Do You Need a Sales Enablement Platform or a Sales Presentation System?

A successful sales team knows how to tell its story to the right prospects at the right time. That’s a whole lot easier when leadership has control over the ways in which your team visualizes, shares, and tracks that sales story.

But that success can be pretty hard to achieve when your system consists of nothing more than PowerPoint decks your team populates with content from various Dropbox folders. 

You’ve probably figured that out by now. If so, you’re also probably looking for the right technology solution to regain control of how your organization presents. The issue is a lot of organizations don’t take the time to assess their actual sales presentation pain points. And as a result, you’re not clear on the best solution for your sales presentations. Many organizations even wind up running too far in the other direction. 

In other words, many businesses jump right from PowerPoint decks to a full blown sales enablement platform when what they really needed was a better sales presentation system. Determining which route is best for your company starts by understanding the difference between the two solutions and how they’ll address your initial presentation paint points. 

What’s the Difference Between a Sales Enablement Platform and a Sales Presentation System?

Let’s start with a working definition of each term. 

Sales Enablement Platforms, like Seismic or ShowPad, are robust systems that give you visibility into every stage of the sales content lifecycle. These tools are meant to close the loop between marketing, sales, and prospects. They’re meant to help track content performance along every stage of the funnel — from content publication to that final pitch. 

Presentation Management Systems, on the other hand, are the supervised creation, distribution, updating, and publishing of your sales messages and visuals in presentations across an entire enterprise. The presentation management software allows you to control your brand and message across all sales activities and encourages interactive presentations.

With those definitions in mind, you need to ask yourself one pretty important question: Do you really need enterprise-scale software or just more control over your presentations? 

Are you struggling with things like complex AI-generated workflows and sales scoring? Or, do your problems actually stem from a lack of control over your presentations, how your prospects visualize your sales story, or even how you’re delivering your presentations? 

If you’re in the latter camp, a sales enablement platform is most likely going to be overkill and it probably won’t solve your presentation pain points.

Don’t Get Lured in by a Sales Enablement Platform that Does Everything…

…because you probably won’t use most of it.

Sales enablement platforms are a great fit for a select handful of businesses that actually need everything they have to offer. They’re the Swiss Army Knife for all your sales activities. But if the only thing you’re using a sales enablement platform for is taking the content you’ve always used and dumping it somewhere else, you’re just paying for a glorified Dropbox.

That’s because these platforms aren’t solely focused on solving the pain points you experience with your presentations. 

How much functionality is going to be left untouched? A lot. How long until you realize you’re wasting a ton of time, effort, and money to maintain a system nobody actually uses correctly? Not very. How many of your initial pain points have been solved? None.

Why Sales Enablement Platforms are Frustrating for Many

Let’s take a look at Showpad’s overall ratings. It’s clear how good a tool it can be for the right users. It’s got plenty of stellar reviews to back that up. But when you dig into some of the more critical comments, you start seeing some common threads. Users note that finding the right assets can be difficult and that the platform as a whole seems to create new problems rather than solving existing ones. Sound familiar? 

These are common themes among lower ratings, not outliers. But these low ratings are most likely coming from folks who didn’t understand what they needed to solve their actual problems and went with the platform they were most familiar with — despite it coming with too much horsepower. It’s the result of a bad fit, not a bad platform. 

How a Sales Presentation System Solves the Pain Points You’re Actually Experiencing

Okay, you get it. Sales enablement platforms are too much and don’t address your issues. So what’s the alternative? 

If what you’re looking for is a way to provide your sales team with a platform that makes it easy to create presentations and share them with your prospects — all while maintaining the level of control required to tell a cohesive story and track performance — that’s where a sales presentation system comes in. Here’s how they address the four most common presentation pain points:

Visualization

You need a way to control every aspect of how your presentations look — from initial design to final send — with the reassurance that they’ll look on-brand the entire time. 

A good sales presentation system nips that problem in the bud. Your marketing and creative teams can upload the most current, on-brand visuals and update them as needed. Now your sales team is working from templates that have everything they need and they don’t have to chase down the right visuals. Better yet, they’re saving time. 

Control

In line with your visuals, you need to maintain control over the messaging in your sales presentations. You need to make sure all of the content your sales team is adding fits in with current brand guidelines. Hell, sometimes you need to make sure they’re using the most current version of your story. 

A closed sales presentation system gives you back that control and lets you rest assured that every presentation walking out the door is company-approved. Your sales reps couldn’t go rogue even if they wanted to. 

Sharing

Porting your presentations into a sales enablement platform isn’t going to affect the way your team distributes them. Think about the ways in which you’re actually sharing your presentations with prospects. Are you attaching giant decks or PDFs to an email? Are they scaled appropriately for viewing on a mobile device? How many leads aren’t bothering to review your presentations because they’re such a hassle to open or view?

The right sales presentation systems solve these problems as a matter of course. No more attachments, no more scaling. Just an easy-to-generate responsive link you can send to your prospects. And on that note…

Tracking

The cool thing about a sales presentation you can share right over the web is that it’s much easier to understand how prospects are engaging with your presentations. Instead of a downloadable deck, your presentation now functions as a micro-website that’s way easier to track and analyze just like you would the rest of your site. 

You can see when someone opens the link, how often they return to it, which slides or content they interact with the most, and so on. That leads to better insights into your presentations and your prospects. That’s a big step up from attaching a PowerPoint file where your insights stop at whether or not they engaged with your email. 

It’s probably not hard to figure out where Nuvue lands on all of this. We’ve seen many organizations looking for a better way to visualize, control, share, and track their presentations. In fact, the Nuvue platform was created with these four pillars in mind. Sure, the robustness of a sales enablement platform is the right move for organizations that need to maintain control over a massive sales initiative, but for a lot of companies, it’s just overkill.

Nuvue’s sales presentation system is that “just right” solution. If you’re looking to solve any (or all) of these pain points, let’s talk.