Thanks to everyone who voted in our LinkedIn poll, “Which presentation templates should SlideRocket develop“. You certainly surprised us with a few of your requests (e.g., lead prospecting template!). We’ll leave the poll open so you can continue to cast your votes, and we’ll watch it closely as input as we create more great templates. And now that you’ve voted, it’s time for us to deliver! (more…)

This is a guest post by Maggie Summers, a content writer and blogger at Ethos3 – a leader in presentation design. Also read her recent post on presentation storytelling.

Most of us have experienced it acutely at the doctor’s office. A hurried, borderline frenetic, doctor bursts through the door and starts blathering on about your test results. He speaks quickly with lots of dense medical jargon; you stop tracking with him about 30 seconds after he starts. When he mercifully finishes, you have no idea what your test results say. Your doctor is suffering from the Curse of Knowledge, and you were just an unwitting victim.

The villainous Curse of Knowledge occurs when a person becomes knowledgeable about something and from then on is unable to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. (more…)

Nonprofits can be fantastic marketers. For the continued success of their causes, nonprofits must refill their coffers year after year. They don’t get to enjoy the recurring revenue, multi-year contracts and other plush budget amenities that a typical private sector company enjoys. These folks really need to be at the top of their guerrilla marketing game to earn donations! Which is why SlideRocket loves to help them!  (more…)

In your career, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is getting noticed when marketing your product, pitching investors for funding, proposing ideas to your manager, looking for a job, etc. The uphill battle job hunter “Ryan” encountered while trying to get his résumé noticed by potential employers illustrates this point:

“I was tired of applying for jobs that I knew I was qualified for and knew I would be great at. No matter how much time I spent retooling my résumé or writing a great cover letter, I knew I was sitting in a stack with hundreds of other applicants.” (more…)

Sleep tight SlideRocket users. Your presentations are safe with us.

We’re excited to announce that all SlideRocket users can now set their presentations to “Private”. Formerly only SlideRocket Pro users could this, but now SlideRocket Lite (the free version) users can as well. This means any presentation you create from scratch or import from PowerPoint will be set to “Private” until you choose to make it “Public”. Nobody can view it, and Google won’t crawl it.

This update provides (more…)

Welcome to Slide Design Friday! In this weekly post we’ll tear apart awful presentations and mock the people who designed them. Nawww! This is really a friendly place where we’ll take a look at good SlideRocket presentations that come across the Twitter stream and provide simple, quick fix tips that may help the slide author better deliver their message, and just generally be more awesome for their audience.

Using Venn Diagrams in your slide design

This slide was created by the folks at Handling Specialty in Grimsby, Ontario, Canada. (more…)

The role of sales has fundamentally changed because customers find much of the information they need to make purchase decisions on the web. To adapt, forward-thinking sales teams are employing a cadre of sales tools to engage with, and win the trust of, prospective customers.

In this webinar, Jacco van der Kooij and Dan Adams discuss this new selling paradigm and share their perspectives on key sales tools and techniques you should consider employing to help you sell more effectively.

The following is the Q&A transcript from the webinar:
(more…)

We are thrilled to announce that SlideRocket has launched integration with the newly released Google Drive. With this announcement Google and SlideRocket have introduced a new level of content viewing, editing and collaboration.

Google Drive and SlideRocket – a Presentation

A Big Day For SlideRocket, Google and The Cloud

SlideRocket users who choose Google Drive will enjoy (more…)

This is a guest blog post by Jacco VanderKooij, an entrepreneurial sales executive with a 10+ years proven sales track record. Jacco brings rigorous discipline and boundless energy to sales organizations. On Apr 25, Jacco will present the webinar The Future of Sales, Selling With Social Media. Join us!

Over the past 10 years I have delivered close to 1,000 sales presentations. In that time, my use of video during in-person sales meetings has had perhaps the biggest, most surprising impact on my ability to deliver an exceptional presentation.

At first, I was reluctant to try video during an in-person sales presentation. My fear was the video would distract my audience, (more…)

This is a guest post by Maggie Summers, a content writer and blogger at Ethos3 – a leader in presentation design and training, and a friend of SlideRocket. She takes pride in empowering presenters through her knowledge and passion for presentations and powerful storytelling.

Stories can be the quickest way to be transported someplace far away. Don’t feel like being at home this afternoon? If you’d like to venture through the streets of St. Petersburg, Russia, pick up Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or if you want to experience Paris and London during the French Revolution, grab Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Stories establish immediate familiarity and trust between storyteller and listener, they explain and nuance our complicated lives, and they offer a genuine glimpse at who we are. Presentations are enriched (more…)