While I was a bChannels I was a project manager on our SAP account and served as the company marketing manager. The marketing team worked on a brand overhaul. Once the updated style guide was approved we started working on other brand elements. One of these projects was creating a slide master and sales deck.

In Microsoft PowerPoint a slide master controls the overall presentation design including theme, layout, background, color, fonts and object positioning within each slide. (It is fairly simple to create your own slide master; here are Microsoft’s step-by-step instructions.) Our goal was to create and share the slide master company wide.

Our value proposition was directly tied to our people; we wanted to show our people doing what they loved. As a result we asked our employees to send in their high resolution photos so we could create the slide master. Here is what we learned:

Using Employee Pictures in the Slide Master

  • Not every photo we received was truly high resolution.
  • Send the release form with the original request for photos.
  • Creating a slide master with that many photos creates a huge file before adding any content. If you are set on this kind of slide master, compress each image.
  • People move, decide before hand how often you want to ask for new pictures and update titles.
  • Old power points don’t necessarily get deleted or updated, they tend to be reused. How important is it to your team that pictures and titles are updated.

Additionally, each company needs to decided if marketing is going to review and approve every slide deck slated for external use. Our answer was no because at the time, the marketing team was just me. This meant the slide master design needs to be simple enough for PowerPoint users of all skill levels.

bChannels Final Slide Master

Once that building block was in place we could use it to make a standardized sales deck with case studies.