Still Using Mundane Decks for Sales Presentations? Why it’s Time for Change.

20% of sales teams reported recently that they don’t have the necessary resources and tools to help them with their workflows.¹ It’s also been reported that businesses who invested in their pre-sales engine saw a 10-20% improvement in the speed of moving prospects through the sales process.² 

These facts make it clear that the importance of which tools pre-sales teams have available to them in 2023 has never been greater.

This understandable need has shed light on a growing problem with technical product demos and digital transformation solutions. Simply put: traditional presentations tend to be boring and can not do justice to the value of sophisticated tech solutions. Prospects need something more engaging than another slide deck. Pre-sales engineers need to bring something more impressive than another Powerpoint.

It’s time to use different tools to present solutions.

In this article, we’re going to look at what the research says about traditional presentation tools, and why 3D visualisation software could be the change you need to boost your win rate and close deals faster.

Slide Decks Are Not An Effective Use of Time

Sales professionals only spent 30% of their time actually selling in 2022.³ In the competitive world of B2B, your team’s win rate isn’t going to improve without maximising your time with effective strategies.

One of the most time-consuming tasks that sales teams face is the production of presentations, with an estimated 47% of people spending more than 8 hours on designing a single deck.⁴ This is not surprising when you take into account all the steps involved in them:

1. Prospect specific research
2. Design and branding
3. Content production (often manual or at best using generic templates)
4. Editing and redrafting
5. Rehearsal

However as this article will discuss later, the rewards of putting effort into traditional decks are often minimal and lead to more follow-up calls than should be necessary. 

Growth minded pre-sales teams have instead been adopting technology that visualises solutions and value into something far more meaningful.

Your team could instead make use of online platforms that transform data and talking points, into a compelling narrative. 3D visualisation technology allows you to quickly create interactive environments that not only present your solution but model it in a way that makes it easier for a prospect to understand it:

Finances Online reported in 2018 that almost a third of B2B buyers complained that the buying process had become longer due to difficulty understanding information.⁵ Cultivating shared understanding has been and always will be a factor in closing deals, so investing in the right tools to achieve this is essential.

Time is precious for both the prospect and the pre-sales engineer. Don’t waste it on long sales decks and follow-up calls.

Powerpoints are Mundane

Even when you’ve spent an entire working day meticulously designing your slide deck or presentation, more often than not these efforts don’t even pay off. All the way back in 2001, Microsoft estimated that at least 30 million Powerpoint presentations were made everyday,⁶ so one can only imagine how many are made today in 2023.

While no doubt popular, a survey conducted last year found that 79% of people found Powerpoint presentations boring.⁷ While there could be several reasons for this, the fact is that this method of demonstrating value is simply not as appealing as it used to be. 

Engaging people with data and business processes can be especially challenging – especially when your audience are busy stakeholders or yet to be convinced prospects. Attempting to present digital or abstract ideas using only a static, 2D medium is difficult for even the most talented of presenters. 

In a recent LinkedIn survey, Don Carmichael found that a value/outcome-focused story was the thing that buyers wanted pre-sales professionals to deliver the most.⁸ Presentations then must find a way of delivering their story in as compelling a way as possible. 

This is why using a 3D visualisation tool is advantageous, as it provides a new and immersive experience for people to engage with. You can show your audience the full scope of a project and how different parts of it interact with one another in a way that traditional tools can’t.

Companies such as Siemens Digital Software have already invested in such tools, and have commented that 3D graphical presentations have provided a ‘compelling buying experience’ that leads to ‘faster sales with better customer confidence’. 

Feedback such as this indicates that there’s definitely an appetite for new tools that revolutionise how we deliver presentations, and they’re already effective. It’s time to stop using boring Powerpoints. It’s time for a change.

Displaying Change Over Time is Essential

A huge part of any pre-sales process is showing how a product or service will positively affect a business. 

To properly demonstrate change over time in a slideshow, however, takes either a crude animation or multiple slides – and if the prospect wants to review this part of your presentation again, you have to awkwardly cycle back and forth. This not only breaks the journey of your value proposition but also takes away any chance of keeping the bigger picture of the solution in focus. The long-term value of your product deserves to be communicated better.

An online platform where you’re not limited to the borders of slides makes for a far more seamless experience. A 3D visualisation tool can display a change within a business process in real-time; instead of just seeing a ‘before’ and ‘after’, the viewer can now enjoy a bespoke view that speaks to their goals and key pain points:

54% of marketers say that video is the most valuable type of content,⁹ which is a statistic that pre-sales professionals must keep in mind to deliver effective presentations. Experiencing a product has never been more important in the buying process, but how does one take the time to create such a video – especially in the busy world of pre-sales. 

3D modelling solutions overcome this obstacle by creating a live, bespoke journey demonstration that viewers can take a look around after the presentation. Certain platforms even allow you to customise which elements are on display with specific filters so that your audience only sees what’s relevant.

While not a fully-fledged video, a 3D animated time-lapse provides a similar experience that will interest prospects far more than just another slide.

It’s Time to Shorten the Sales Cycle

Pre-sales teams need to stop limiting themselves to outdated slide decks. The problems with just sticking to traditional presentation techniques are clear:

• Slide decks take too long to produce and prospects take too long to understand them
• Presentation slides aren’t engaging people anymore
• Displaying change over time and demonstrating value is difficult

A surveyed 55% of sales teams in 2020 said that optimising value messaging was one of their top priorities in overcoming sales challenges.¹⁰ In a world filled with content, mundane decks and complex presentations are not enough to capture the attention of prospects and stakeholders – especially not ones who aren’t technologically minded. If you truly want to optimise your value messaging, then you need to stand out from the crowd. 

Integrating a 3D platform such as EMMa3D into your tech stack could be the change you need to shorten your sales cycle in 2023. Shared understanding through 3D visualisation is at the core of what EMMa3D does, and it is our mission to help sales and transformation teams to adopt a systemic way of thinking.

Before co-founding EMMa3D in 2019, Ian served 16 years in the Royal Marines where he developed skills in leadership, training, and project management. After leaving the army in 2012, Ian brought his wealth of experience to organisations such as J.P Morgan and Barclays, where he realised his passion for bringing shared understanding between businesses. You can follow him on LinkedIn here.

¹ https://theinfluencerforum.com/76-sales-statistics-2022-facts-figures-and-trends/

² https://hbr.org/2015/02/to-improve-sales-pay-more-attention-to-presales

³ https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/the-state-of-sales-2022-report

⁴ https://www.infographicdesignteam.com/blog/presentation-statistics/

⁵ https://financesonline.com/b2b-statistics/

⁶ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/05/28/absolute-powerpoint

⁷ https://presentationpanda.com/blog/new-presentation-statistics/

⁸ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7001597365233033216/

⁹ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-video-statistics/

¹⁰ https://financesonline.com/sales-statistics/