The Real Cost of PowerPoint

What is PowerPoint costing you? No, not the program itself – that is probably the tiniest fraction of your total expenditures. We’re talking about the costs associated with the time your sales reps spend sifting through mountains of old presentations to find what they need, the time they spend modifying sanctioned slides for individual presentations, or the cost to your company when those modifications look unprofessional or contain factual errors. If you take a hard look, you’ll find these costs are significant.

Bob Schmonsees, founder of the Value Mapping Consortium (www.valuemapping.net), examines the problem in a new eBook called Solving the PowerPoint Conundrum. In it, he observes that the “unrestricted growth of both sanctioned and total PowerPoint has created a major expense for many companies that I call the ‘Total Cost of PowerPoint.’”

Schmonsees says there are two components to the cost issue. The first is Visible Cost, which includes all the time and resources spent creating and managing sanctioned presentations. The second is Invisible Cost, which includes the time reps spend looking through old slides to find what they need and then customizing and updating those slides. It also includes the lost revenue from sales opportunities that are lost or delayed when reps or prospects act on incorrect or outdated information that has been edited in to sanctioned slides.

Unfortunately, it’s a problem that feeds on itself. As the amount of sanctioned PowerPoint slides grows, “it spawns an enormous amount of presentation morphing by the sales channels, thereby accelerating the total growth of PowerPoint,” says Schmonsees. And as the growth of PowerPoint accelerates, it not only takes longer to sort through the slides, it also becomes increasingly difficult to maintain slide accuracy.

So what’s the fix? Schmonsees says your first step is to select a small team of high performers from sales, sales support, and marketing – everyone involved in the creation and use of PowerPoint. The team’s first action item should be to formally assess and document the level of the PowerPoint problem in their company. Once they’ve got some hard numbers, they can communicate the full scope of the problem to management and get management’s buy in to seek a solution.

Next, Schmonsees says the team should develop a long-term vision for the role of PowerPoint in the customer’s buying process, meaning “where information in presentation format will give a prospect all or a key portion of the information they need to make a favorable buying decision.” Complementing this vision, he adds, should be a set of “broad functional requirements for the enabling technology that will make that vision a reality.”

But it all starts with documentation of the problem. In most companies, the real cost of PowerPoint goes unnoticed because it is not readily identifiable and because most executives are removed from the day-to-day frustration of using PowerPoint. Organizations that can get their arms around the problem, and then implement processes and technologies to address it, are the ones that Schmonsees says will have a “sustainable competitive advantage” going forward.

To download the full eBook, visit www.inciteknowledge.com.