The Phoenix Suns— an NBA team— work in high pressure, high visibility scenarios, and every interaction counts. From internal strategies, to partnership pitches, it requires the right tools to produce professional, on-brand results. 

We caught up with the Suns’ Creative Director, Chris Grasha, to learn more about how their team is leveraging Beautiful.ai to scale their workflows, collaborate more, and win new partnerships.

Chris was searching for a solution to their existing presentation pain points: the lack of efficiency and brand control. He found Beautiful.ai in his search and was instantly impressed by the ease of use and consistency in design. He says, “Beautiful.ai’s solution has really blown me away with the ability to lock down certain features to enforce brand standards and keep consistency across presentations.”  As the leader of the design team, Chris is creating at least one new presentation a week while also overseeing the team’s designs before they send them off to clients, so streamlining the process was a priority. 

Building better sales decks in a fraction of the time

Beautiful.ai’s cloud-based software has unlocked a new way to collaborate, and improve efficiencies, for the Suns’ internal team. The ability to make edits on the fly, simultaneously in the same deck while their teammate is adding notes, has been a game changer saving them a lot of time. 

Another way they’ve been able to improve efficiencies is by repurposing content from existing decks. “After building assets for one major partner deck, we might want to include some of the same examples in a new potential partner pitch deck.” Chris explains, “In PowerPoint you’d have to download that entire deck, pull out those three slides that you need to put into the new deck, and then build this new monster of a deck. It was all over the place. But now with Beautiful.ai, we can pull the same three slides in from an existing presentation that is already built and it’s ready to go.” 

The consistency in design allows them to recycle content and tailor it for each new prospect or partner to deliver a customized experience in a fraction of the time. 

Locking in branding with design guardrails

Sales managers aren’t generally design experts, which means sales collateral can be a mess if there isn’t brand control in place. Chris says, “brand standards and logos, or other team assets, are really important to have as a creative director to make sure people aren’t using the wrong assets.” The Suns’ sales team uses the same approved Team Theme to lock in branding guidelines and ensure their decks are professional and cohesive. In Beautiful.ai it’s easier to restrict assets, so each sales manager is able to run with their deck and add personal touches to the graphs, charts, and images. “They have those tools at their disposal to customize their decks, but I know that they're not going to be able to use a different font and compromise the branding,” Chris adds.

Plus, allowing them to own their presentation, layout and deck design included, makes them more comfortable and confident when they’re presenting to prospective clients and partners. 

Winning multi-thousand dollar deals with Beautiful.ai

There are many decks being created by the sales team from pitching to potential clients, to onboarding partners and end-of-season recaps. It’s nothing new to their team. However, the Phoenix Suns’ recently closed a substantial deal using Beautiful.ai from beginning to end. A new salesperson was hired and hit the ground running, pulling what they needed from the team’s master sales deck and dropping it into a new Beautiful.ai presentation for the client. They closed the deal and they did it quickly. Chris says, “it was really powerful, and it happened in a 3-4 day window.” 

To help measure their success, Chris finds a lot of value in the analytics feature. He appreciates the ability to share out a deck and then have metrics on the backend to be able to see who has opened the presentation. Those metrics can help him, and the sales team, evaluate which slides are resonating well with partners and what might need updating for future decks. 

Chris leaves us with, “my colleagues will walk by my office and say ‘Beautiful.ai is such a cool platform, I'm glad you found this’ and they’re right, it has solved a lot for our team.”

We’re glad to see the Phoenix Suns winning on and off the court.