Why the PowerPoint file is the problem

Every few years a sales team decides the deck is tired and goes looking for PowerPoint design services. The designers refresh the slides, fix the logo lockup, and for a quarter everyone feels better. Then the old complaints return: reps send old versions, nobody knows if the buyer opened it, and a pitch that took a year to sharpen lands as a 40 MB attachment somebody skims on a phone.

The slides were never the problem. The file was.

Four things a file does to a good pitch

• It forks. Send it once and there are two copies; by the end of the quarter there are forty.
• It goes dark. An attachment cannot tell you whether anyone opened it, which pages they read, or who they forwarded it to.
• To personalize it, you have to duplicate it. Every tailored version is one more file to maintain.
• It was drawn for a projector. On a phone, where many buyers open it, a slide shrinks to a postcard.

What changes when the story ships as a link

Keep the story. Keep the brand. Change the container. A hosted interactive presentation is one build at one address. Each recipient gets their own link with their name and context merged in. Edit a screen and everyone who already has the link sees the change. And it reports back which screens each person read and for how long. It reads well on a phone because we design it for one, and it can sit on your website as well as in an inbox.

That is the difference between a pitch deck redesign and a pitch deck rebuild. A redesign makes the file prettier. A rebuild retires the file.

When the file is still right

Sometimes a PowerPoint is the right thing: a board meeting, a conference slot, a deck presented once and never sent. In that case a polished deck is the right choice, and one of our designers specializes in building them.

If you send your deck more often than you present it, send us the one you use today. We will rebuild one section as an interactive presentation, free, so you can judge the difference on your own material, not ours.