Powerpoint presentations have long been a double-edged sword. Competent sales presentations using decent powerpoint design can be a real asset to a company. A low-quality 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 background, 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 planning 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 hopeless mistake. Powerpoint design is a fairly tricky art. Like any audio-visual medium, doing it well is not as easy as it looks. 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 product 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 just 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 bad presentation will put people off. Put another way, not having a Powerpoint presentation is better than having a bad one. This can hamstring otherwise good 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 win 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 understanding how to do it properly, every time.
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