Whether it’s from pension funds, wealthy individuals or other investment managers, meeting with prospective clients to raise money is a core function for private equity (PE) firms. Regularly, marketing and client teams work to build content to fuel these meetings:
- Firm overview and history
- Biographies of key leaders
- Investment strategy
- Fund performance
- Due diligence process
- Management and performance fee
However, with the large variety of meetings, audiences, and objectives, PE marketing teams have the significant challenge of building and maintaining a large number of PowerPoint presentations and slides. As we’ve worked across a number PE firms, three pain points emerged.
1. Customizing and updating presentations
Presentations need to be tailored to the specifics of the meeting to improve outcomes. From client logos and customized messaging to updating fund details and the latest performance numbers, there are a painful number of checks that the marketing team needs to run through.
2. Tracking and managing slides
The constant need to update and modify slides leaves behind a mess of old versions that are hard to track, manage, and update. This inevitably leads to errors that have costly implications.
3. Compliance and regulation
With constantly changing regulations and different levels of awareness among team members, checking for compliance is a significant time sink. The process usually bottlenecks with a sign-off required by one or two key individuals.
Slide libraries to the rescue
Slide libraries, used by a variety of other industries and functions, are the preferred way to organize PowerPoint content. Typically, slides are stored in a central library that includes strict access rights, ensuring that content is verified and approved for client meetings. Slides are individually accessed and combined to build custom presentations.
Two primary methods of slide access exist:
- Browser-based: Users launch a browser to find individual slides that are either combined and exported or copied and pasted into the user’s presentations
- PowerPoint add-in: Users search for slides without ever having to leave PowerPoint and click to insert into their active presentations
In our conversations, we find that PE firms prefer the PowerPoint add-in method as their teams are already actively working in PowerPoint.
Some slide library solutions even notify users when a slide they are using is out-of-date. When working in PowerPoint, the slide library add-in can check if the slides in the active presentation have been updated by other team members. If they have been, the user is notified and given the option to update with just a click.
Slide libraries can sync with existing content systems like Box or SharePoint to help speed up the initial setup. This reduces complexity as firms can still manage all their slides in one system. Microsoft’s SharePoint used to offer a native slide library function, but it was unfortunately discontinued starting with SharePoint 2013.
At TeamSlide we focus on building a robust a slide library solution that fits within the workflows of PE firms and other financial services organizations. We offer a Business version that allows teams to create a shared library, as well as a ‘Pro’-fessional version that allows users to search for slides in presentations on their own computers (including Outlook attachments).
For private equity firms that build presentations every day, accessing content through a slide library can solve multiple pain points and result in effective client meetings.
