Twenty-five years ago, Robert Gaskins, with a little distribution help from Microsoft, helped free countless business professionals from the need to carry slide carousels to speaking engagements, use overheads in lectures, or rely on printed brochures to sell wares. This massive innovation was PowerPoint, and it was a game changer.  Suddenly, everyone and anyone could make slides and present them directly from computers.  And, of course, once email hit the scene the ante was upped, & PowerPoint presentations could easily be sent from person to person without the need for a sales rep to present the slides.  Colleagues could collaborate on presentations by emailing, downloading, editing and sending them back.  It seemed life for presentations could get no better.

Innovative or dated technology?

PowerPoint  technology was such a dramatic improvement over the previous alternatives, and quickly professionals around the world became hooked on this new approach. And hooked they stayed – through innovations in personal computing, Sales and Marketing optimizations that came about with online marketing, the advent of SaaS, and the dawn of collaborative business software.  Throughout the last twenty-five years, presentations have climbed the corporate ladder to become second only to email in their importance to organizations.  They are used to sell to customers, to present at tradeshows & conferences, to communicate to staff & Boards of Directors, and to teams trying to optimize their cycles and products.  In short, they are everywhere – to the tune of about twenty million presentations being delivered every single day. They are the conversation opener, and hopefully the deal closer. And yet, this all-important business tool continues to rely on the use of PowerPoint.

Think about that for a minute. PowerPoint presentations are essentially digital brochures. Yet you can’t easily collaborate on them – instead you are forced to email enormous decks back and forth making small edits and clogging your email servers. You can’t quickly update old data, logos, or other assets – instead you have to open file after file in search of the one slide you are looking for to update, and then email that new presentation around to everyone who is using it and hope they adopt it. You can’t see who has viewed your presentation – in fact once you send it, it drops into a void where you have no visibility. It could get sent to your competitors or leaked to the press, not to mention the insights you could gather about how effective your presentations are if you could see viewing habits and information.  And perhaps most simply, without your presentations living in the cloud, you can’t send a prospect a deck without emailing them a huge attachment, and then hoping it speaks loudly enough to keep the negotiations open, which would hopefully, lead you to close a deal.

Things are changing

When you think about all the things current presentation technology does not let you do, and you match this up with all of the enormous innovations that sales and marketing teams take for granted by conducting so much of their business online, it is striking how much of a disconnect there is. Somehow, presentations are the gigantic needle that got lost in the haystack of innovation, and people have put up with the status quo for so long that they don’t even realize the needle could be highly effective if it were in an automatic sewing machine, surpassing previous methods. 

WHY IS THIS? How did presentations – arguably one of the most important pieces of software a business professional is likely to use in his or her lifetime – get so far behind? And why isn’t there more of a groundswell of anger about this? If you do a Google search for “Death by PowerPoint,” you’ll find over 60,000 results.  That’s a lot of people who are feeling the pain of using and being subjected to this software. Entire books have been written on the subject, and businesses have grown that are dedicated to fixing people’s poor PowerPoint uses.  And yet, until recently, this problem has not been addressed in a holistic and effective manner.  The problem essentially is that PowerPoint was built in a time when cloud-computing wasn’t even a remote possibility, and it did not grow with the times. Companies like Microsoft grew so reliant on revenue from client-based software they could not innovate the technology to take advantage of all our modern computing the world has to offer.

I believe this is all about to change, and that this change couldn’t come too soon. There is so much more that presentations can do for a company when they become living, breathing, online documents that transmit information seamlessly between the presenter and the viewer. Imagine a sales team that can spend the majority of its time actually selling, as opposed to assembling decks that likely have outdated information in them.  Or picture a world where a marketing team can easily lock down users to use only certain fonts, colors, themes, and slides in their presentations, and can update a logo or a number and have it automatically updated across the thousands of presentations being used.

We think it is about time for this important technology to catch up to and even surpass what is currently available. There are now a handful of companies who are addressing this problem, helping to turn presentations inside-out and allowing people to interact, engage and collaborate in new ways.  At the company SlideRocket, they strongly believe that there is a need to address the entire lifecycle of a presentation, giving professionals the tools they need to optimize at every point along this circle: creation, management, collaboration, delivery, and measurement. Until sales and marketing professionals can do all of this with ease and intelligence, a lot of money is being left on the table, and valuable time is being wasted in companies across the globe.  The Internet has made all of this possible, and it is time for presentations to take a giant leap forward to meet the future head-on.

Charles Dietrich is CEO of SlideRocket, headquartered in San Francisco, CA. You can reach him at: cdietrich@sliderocket.com or visit www.sliderocket.com for more information.