Category: Sales

Presentation Design Agency – Used to Best effect…

Annie

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.

Please visit http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/

Improve your sales presentations with Powerpoint design

John

I had been doing sales presentations for years when my boss took me to one side and started to question why my performance was not as strong as the rest of the team’s.  He asked me to give him one of my standard Powerpoint presentations, to give him a better sense of what I was doing in my meetings.  He wasn’t totally unimpressed by my efforts, but he thought that my use of Powerpoint design could do with being updated.  I hadn’t been on a course for a good few years and had been concentrating on the content of my presentations at the expense of the style, which is more important than I realised.

My boss sent me on a brief course which I found really useful.  It really made me aware of all the tools in the program that enable you to really make your presentation into a multimedia experience that is less at risk of boring the audience to tears.  I found it really useful thinking a bit more in depth about the visual element of my presentation.  I had always included pictures, but the course flagged up how carefully these need to be considered.  Rather than picking a vaguely suitable picture to go with a statistic, it is more effective to use a pie chart or bar graph that properly reinforces the statistic.

The course also emphasised that, while Powerpoint design does allow for very technical and detailed slides, simplicity remains very important.  As the audience only sees each slide for a number of seconds, a hectic page is unlikely to make an impression and convey all the information on it.  The old rule that audiences can take in three points at a time is worth remembering, and extra elements such as video content should be viewed in context of this.  I was glad that the team at the training course also worked with me on my existing presentations, looking at how I could improve the effectiveness of the message I wanted to convey.  General advice is always useful, but I really felt that I got value for money when I was able to see how much better my new presentation was than the one I would traditionally give.

When I got back to the office I was actually quite excited about showing my boss my new Powerpoint presentations!  He agreed with me that they did a much better job at getting my point across, and were more entertaining as well.  My next sales presentations went quite well, as I was much more confident about my new presentations, I think this improved my confidence and therefore my presentation style.  A bit of Powerpoint design training certainly went a long way.

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

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Bid support: is it worth spending money on help?

Annie

Business proposal writing does not come easily to everyone, even professionals with a natural gift for selling.  Constructing a complex bid for a client is such a key part of modern working life, that companies are increasingly choosing to employ consultants to ensure that their proposals are as effective as can be.  In addition, many people are surprised at how educational sales presentation training can be.  A consultant with lots of experience providing bid support to different companies will really have the insight to help you look at how you can adapt your style to outperform the competition in your field.

Many sales teams find that they are stuck in a rut, having been creating business proposals in the same way for ages, with varying degrees of success.  If you are pitching to similar clients year after year, then it is often a good idea to surprise them with the kind of proposal they may not expect from your business, so that they regard you as a firm with the capacity to grow and develop; after all, the client is likely to want to work with a firm that is able to think creatively about its own projects.  This is where an outside opinion can be invaluable; it can be almost impossible for people in a business to challenge old ways of thinking that have been ingrained in a company for years.

Indeed, winning an important bit of work is not necessarily a matter of changing your approach to constructing the proposal itself, but about how you present it in the short time you have with the client.  It may be a sad thing, but these days, presentation is crucial.  People seem to have less and less time on their hands, and will not do you the service of listening attentively to every word of your carefully written bid.  This is why it is important to make sure you can convey the key points in the first minute – something which is easy to do once you think about it, but some teams need a little help to make sure this is achieved.

There is no reason to feel inadequate for asking for bid support or some professional help with your business proposal writing.  Rather, your boss is likely to be impressed that you are so keen to improve your skills.  He or she may decide that your entire team could do with some sales presentation training, and you might be the one who takes the credit for the business success that it creates.

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

http://www.salesengine.co.uk/

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