How to Build a Dealer Deck From Furniture Connect
Build a dealer deck from your catalog in four steps: name the audience, review the slides, request changes and export an editable PowerPoint.
A dealer deck in the US, a range presentation in the UK: the same document, a set of slides showing a selection of your range to one account, with the right finishes, images and prices for that account. Here is how one gets built from the catalog in Furniture Connect, step by step, and what stays your job.
1. Ask for it, for a named audience
Open the agent at Home and ask for a presentation for a specific audience: a named dealer, a buyer at a retailer, a trade show. Say what the selection should cover. "Build a presentation of the outdoor seating range for [dealer], in oak and painted finishes, showing the trade price field and lead times" is the level of detail that works. Naming the dealer tells the agent who it's for; it doesn't tell it which finishes they stock or which price basis they're on. You supply those, from your account records or from what you know.
The agent draws on your product information and imagery, and on the colors, fonts and logo saved in your branding settings [1]. Set and review that branding once in Settings, then use it as the starting point for each presentation [2].
2. Review the slides in the platform
Before anything is exported, the slides appear in the platform for review [1]. This is the step that replaces most of the checking a rep normally does on a deck built from last season's file. The product names, images, finish options and prices on the slides were read from the catalog when the deck was built, so they're as current as the record. Still check them: the right data can be selected or presented wrongly, and a wrong price on the record is a wrong price on the slide.
Look at four things: is the selection right for this account, are the finishes and variants the ones you asked for, are the images the right colorways, and is the pricing field the one this account should see.
3. Ask for changes
Anything you'd change, you ask for. Swap a product, drop a slide, add the availability table, show the sideboard in walnut instead of oak, change the wording of the introduction for this dealer. The agent revises and you review again [1].
Two kinds of change are worth separating. A change to the selection or the wording is a presentation change, and the agent makes it. A change to the product itself, a wrong dimension or an old price, is a catalog change: fix it on the product record, then ask the agent to revise or rebuild this deck so it picks up the change. A deck already built is a snapshot of the record at that moment; the correction reaches future decks because they're built from the corrected record. The deck is only as right as the record it was built from.
4. Export an editable PowerPoint
Download the .pptx. Text, images, shapes and tables are editable, and the file opens in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides [1]. Make the final edits yourself if you want to, or send it to a colleague before the meeting.
That is the sequence: ask for a named audience, review, change, export. The product information and imagery come from the catalog rather than being assembled again for each deck. The checking still matters.
What goes in a deck
The example on the product page is an outdoor seating pack: the collection in a lifestyle setting, finish options, the individual pieces, package pricing and availability tables [1]. In practice the content is whatever your catalog holds for the products you select: names, descriptions, dimensions, finishes and fabrics, the imagery attached to each product and variant, and the price fields you choose to show. What a complete deck looks like is covered in what goes into a range presentation from the catalog.
What stays your job
The selection: which products this account should see, and in which finishes. The pricing basis: which price field this account gets. The story: why this range, for this dealer, now. And the judgment on the output: the agent builds from your data, and you check that the data is right before the deck leaves the building.
What the catalog does is let each new deck be built from the record as it stands, in your branding, without retyping. What it doesn't do is know your dealer: their finishes, their terms, their agreed prices. That's still you.
When the deck needs to be a quote
A presentation shows the range. A quote prices it, line by line, for an order. If the conversation moves from "show me the range" to "price me these twelve pieces for two stores", that is a different output, built by the agent as a priced, branded PDF with an Excel working file alongside [3]. When to make that switch is the subject of from deck to quote.
Try it on the next meeting
Pick the next dealer meeting in the diary. Ask the agent for a presentation for that account, review it, change one thing, export it. Compare it with how long the last one took. For the first three decks worth building, see your first week: the three decks to build first. For the whole picture of selling from the catalog, see selling from the catalog.
