Sales Graphics Blog

When EBONY was born in the 1950s women were romping around in poodle skirts, but today heritage only gets a media brand so far. That’s why new management introduced a revolutionary set of tools to position the JPC brand (EBONY & JET) with the likes of Hearst, Condé Nast, and other major players on the media stage.

Rather than rely on old presentation tools with steep learning curves, EBONY & JET called on our design team to breathe new energy and life into the brand. Then they took the visual refresh a step further and moved the sales team over to our presentation software, CustomShow.

The new design and presentation tools were a perfect match for the brand’s fresh energy, evolving image and new leadership. Video and animations brought EBONY & JET’s allure to life while the presentation tool ramped up productivity and gave the sales team control over the brand’s new and evolving message.

EBONY & JET’s crisp new design and bleeding-edge corporate presentation tools are now the engine for a newly defined, progressive media company. The company’s new presentations didn’t just increase performance and productivity, it started a movement and propelled the media conglomerate into a new generation.

As the VP of Marketing-Media at JCP says:

“When it came time to refresh our brand and reintroduce ourselves to the ad world, we turned to the responsive team at Sales Graphics. They make it easy for us to succeed by helping us appear cutting-edge and vibrant. Our sales team is excited about the new slides, and that has already started to translate into more presentations and more effective sales calls.”

Before racing forward into 2012 on the Sales Graphics News Blog, here are the 10 most popular Sales Graphics blog posts of from the past year.  iPads stole the show (both literally and figuratively) in 2011, with readers taking a particular interest in clicking through to posts tagged “iPad Presentations.”  Have you heard enough or do you think iPad presentations will stay hot through 2012?  Let us know in the comments.

1. Physicians Prefer Pharma Reps Present via iPad
2. The Best iPad Presentation Apps for Business
3. CustomShow: Now Playing on the iPad
4. Sales Graphics Provides Powerful Tool For Pharma Marketers
5. Vanity Fair’s iPad Presentations Mark the Future of Sales for the Industry
6. WeTV and AMC: United By Presentation Software CustomShow
7. NBC Increases Advertising Revenue $100mm at 2011-2012 Upfronts
8. What’s Wrong with Keynote for iPad? Almost Everything
9. 5 Reasons Why Good Presentation Design Can Drive Your Point Home
10. Telemundo Presentations From IMAX to iPad

The standard presentation tools can create hours of slide searching and unmanageable oceans of corporate content. By contrast, our design services and presentation software bring simplicity to stadium-sized events like the ones DIRECTV holds. Animated videos bring the broadcast company to life while legally vetted, lockable content gives DIRECTV sales trainers the assurance they’ll never slip up. To give attendees an active voice through the sessions, we built live interactive text voting into the slides. The result is a lean-forward environment where everyone is engaged.

This year DIRECTV readied their training presentation near the strike of midnight before delivery day, and as soon as the team hit “save” everyone across the company had immediate access to the next day’s presentations. When the trainers at Salt Lake City’s event had an edit they were able to make the change for the next presentation in Raleigh, NC within the hour.

After the fact, DIRECTV’s Sr. Manager of Sales Training said:

“Sales Graphics does a terrific job of helping us successfully train our national sales teams each year. It’s a challenge for us because we have so many people to educate. The Sales Graphics team is our trusted source for helping us deliver our materials in a creative, informative , consistent way. They also help us push the technology to rapidly update information across the country and include cutting-edge features such as polling slides that automatically tally text votes from the audience.”

We spend a lot of time talking about the aesthetic gains clients get when they work with Sales Graphics, but there’s more to this story than engaging video and presentations that sell. We also spend a lot of time thinking about optimizing our product for performance and reliability.

When it comes down to crunch time confidence in your presentation software means everything. That’s why we worked with the team at a premium-subscription channel to get their feedback on their transition from PowerPoint to CustomShow.

The graph above represents how presenters allocate their time using PowerPoint. As you can tell, they spend lots of time customizing slides, finding approved videos, and collaborating with co-workers.

The average person spent 72 minutes on every PowerPoint presentation, but when the team switched to CustomShow that number dropped to 40 minutes. That’s a savings in excess of 30 minutes per presentation, but we also saw some other interesting statistics.

When people switched to CustomShow they spent much less time finding the latest versions of slides and worrying about design. Instead 92% of time was spent tailoring slides to the sales prospect. This represents not only time gained, but also significant revenue savings.

Let’s take a step back and quantify this. If 100 people in a sales team give five presentations per month (a little more than one per week), then that team can save 3,000 hours per year. If each of these account executives earns $50 per hour in salary and benefits, the time saved on presentations can equate to a $150,000 savings. In other words, we’re not all about aesthetics and design, but we do think about that too.

As 80 percent of businesses reach for the iPad, Apple is making serious B2B strides. The introduction of their Business App Volume Purchasing Program delivers exciting opportunities for not only CustomShow, but for every apps oriented business in existence.

For the first time businesses like ours can host our apps in a private, business only environment. Unlike the previous model where CustomShow had to live alongside other presentation apps open to the public, we now have the flexibility to create a custom site for clients.

This means a more custom experience, volume pricing, and the ability to deal with app purchasing for an unlimited number of employees through a common business account.

Apple’s new webpage for the program reads:

Whether you’re providing apps to two employees or ten thousand, the Volume Purchase Program makes it simple to find, buy, and distribute the apps your business needs.

The Volume Purchase Program also provides a way to purchase custom B2B apps built by third-party developers to meet the unique needs of your business.

Watch for us in Apple’s new, customized business environment soon, as this is just one of many updates expected for our presentation app in the Fall of 2011.

The newest version of CustomShow is well on its way to completion, but before the latest iteration hits prime time we’re rolling out aspects of our presentation offering in small chunks. This paced rollout will build up to one significant update, but current clients and early adopters can already enjoy our enterprise specific online presentation viewer. What does this mean for presenters and sales team? These five features break down CustomShow’s online presentation capabilities for business:

1. Aligned with your workflow. We think about presentations all day everyday, but just because we specialize in everything from design to slide management, doesn’t mean we have to do it all for every client. We work with design teams to give businesses version control and other special presentation features with our presentation software CustomShow, help corporations transition to the iPad, or work specifically on animation design. Whatever the case, our fluid business structure makes it easy for our business to pick up on your business workflow effectively.

2. Built for business. Our secure viewer is run through a secure login system. Sales teams invite viewers to online presentations via email. From there audiences can log in and view their presentation at a scheduled time or whenever it’s convenient.

3. Fit for any situation. Our online presentation viewer works as a standalone product, leave behind, or even in conjunction with CustomShow Web Meetings.

4. We take security seriously. We put managers’ minds at ease with hefty security measures that keep insider presentations confidential. One example of this is our automatically changing encrypted linking structure. Private presentation URLs change every few minutes so even if someone tries to share an unauthorized presentation it will hardly exist before it’s safe in the hands of the company.

5. Everything is trackable. Presentation administrators have access to detailed dashboards with realtime insights on presentation viewership. Data points let managers decipher who has logged in, how long they spent on each slide, and much more. This isn’t just sales team performance measurement, these are the kinds of statistics that can inform client or consumer interests and product development.

Try the Online Presentation Viewer Now

Want to give the online presentation viewer a spin? Follow this link and request an invite. You’ll receive an invite via email and within about thirty seconds you’ll be viewing a sample presentation we created for Bravo.

When it comes to large organizations making sure everyone is on the same page is difficult enough, but for two brands who had just merged, it seems the challenges would be numerous. AMC uses widescreen for example, while WEtv prefers to stick with the standard 4:3 presentation layout.

Fortunately for everyone involved, a few members of the team had a bit of experience with our presentation software, CustomShow. Before long the sales teams at both WEtv and AMC had signed up and they recruited us to work on their upfronts.

AMC commissioned us for the second year in a row to create their presentation. Our goal was give viewers a taste of each property and then delve deeper on demand into the content that’s necessary for making buying decisions. WEtv, on the other hand, enlisted us to adopt some of their existing creative into a compelling animated presentation.

Today everything both teams need is accessible on demand through a unified slide library. Managers control which presentation slides are editable and which are indispensable, updates can be sent team-wide, and perhaps most important of all, the sales and marketing teams at WEtv and AMC have become unified by a slide library that lets them keep their brand image intact.

This year the Telemundo upfront event swung into action on high definition IMAX screens in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. The wall filling graphics that covered the big screen during the event jettisoned viewers into a Telemundo experience highlighting the network’s most significant accomplishments to date, but thanks to CustomShow, the presentation from that night lives on in the hands of the Telemundo sales team.

It all started when the Spanish-language broadcast network commissioned Sales Graphics to create a “Welcome to Our World” space themed multimedia experience. We designed the graphics for their online media kit and created a consistently branded look-and-feel for their Museum of Natural History event, but the space flying didn’t end when the IMAX screens turned off for the night.

Instead, our presentation software CustomShow let the Telemundo sales team re-use and reintegrate the stellar space experience into everything they employ to sell the network across multiple devices. Everything that exploded off of Internet browsers and the IMAX screen at the upfront was ready for delivery the next day on laptops and iPads.

Telemundo didn’t miss a beat. In fact, their “Welcome to Our World” presentation on CustomShow turned out extremely well. The sales team that uses it in the field might say CustomShow handles like PowerPoint on steroids, but for everyone who has seen the cinematic experience on the iPad or an IMAX screen, the brand’s upfront feels more like a movie.

Click on the image above to see a sample Bravo presentation in action.

Three years ago the television industry had a realization and Bravo was one of the first to make it a reality. Industry presentations didn’t need to look like static and dreary PowerPoints and the experience of watching an upfront sales presentation could rival that of catching a few highlights from the Real Housewives Reunion. With one quick sweep the network rid themselves of flat, print-like PowerPoints and traded the old ways of presentation management for a type of mobility that was unprecedented within the company.

When we delivered engaging motion graphics and polished creative to Bravo, we connected them to our presentation software, CustomShow. This gave their sales and marketing team the capability to edit our professionally designed presentations from anywhere without having to deal with the version control issues that are so common amongst larger companies. Individual sales people retained editorial control but when company wide updates are necessary all it takes is a single change in the master slide library and the entire company has instant access to the newest and most up-to-date numbers.

As business moves ever faster, this kind of instant update is crucial. It’s also a game changer because it lets sales people move away from the drudgery of constantly sending large files back and forth, and instead lets them spend more time focusing on making the sale. For Bravo it was perfect, and the benefits only extended further when the network decided to buy the sales team iPads.

While others were trying to figure out how to sync Keynote presentation videos to the iPad, Bravo downloaded the CustomShow App and reaped the benefits of being one of the first to deliver motion-filled professional presentations on a device that’s today’s mark of innovation. CustomShow lets Bravo move fluidly across Macs, PCs, tablets and the Web, helping them build business development opportunities for the network across all their platforms.

With our technology Bravo can go everywhere, but what’s more important is that regardless of what comes next, our team will be ready with creative solutions for new innovations in business.

In the midst of diagrams and bullet points it’s easy to forget, but in the board room the presentation is the product. Of course facts and figures are a part of the complete picture, but any good sales person would agree that coming as close as possible to reproducing the actual product is indispensable to making the sale.

That’s what ESPN The Magazine kept in mind when they made the leap to Sales Graphics and CustomShow. The magazine armed their entire sales team with professional presentations but didn’t stop there. Instead of sending them into the field with still images of ad units, they used our design services to animate the look and feel of even the most complicated paper fold. This is the power of CustomShow.

Sales Graphics, unlike other professional design services, provided ESPN The Magazine with animation while allowing them maintain total control over wording and content. Backgrounds could move and ad units in motion illuminated the power of advertising with the magazine, but all the research and copy remained easily editable on both Macs and PCs.

CustomShow also allows ESPN The Magazine to publish the presentation to iPads. When it comes time to update or make changes across the sales team everything updates quickly and easily, but only when each presenter believes the time is right. In other words, CustomShow solves the problem of dealing with an entire fleet of presentation decks without forcing updates on the sales team right when they’re walking into their next meeting.

In the end CustomShow delivered the flexibility of a do it yourself presentation option while maintaining the look and feel of a professional solution. ESPN The Magazine was delighted. In fact, here’s what they wrote afterward:

Just wanted to drop a note to say that your team did a fantastic job on the ESPN The Magazine deck. We are really pleased with the results and the presentation really helps the magazine stand out. Besides it looking great, the presentation also worked flawlessly on our computers and that was a huge win for us.”