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How to better manage your sales decks with Linked Slides

If you create decks for your revenue team, embrace “Linked Slides”.

I’ve been experimenting with this feature in Google Slides over the last couple of months, hoping to streamline how we manage decks across Klue.

Here’s the plan:

🔐  Build a master deck

One massive deck that we use for building and maintaining slides.

It’s the source of truth for every slide that will make its way into one or many “Internal Deck Templates”.

For example, our master is close to 250 unique slides.

Few people have access to this. Maybe 2-3 people tasked with building these slides.

Lock down your Master Deck to View or Comment access only and remove the ability to copy this version.

🧰 Create internal deck templates

These are the standardized deck templates that everyone in the org has access to. Things like pitch decks, kickoff decks, proposals, business cases, etc.

For example, we manage 10 of these at the moment.

Every slide in these templates is copied over from our master deck.

The important step to remember is that when we copy/paste a slide into these decks, we have to select “Link & keep original styles”

After that, we never edited the slides in these decks directly.

The same 2-3 people have edit access while everyone else has comment access only. This means they can provide feedback in the deck, but not edit the slides directly.

They can instead copy these templates to create their own versions.

🔁 Edit the master, update the template

Whenever we update the master deck, we open our templates, go to Tools > Linked Objects > and select “Update all Objects” to pull in those changes.

This is handy because we can decide when to pull new changes into our templates.

Which means we can use the mega-deck as a sandbox for editing slides without them automatically changing our templates.

📣 Create a cadence to communicate changes

For us, the plan is to use our weekly sales meeting as a time to communicate new changes.

We’d be silly to think our AEs will always come back to the deck templates whenever they build a new client presentation.

So these meetings will be an opportunity for us to say “Hey team, the pitch deck is now updated with x, y, z. Make sure you grab this new version.”

👉 Cross promote deck templates

We’ve added a simple cover slide to each template explaining some of this process, but more importantly, it links to all of the other template decks.

There it is — the plan at least.

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