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Teamwork makes the dream work. Collaboration is a crucial part of the presentation process when you’re trying to scale your business. But with collaboration comes the responsibility of content management, branding control, and security. It has always been our goal to make the presentation process more seamless, efficient, and secure. To help facilitate teamwork and collaboration, we’re excited to announce the Beautiful.ai Team Plan.
We designed our Team Plan to remove things that kill efficiency from the presentation process. With new features like Shared Slides, Shared Themes, single sign-on, team administration and advanced controls, it makes it easy for your team to design decks quickly, collaborate remotely, and stay on brand—all under one account.
In light of the launch, we caught up with our Beautiful.ai President/COO, Jason Lapp, to talk about the new Team Plan and how it will change the future of work for teams.
Tell us about the new Team Plan.
Jason Lapp: We know that when it comes to selling and marketing your brand against the competition, the best presentation always wins. In business, making yourself look beautiful requires process, time and skilled designers. Having content that you can be proud of is expensive and difficult to create.
We believe that design and beautiful content shouldn’t be reserved for just the marketing team and professional designers. We’re democratizing design at scale and putting a design team in your back pocket for the important moments when you want to show off your brilliant ideas. With our newest Team offer, you’ll not only look good, but you’re getting your most valuable asset back across your entire team…time. Our customers are telling us that we’re cutting production and creation time in half, while innovating the way they work. As you scale with the Team offer so does the ROI.
How is it different from the current Pro Plan?
Jason Lapp: Our current Pro Plan already gives the individual user the power of time savings, ease of use and making presentations more fun. The Team plan is meant to help scale that for an organization, and as such we’ve added a new set of administrative functions, customer support and features designed to support a company’s need to manage their brand and content across a distributed workforce.
What problem is the Team Plan solving? What are the main pain points companies experience with presentations?
Jason Lapp: Using a common example from my prior life, my teams were spending 30%+ of their week working on content in PowerPoint (presentations, proposals, analysis, marketing, etc). We used PowerPoint because it was the only option and the common platform to communicate. It was rare that the output of that work was Accenture/Deloitte level quality. When the work was beautiful, it meant that marketing had spent time reworking the content or had to start from scratch. That often took too much time and was impossible to pull off for client timelines.
I'm getting hives just thinking about how it used to be. The version control issues, the old slides that would pop up, the frankendecks that were created and the weekends/nights/holidays that I spent sending decks over email and setting up conference calls to review them.
At the core of this issue there was a desktop based presentation software that was designed to solve a problem 20 years ago and a content creation process that matched. In today's workplace, and especially with the new remote working structures, the problem is exacerbated.
Beautiful.ai is a different way of working and a different kind of software. It's cloud based so it's fast and makes it easy to collaborate. The software has leveraged AI driven design principles so the user not only can accomplish tasks faster, they have smart starting points via pre-built templates that they can't mess up. The product itself makes the individual more efficient, but we added features to scale that for businesses. With the Team Plan, the business can lock down a corporate presentation template (color, font, logo, etc), they can put Shared Slides or presentations into the product so it's easy to update and locate new messaging, branding, content, and data. Your collaborations and content act as a living event versus an old school passing of the baton approach.
I like to think about Beautiful.ai as having a superpower that gives you your time back and makes you and your content look beautiful when you show up to a meeting.
Why did Beautiful.ai decide to build this new feature?
Jason Lapp: The short answer: our customers asked us to. We have 72,000 companies around the globe using the product, and they were finding it limiting to subscribe as individuals and not have all of their employees under one roof with the proper administration that allows them to scale the efficiencies of the platform.
We also learned that companies were building out our platform in new ways and creating individual use cases that had a major impact on their bottom line. One of my favorite examples to talk about is a company called Cybrary. They’re focused on Cybersecurity in the tech education space and the core of their business is producing training courses that range from 30 minutes to 30 hours. These courses require a production team, creative team and instructors to collaborate to build great content and stay consistent with their quality standards and brand guidelines. They used to use PowerPoint to manage the content, but found it incredibly inefficient to run the production process. When they introduced Beautiful.ai into the process it allowed them to cut the production time in half. They’re leveraging the product to streamline content creation, collaborations between teams, and having everything in one place to build content faster.
What do you think users will be most excited about with this new feature?
Jason Lapp: The client favorite at the moment is our Shared Slides library. It was designed with the idea that every company has critical content to keep everyone on brand and on message. To be effective this needs to be easily accessed and distributed to the rest of the workforce. With Shared Slides, marketing uploads their content into the library then every user can easily drop those slides in when they need them. The thing that makes this feature really unique is that when it’s time to update that content, you simply make the change in the library and it simultaneously pushes the new content out and replaces the old version across all presentations. It keeps everyone up to date and on the same page. You no longer need to worry about old content being circulated for reuse. One of our longtime customers, Danny Ellis, the CEO of Skyspecs, recently told me “The Shared Slide library is fantastic and the best feature that you’ve pushed out. It’s a defining feature and not seen in any other tool out there”.
Who is the Team Plan ideal for? What size teams, companies, etc.?
Jason Lapp: It’s designed for any company that wants to innovate presentation management. If you’re two people or 1,000 it’s easy for the product to have immediate impact. Larger companies will see a much greater ROI in terms of time saved by employees and a reduction of marketing costs needed to support functions like sales and customer service.
What are you most excited about for this release?
Jason Lapp: I’m excited to hear about how clients are using the product and how it’s impacting their businesses. It’s energizing to hear how we are solving problems and helping them succeed.
The Beautiful.ai Team Plan allows you to create all the beautiful presentations your organization needs: remotely, securely, and without putting other work on hold. We centralized everything from branding to billing, so you can scale beautifully. Make your team look brilliant and get started today with the Beautiful.ai Team Plan.
