The Problem:  According to the WSJ, $250 million per day is wasted on bad, ineffectively designed PowerPoint Presentations. But, based on our calculations, it could actually be 3X’s that amount – $619 million per day, and NEITHER of those figures include the salary costs associated with creation of bad PowerPoint decks — nope, those figures are based solely on wasted hours sitting through the delivery of these bad PowerPoint presentations. Which begs the question, why don't companies invest in persuasive PowerPoint presentation deck design? 

By the numbers: there is no published (at least that we can find) number suggesting the average number of people attending a standard business meeting, much less one featuring a PowerPoint presentation. So, we’ve taken some conservative (in our opinion) liberties to create such a number. 

• PowerPoint Presentation design consumes 8-13 hours: assuming we all engage in a similar set of steps to create a super basic PowerPoint presentation featuring a simple text over colored background. 

If you choose to forgo a basic text over background design, favoring something higher end, incorporating multiple visuals and a professional looking aesthetic, your time quickly balloons from that 8-13 hours to something closer to 30-40 hours. Personally, my breakout and keynote decks usually run around 40 hours of design and preparation time for each one. Just to give you some kind of context.

• Bad PowerPoint presentation meetings cost an average of $20.63 per meeting: Microsoft claims there are 30 million PowerPoint presentations made every day worldwide. Whew! That makes my head hurt and my body ache for a cocktail just thinking about it! So again, taking a few liberties to approximate the employee hours involved in sitting through 30 million PowerPoint presentations a day for 1 year: 

And that $619 million figure doesn’t even include the cost of failure.  If you or your team is trying to sell your product, service or ideas with PowerPoint sales decks that have really bad breath, then chances are you're leaving a lot more than $20.63 on the table each time you make a PowerPoint presentation. 

Think about that for a moment. How many sales have you lost? How many initiatives have you championed that never got started? How many game changing ideas have you proposed that never had a chance because your poorly designed PowerPoint created a persuasion hurdle your sweet talking self couldn’t overcome? 

How do you know if your PowerPoint presentations are costing you opportunity or sales? That’s a great question. And there isn’t any sure fire way to know for sure, but as an early warning system, honestly ask yourself... do your presentation decks or your team’s or company’s sales decks suffer from: 

If your PowerPoint slides suffer from three or more of these fatal design flaws, chances are unless you’re a TED level presenter, you're probably losing opportunities and/or revenue that a well designed pitch deck could help you win. 

The Key Benefits of great PowerPoint Template design include, but are not limited to:

To solve your Problem and turn your PowerPoint decks into an asset versus a liability, think of your Powerpoint Templates as another piece of sales collateral or sales enablement content worthy of professional design assistance. You wouldn’t trust yourself or your sales team to create your sales brochures, sales slicks or other sales & marketing materials would you? So then why do you ask them to play Art Director and Copywriter on what could potentially be the single most important piece of sales collateral they’ll ever use??? 

First, build The Ultimate Presentation Deck Template by gathering every relevant presentation deck you or your team has ever created and delivered to anyone — inside or outside of your organization.  

Second, work with an outside sales messaging consultant who can bring a fresh viewpoint, not to mention critical thinking skills, to help you make three key PowerPoint design decisions:

Third, work with a professional slide and data information presentation designer. Trust me, this step is worth its weight in gold, especially if you rely on statistics or data to sell your ideas, products or services. Well designed tables, charts and graphs make it so much easier for your audience to understand and process your message, especially on virtual sales calls.

Fourth, test drive your new ultimate PowerPoint presentation template to confirm it makes it easier and faster for you or your team to create attention grabbing, persuasive sales decks and marketing presentations that consistently produce desired outcomes.

Fifth, and finally, if you're developing this ultimate PowerPoint template for your staff or sales team, TEACH them how to use the tool. Believe me, having built these ultimate sales deck systems for some of our B2B clients, skipping this step guarantees you'll have huge implementation issues. 

And if you really want to maximize the ROI of your initial design investment, create an on-demand, video based course that your team can complete and then refer back to later. And then have your HR team require all new hires to complete the course, ensuring new hires receive the same "how to" training as your current team. 

Wondering how much great PowerPoint Template design costs? The truth is, it depends. I did a little Google searching and found everything from $5 per hour Fiverr designers to $25,000 per deck design agencies. However, it’s important to note, that none of these services included strategic message development or Talk Track sequencing. These folks only offered to redesign a pre-populated generic PowerPoint template into something more professional and eye-catching.

Here at Converse Digital, we charge our clients based on three variables:

So, while there is no standard price, on average we're able to create 100+ slide decks and fully customized PowerPoint templates including approximately 50 custom charts, tables, and infographics for about $500-$750 per slide.

So, the only questions left are, how much is that bad slide deck you're using costing you and what are you willing to invest to fix it — FOREVER? If you think we can help, give me a call and we’ll see what we can work out. 

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