Powerpoint presentations – the key to of sales pitches
I had been giving 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 show 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 recommended 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 short 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 put in pictures, but the course flagged up how carefully these need to be thought about. 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 actually reinforces the statistic.
The course also emphasised that, while Powerpoint design does allow for quite technical and detailed slides, simplicity remains very important. As the audience only sees each slide for a number of seconds, a busy 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 information such as video content should be viewed in context of this. I was pleased 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 good, 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.
http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/