Martin Behrens is the co-founder and CEO of presono - a tool for creating, managing, and showing presentations for companies that offers central data management and a more flexible way of presenting. Martin also will be one of the speakers at our Present to Succeed Conference 2022, and his company was the first to support next year's event as a sponsor!
In this episode with him, we talk about presentations in the corporate world and the issues people have with them, like staying on brand and maintaining files in several languages, and how they can be solved.
How Martin ended up in the presentation industry
Martin revealed that in school, he focused on music and literature, then went on to study theatre and acting, and at university switched to multimedia technology and design But because he likes being on stage, he has always naturally enjoyed presentations.
Eventually, he ended up in IT and it was there where he met his co-founders. One of them shared his idea that solved a significant problem for many departments that present daily, such as marketing, product management, and sales, among others. And by creating and working on presono, they have been able to solve these issues over the last six years.
The issues corporate presentations face and the initial idea for presono
Martin shared the case of a young professional in product management who was having trouble keeping all of the product presentations up to date in all of the different languages. If he had to update the content, he had to do it for all of the five or more languages. Their original plan for the company was to build a language management system.
Language management on websites is simple: you change the language, and the graphics remain the same. That was their first strategy for presentations. But then they focused on solving more than one corporate presentations issues and thus presono has come to be what it is.
The teams that struggle the most
The most affected departments are sales, marketing, and product management. Any type of presentation that needs to be updated and maintained and isn’t for one-time use may run into these problems.
Usually, everyone in a big company uses a central server or SharePoint, and as soon as a certain presentation is updated, no one has the most recent version since they all have copied the already old file on their devices. And when you have a lot of duplicated slides or versions, new files keep being added, it is easy to get lost in them.
We’ve all been in the scenario where you’re preparing a presentation and can’t find the most recent version of this one single slide, so you phone marketing to ask about it. This takes a long time and costs a lot of money to companies, which is why slide management software exists today.
Branding guidelines are another major issue for larger businesses. They spend a lot of money on branding, websites, trade show booths, and printed materials. But when it comes to presentations, though, using a template does not guarantee that you will stay on brand.
And here is where presono comes in, making it easy to stay on brand for everyone. The marketing or administrative teams set the main settings for templates, such as the approved typefaces, font sizes, and colors. You can also have defined places where to put your content because it is preformatted.
Moreover, if you want to change the font for everyone, you may do it with a single click. After that, everyone who has previously used that typeface is instantly updated to the new font, color, or logo, or whatever you have changed. Shortly said, with presono, you do not even have the chance of going off-brand or have a stretched logo or anything like that.
Modern brand design and its common lack in presentation design
The modern brand book, when it comes to presentation design, still often has just the most classical PowerPoint template presentation that we all have seen. There is nothing wrong with PowerPoint, but creativity is strangely missing when you get to the presentation design part of the developed brand identity sometimes, up to our day. Often you have the standard font there, one area of color, and that’s it. Nowhere as modern as it should be.
There should even be templates for various scenarios – each department has its own set of requirements and should have a template on hand for its own use cases. Something that can help people that do not have time but want their slides to be better is SlideModel – a library of ready-made slides that can be swiftly tailored for your needs.
Resources
You can connect with Martin Behrens on his LinkedIn or his email mb@preseno.com. Check out his company presono here.
Listen to the full episode!

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