, modifying formats, making content edits, and collaborating with others is time-consuming and stressful. For example, version control can spin up multiple conversations and delays as team members struggle to determine which slide is the latest.
Slide libraries, however, make presentation management completely seamless and help proposal managers focus on telling winning stories through their presentations.
The benefit of slide libraries
Create an approved central repository
Rather than editing previous proposals, a slide library allows for a central repository of approved content. All team members can quickly access these slides and assemble them to create strong client-focused proposals. Slide libraries can typically be extended to include images, too.
Up-to-date slides
With a slide library, users get seamless access to the latest PowerPoint proposal slides, while avoiding stale and duplicate content. However, slides are often updated and while the main repository will house the latest version, team members may still have old slides on their computers. To solve this use-case, slide libraries can automatically check slides and suggest slide updates, ensuring users always have the latest content.
Improved productivity and clear business outcome
With easy access to PowerPoint slides, simple management tools, and strong search capabilities, slide library solutions drive productivity. More importantly, they help improve the quality of proposals which in turn increases the win rate.
Find the right application to manage slide libraries
While support for slide libraries was removed from SharePoint 2013 onwards, third-party tools like TeamSlide can help manage proposal presentations and slide libraries.
TeamSlide is a PowerPoint add-in or plugin that lets you build a slide library or connect to an existing repository like SharePoint or Box. It even imports fields and metadata properties which fuel the search and filter capabilities. In addition, TeamSlide can include a central repository for images, including product shots, stock images, and leadership biography photos.
Final words
Slide libraries are a necessity for proposal managers looking to organize and maintain proposal slides. TeamSlide helps streamline the proposal creation process which in turn drives productivity and increases the team’s win rate.
