How the Florida Panthers Maximize Their Workflow & Win New Clients Using Visme

The Florida Panthers are a National Hockey League (NHL) team based in Sunrise, Florida. The franchise was awarded on December 10, 1992. Since then, the Panthers had officially begun playing in the 1993-94 season and are owned by Vincent Viola, with Matthew Caldwell serving as President & CEO, Bill Zito serving as General Manager, and Paul Maurice serving as head coach.

Their company has over 250+ employees across various departments, including 15 team members from partnership sales, activation and solutions teams. These 15 team members specifically use Visme for their day-to-day operations and visual communication materials.  

Bridget Sullivan is the Director of Partnership Solutions for the Florida Panthers. Her main goal as head of the department is to empower her sales team to present data and solutions for partners and prospects through the art of storytelling. 

She works closely with the sales and activation team to provide marketing activations, proposals and more with local and national companies. 

Next to Bridget, Walter Da Rocha, the Creative Coordinator, also supports the partnerships solution team. His role is focused on aiding to bring their storytelling, visual campaigns or creative vision to life, whether this is a presentation, mock-up or providing the team with branded templates. 

How Florida's Panthers Uses Visme 

The Florida Panthers use Visme to help departments to streamline their content creation process, maintain brand integrity and enable the team to design confidently without feeling restricted. 

Once brand standards were established and templates were launched within Visme, team members could find and use an entire template, or select sections for their project needs. 

Providing a hub of ready-to-use branded material that can be quickly customized and shared with internal or external stakeholders. Empowering the team of non-designers to create and tailor materials without relying heavily on the design team. 

Branded templates equipped the team to tell the best version of their story with the updated information, storytelling tactics and visuals across regardless of their department or role efficiently. 

“To be able to find success and streamline our process of creating presentations that reflect our brand story; we built a slide library of standard locked slides for everybody to use, and editable slides as they need to bring their sales materials to life.” Walter remarks. 

"Since we all have access to Visme, our team has become more independent regarding edits or changes. No one is asking 50 questions on how to set up a graphic or resize a photo. If something pops up, our team can adjust with ease because Visme has become an integral part of how we handle things,"

The department is always focused on driving immediate success in regards to driving revenue for the business. They had been successful along the way but found a gap in how their previous materials consistently portrayed their brand story, look and feel and even goals. 

They saw that some individuals found it hard to stick to brand guidelines or translate their brand into the visual elements within their presentations. 

Visme allowed them to permanently integrate their brand designs and guidelines, along with creating branded templates. All of which aids to maintain brand integrity and remove design bottlenecks that would delay their workflow by having to wait for a designer.

"Visme made it so easy for us to add our brand design and guidelines into the software, which means I don't have to download fonts or colors every time a project needs to be created because it's already there for me." 

This process diminished the margin of error for team members to use outdated visuals, off brand presentations or inaccurate company information. Furthermore, it guaranteed a uniform standard of professionalism across each department and stage of the client's journey, fostering a greater sense of confidence in the brand and the individuals representing it.

The team has built over 1000+ projects in Visme, and as they plan to do more outreach to new partners and make as many connections as possible, that number will tremendously increase with time. “Visme has made it relatively easy for us to work on products, communicate and create presentations at such a faster rate,” Walter states. 

The Florida Panthers start using Visme in 2021. During this time, they've not only developed a system that incorporates the platform in their workflow but culture as well, including onboarding new hires.

The team uses Visme to host some of their past work and brand essentials and newly created guidelines that new hires can use to learn about the business. 

Team members can also smoothly navigate through their Enterprise Visme workspace where all relevant content is stored. They can easily locate projects or presentations through a simple search within the platform, avoiding the need to sift through endless folders, drives, or email communications. 

"When I was onboarded and introduced to the brand, it was through Visme. I was really excited about it. The platform is so visual, making it easy for me to log in and see everything I needed instead of looking through tons of folders. From the get-go, I was surprised by how visually appealing Visme's templates and presentations were compared to past sales presentation tools I used before," Bridget shares.

The team can integrate new hires into Visme quickly as it offers a low learning curve for employees, making onboarding them into the software seamless. 

"There's not only the ease of adoption for new teammates to learn Visme but the confidence that our presentations have a high quality and are consistent. This is why I recommend Visme." 

When their previous graphic designer left the company, Walter was able to pick up where they left off in Visme and instantly create projects that needed a fast turnaround. "Our graphic designer left during an integral time in our selling season. 

So when Walter joined our team and immediately started using Visme without meeting a huge learning curve, it was a huge success. He could pick up and build off of what was already present."

At the moment, Bridget and the team are working closely with their business intelligence team to design dashboards in Visme with the help of Tableau that can be easily embedded into Visme projects as an HTML embedment. They’re excited about the dashboards they’ll create with Visme. This will give them a more comprehensive view of readily available data for their future projects. 

How Visme Helps to Streamline Their Workflow 

The partnership department (sales, activation and solutions team), work together in Visme to build out material they can use to onboard new partners and create end-of-the-season recaps. 

“Using Visme, the team reduced our proposal and presentation timeline from over a week to one or two days. Compared to the time we were previously spending weeks to complete these tasks, thanks to Visme and Walter, we’ve removed that bottleneck from our process.” 

A standard workflow for Bridget and her team would start with creating a presentation. This presentation could be a collection of selected slides or a duplicated template obtained from their template library. 

Walter designs and personalizes each slide as Creative Coordinator. Their design team is in charge of creating editable and non-editable master slides to empower the teams to pick, choose, and build their own deck. Since branding guidelines are uploaded into the "My Brand" area (where fonts, colors, and logos are hosted) this ensures that the content created will be consistent and aligned with said guidelines.

Once Walter is finished with the presentation template, Bridget reviews and shares it with the sales team, and places it directly in a folder that hosts decks for new prospects. Each department has designated folders with commonly used or needed materials so that the team is organized, efficient and can easily find items. 

"With Visme, we've been able to create a collaborative work process across all sub-departments, whether it's a recap, onboarding, sales presentation or pitch deck."

The sales team reviews the presentation and provides additional feedback or ideas for additional visuals, slide templates and information to include within the templates.

The team can also make and see real-time updates to their projects once they are creating off of Walter’s presentation templates, regardless if users are viewing or actively working on the project simultaneously, contributing to quick turnaround time for edits. 

Executives no longer need to download decks, update software to view items or search for attachments in lengthy email chains, which produces  unnecessary delays for the team. Now they can simply click and view projects with ease, regardless if they have access to the Visme workspace. 

"The sharing option has been well used across the entire department." Walter states, "Sometimes we’ll share with the executives of the team, but give them the option to view and not edit. Turning on and off permissions helps to keep things in place."

Every Visme project has user permissions that the creator or workspace admin can control. You can restrict specific people in your workspace from viewing projects and allow users to view-only, edit or comment directly on projects. Lastly, you can make projects password protected. 

These options apply to individual users or you can grant access to an entire group of users from your team. The admin of your Visme workspace can set up these groups and assign user roles in the "Manage My Team" area. This allows for sharing of projects with multiple users, ensuring that everyone who needs access is included and only those on a need-to-know basis are informed. 

For projects shared with internal stakeholders or their executive leadership team, links have aided Bridget and the team in cutting down unnecessary bottlenecks that traditional document sharing would incur. 

"We use Visme to showcase the work we're doing to our executive leadership team to ensure it has their approval. Visme makes it very easy to share presentations through links that anyone can access. It is so valuable to us and a great feature."

After final edits and changes are made, the sales team shares the presentation with the prospective partner. The team then uses Visme’s analytics to their advantage once the presentation has been viewed. 

Any Visme project shared as a link that has been published using the Share button in the editor offers analytics for the user to track. Users can see data like:

• The average time is how long a visitor spends on your projects. 
• What percentage of your projects were 100% viewed by all the visitors?
• How many views and unique visitors does your project have?
• And more.

Users can export the data from project analytics as CSV and filter the data by date range as needed.

Bridget and the team use analytics to learn more about their prospective and current clients. It allows them to understand what slides or sections their client values the most. This information aids them with future decisions on designs, layouts, copy or point of contact. 

"Analytics is definitely something that is a feature that we really value in business; being able to know who's watching or what they're going through our presentations, where they've spent their time, what might have picked their interest more than other things. And just having that data to help continue the conversations is very helpful."

Analytics also enables the team to learn ahead of time how to navigate conversations with clients for a more productive outcome by leaning into areas they might be more interested in or showcasing more content aligned with their interests. 

Visme Feature Favorites 

While designing, Walter uses one of his favorite features, Visme Shortcuts. "When I'm working on a project, and I need to speed things up a bit, I use Visme shortcuts. Rather than constantly scrolling to find what I need, I can use the Shortcut command and find it quickly." 

But Visme shortcuts go beyond the copy and paste or duplicating slides. Simply click "/" to access shortcuts and instantly provide access to images, text or graphics that you would otherwise have to find manually. Plus, when you use shortcuts to search for a specific item and select the "Help" option, you'll automatically be given help options directly related to your current search. 

Additionally, Walter is reassured that regardless of how many high-quality images or photos are added or presented in their projects, Visme's response time to upload is fast and efficient. Visme supplies reliable storage space for clients and a team of developers to maintain it. 

"When we share our presentations to prospecting partners, we don't have to worry about elements presented in low quality. Even the other day, a presentation was on a giant screen, and the feedback from the team, and client, was that it looked great. For the ability to have elements maintain quality no matter where it’s presented, is important to us," Walter remarks.   

How Florida's Panthers Finds Success with Visme

Bridget and her team are always trying to connect with new brands and reach out to prospective companies or partners. Along the way, they found that one particular brand they wanted to work with wasn’t interested in conversing with them. 

But this didn’t deter them. In fact, the team went straight into Visme and spent time crafting a winning proposal and presentation, using Visme’s functionality to the fullest, to help visualize their storytelling methods, highlight their best work and showcase why and how the Florida Panthers outshine their competition. 

After the proposal and presentation were presented, the client’s demeanor changed, and they were ready to discuss how the two brands could work together. “They specifically called out that they wanted to continue the conversation due to the quality of our presentation. They could see the level of care, detail and time put into it. Which helped showcase the level of craftsmanship and professionalism our organization offers.” 

After this brand  discussed details with the team, the presentation not only opened the doors for discussion, but led to closing a deal with this new corporate partner for the company. “It made us all feel really proud of the work and thankful that Visme helped us to tell these stories,” Bridget states. 

“During the closing call, they consistently referred to the materials we provided them and pointed out the storytelling and how it stood out against what they had seen previously.”

By combining Visme with the team's skills and storytelling techniques, Bridget and her company have progressively improved their work over time. "With Visme, we see that the quality of our proposals or presentations are so much better than before. Even in the simplest ways, it's helped us to elevate our content. It's been tremendously helpful." 

As the team looks back on their earlier work in Visme, the quality of their work may have drastically transformed but still maintained a consistent brand look because of their ability to keep their brand guidelines directly in Visme. The team is excited to see what new ways they can continue to grow with Visme.

Your Turn

With Visme, you can streamline your content creation platform for a more robust and productive output, encourage collaboration, onboard employees seamlessly and create content that starts conversations with potential clients. Whatever your needs are, try Visme to see what solution it can provide your team and clients.

With intuitive tools and templates, and so much more, you can elevate how your brand tackles what lies ahead. Request a demo or give Visme a free test run.