Sales presentations that achieve your aims

Powerpoint presentations have long been a double-edged sword. Strong sales presentations using decent Powerpoint design can be a real asset to a company. A bad presentation, put together by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, can be a liability.

One of the difficulties with Powerpoint, as well as its advantage, is that it is so easy to use. Without any experience, someone with basic computer literacy can throw together a slideshow without too much trouble. It’s extremely powerful, allowing you to embed all kinds of different graphics, movies, audio and other effects. So much is built in that a speaker intending to make a good impression can really go to town, incorporating as many as possible of its bells and whistles.

This, however, is often a fatal mistake. Powerpoint design is a fairly tricky art. Like any audio-visual medium, doing it well is hard. Just because you can put together a poster with desktop publishing software, or a home movie with a video camera, doesn’t mean that the result will convince the audience.

Worse, Powerpoint is so popular in the business world that there is often the expectation that it will be used – both on the part of the audience and the speaker. That means that presentations can be thrown together solely to fulfil that expectation. Whilst well-designed Powerpoint presentations can add a whole other dimension to a speech, giving complementary information and appealing to listeners for whom the spoken word isn’t a natural medium, a shoddy presentation will put people off. Put another way, not having a Powerpoint presentation is better than having a bad one. This can hamstring otherwise capable speakers, because they find that the slideshow actually detracts from what they are saying. This is never more the case when it simply follows the material verbatim – a mistake that is all too common.

The purpose of sales presentations is to secure a deal. Good Powerpoint design can help you with this; bad Powerpoint design can end up losing you the bid. If you are in any doubt, compare a few successful presentations – yours or other companies’ – with presentations that haven’t gone so well. What has been the difference? Where Powerpoint adds to clear and effective communication, it is an asset. Where is makes things more complicated and distracting, it’s best left out. The trick is knowing how to do it properly, every time.

Please visit http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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