In the second part of our sales presentation series, we bring you advice on the process of creating a presentation. Contributions have been drawn from our own consultants and other experts in sales, marketing and presentations from around the web.

Don’t Act at the Last Minute

In Pitching to Win, David Kean bemoans the amateurism of the new business pitch – ‘we agree who is going to say what, and make last-minute amendments to the presentation on our journey to the client’s offices … Doing everything at the last minute is our disease. It is the work of the amateur’.  The answer? Plan the process, prepare and practice thoroughly, and treat pitch presentations as critical, and not just something to fit in around the day jobs.

Background Knowledge

Prepare by doing your homework – before you get face-to-face to deliver your sales presentation. In How to Win a Pitch, Joey Asher suggests the following line – ‘”to make sure that your presentation shows you just how we can help, we’d like to spend a little time chatting with a few people at your firm before we come. Is that okay?”‘ If you can’t get genuine inside information, make an educated guess, using common sense, and the insights of your friends and colleagues.

Seeking Advice

Don’t be afraid to seek help when pitching for new business. As Lee Bowman writes in the now out-of-print High Impact Presentations – ‘the moment that a company knows it is going to be pitching for a piece of business, it should start planning the presentation, and taking whatever professional advice it feels is necessary… If the right advice is given at the beginning of the process, a great deal of pressure can be taken off the key players, and a lot of time can be saved.’

Start on Paper

One of the biggest mistakes people make when preparing presentations is in “going digital” too early. In other words, many people simply type slide headings and bullet points directly into PowerPoint without ever stepping back to ask important questions about the audience or about their own objectives. Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen recommends “going analogue” to write a presentation; don’t make the mistake of opening PowerPoint and writing a presentation directly onto slides. Instead, use paper and pen, whiteboards, or Post-Its to “brainstorm, explore ideas, make lists, and generally sketch out… ideas”. In this analogue stage, two of the most important questions to have in mind are “What is your core message?” and “Why does this matter?”

Communication Preferences

Although the idea that different individuals have different learning styles might be over-baked, some people do prefer to read, others to listen; and some love detail, while others focus on the big picture. For some sales presentations, it is possible to find out in advance what the communication preferences of the most important audience members are. In this case, suggests Andrew Abela this should be done, and the presentation tweaked accordingly.

Practise

Practise. Lots. Oliver Adria includes in his blog ReThink Presentations a quote from the film Shine, which encourages a student practising piano to learn the notes, so that he can forget all about them.If you practise enough that you know your presentation back to front and inside out, you don’t have to be constantly worrying about what will come next, and you can focus on making sure you present your material well.

Keep Improving

Don’t expect perfection immediately. Tony Ramos demonstrates this in his post, Give Me Something to Hate: Delivering a first draft of a presentation is rarely a good idea. Don’t just use what you have: constantly reconsider to see if you can improve.

Follow-Up

After a pitch presentation has been delivered, David Kean then sees two more phases of work. Follow-up involves answering questions in more detail, getting feedback from supporters and acting on it, generating and sharing additional ideas, and generally just not giving up. Feedback should be sought whether one wins or loses – but after a loss, wait a few weeks, when feedback might be more open, and ‘the first cracks in their new relationship may have begun to show’.

The good news is that m62 is here to help. We know sales presentations – after all, we’ve created 1000s of them. Here, we bring you great tips from our own consultants, as well as other sales, marketing, and presentation experts. We’ve reproduced all of these tips for you in a series of articles split into five different aspects: content; planning and process; format and structure; design; delivery and technique.

The first part of our series contains tips on messaging and content.

Concrete Details

Make sure that your presentation brings your points to life, rather than simply presenting abstract concepts. If making a sales presentation, make sure that you offer proof. As Chip and Dan Heath note in their pamphlet ‘Making Presentations that Stick‘ – “The number one mistake we’ve observed in presentations – and there is no close second – is that the message is too abstract. The presenter offers concepts and conclusions but not evidence. He talks at a high level about the big picture, but gives no concrete details that might make the big picture understandable and plausible.”

Focus on Solutions

In a credentials presentation, says author Joey Asher, don’t talk directly about credentials, or too much about your own company. “Instead, your credentials will be apparent as you talk about your solution, and how you’ve implemented similar solutions for other clients. You focus your presentation solely on what the client really cares about – a solution to her business problem.”

Value Proposition for Structure

Less is more. At m62 we advise our clients to structure their sales presentations into five parts or fewer. Use benefit statements to form a value proposition, and use the value proposition for structure. Giving five strong answers to the question ‘Why Us?’ is far more powerful, and memorable, than listing 100s of benefits that nobody can prioritise or remember.

Bring Solution to Life

In Fire Them Up, best-selling author Carmine Gallo suggests focusing on the solution that your service delivers, and recommends bringing to life how this solution will help – “Tell your listeners why you’re excited about your product, share a vivid vision of the future that your product makes possible, and be specific about how your product will help them succeed in business”. He reminds us of the well-known adage that ‘nobody wants a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole’ – that is, in B2B sales, people want solutions, not just products.

Memorable Moments

Duarte Design in California (the folks behind Slide:ology) teach presenters to use ‘S.T.A.R Moments™. S.T.A.R. stands for “Something They’ll Always Remember” and S.T.A.R. Moments refer to the memorable moments in a presentation that stick in the minds of your audience long after the presentation is over.’ We’ve mentioned it before on this website, because we love the clip, but a great example of this is Bill Gates releasing a jar of mosquitoes into a crowded auditorium while talking about Malaria. People remember that kind of stunt, and if it’s connected to your message, they remember your message too.

Benefits not Features

Remember that successful sales presentations can’t simply list product features, but must make the connection to benefits that actually help the audience. As Jerry Weissman writes in Presenting to Win ‘A feature is a fact or quality about you or your company, the products you sell, or the idea you’re advocating. By contrast, a Benefit is how that fact or quality will help your audience. When you seek to persuade, it’s never enough to present the Features of what you’re selling; every Feature must always be translated into a Benefit.’

Stories and Emotion

‘People buy on emotion, and justify with fact’ says Bert Decker, CEO of Decker Communications. Stories are ‘emotionally connecting’, ‘move people’, ‘give third party credibility, and are memorable. Sales people should make use of stories in presentations, because stories help presenters to connect, and ‘connection trumps everything’.

Allude to Competitor Weaknesses

Many companies feel uncomfortable in directly attacking competitors in their sales presentations. The alternative is to use a technique called ghosting. In ghosting, the aim is to allude to the weaknesses of competitors without specifically mentioning them. Explain why a certain feature is important, allude to the risk of not having that feature (without openly mentioning a competitor), and then present your own strengths in that area.

Clear Objectives

Many presentations are prepared and delivered with no clear objectives in mind. Yet, if a presentation isn’t trying to achieve anything in particular, it risks achieving nothing. Andrew Abela, author of Advanced Presentations by Design, suggests creating a table, and listing what the audience think now, and what the presenter wants them to think after the presentation; and what the audience do now, and what the presenter wants them to do after the presentation. This framework ensures that presentations are given for a purpose.

Handouts for Detail

Sales people need to convince emotionally and rationally, and some of the rational sale can be achieved using detailed handouts, as Seth Godin argues – ‘the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.’

Case Studies for Social Proof

As Chris Atherton, writer of the blog Finite Attention, affirms, sales people really need to use case studies. Show your audience how other clients have benefited from your product or service. This immediately poses the question, “What would this do for me?” This approach is interesting, affirming, and involves your audience.

Understand Prospects

And finally, an audience needs to feel important. As recommend by Sue Hershowitz, whose blog SpeakerSue provides resources for sales skills, you should ‘Love your prospects.’ Take the time to get to know them. Do the research. Most importantly, let them know that you appreciate them. Show them that you understand; that their problems matter to you; and that you offer a solution that is tailored to helping them in the best way possible.

See a problem?

Flexibility in front of an audience and conformity within a company are two age-old adversaries that seemingly cannot co-exist. Here, we discuss the reasons for, and limitations of, flexibility and control in company presentations, and offer some advice on what works.

Management Control: The battle for consistency

Managerial staff in every department have different reasons for enforcing complete consistency in their company presentation:

• CEO: “I want control over what my staff deliver.”
• Marketing director: “I want to make sure my staff are exhibiting consistency of brand and message.”
• Compliance officer: “Certain slides need to be included as a legal requirement. If they are deleted, the company is at risk.”
• Sales manager: “I know more about sales than many of my staff – so I want them to use the slides I suggest.”

Having one single company presentation is about making sure that everything is done according to company guidelines – and to the best possible standard. Building a company presentation from the top down ensures that quality and consistency are positively managed.

Brand consistency is important: strong brands create emotional bonds with customers, adding significant value for companies. A standard company presentation can ensure that all presenters use the same slides and deliver the same message.

The Challenges

A generic company presentation, unless it is specifically designed to do so, may not adapt well to all situations. Every audience is different, and an audience that is not interested in what the presenter has to say will not be fully engaged with the presentation.

An audience may not do what you expect it to, and it can be useful to use tools that allow changes to be made instantly in reaction to an audience’s response.

Presenter’s Discretion: Different audience, different presentation

Although presenters in the field may well accept and understand the reasons for consistency and control of their company presentation, they most likely have questions and doubts about an approach that limits their discretion:

• “I’m the one presenting – shouldn’t I be able to pick what goes in to the presentation?”
• “I never know exactly what an audience wants to hear until I’m there. What happens if they decide they only want to see three slides?”
• “There’s lots of boring information in this presentation – surely the audience would prefer me to deliver only what is interesting?”

Every audience and every situation is different. Often, it is impossible to know what an audience will want until the presentation has already begun. Sales presentations need to be kept fluid, with presenters adjusting and adapting to each situation that arises. By trusting presenters to pick their own material, the chances of presenting material that is relevant to each audience might well increase.

The Challenges

• It is not always useful for every presenter to produce and adapt his or her own presentations. A company does need consistency, and this will not occur if every presenter acts individually.
• Not all presenters will be great at preparing elegant, well-structured PowerPoint decks. Leaving those in the field to mix-and-match slides can have awful consequences.
• Management has no control over what is being conveyed. This means that incorrect information could be given out, while the points that should be made (such as legal requirements) aren’t delivered.
• Presenters may end up presenting only the material they are most comfortable with – but not necessarily the material they ought to present.

Is there a Solution?

There is no perfect solution, but there are steps that can be taken that should greatly improve the situation. A balance should be found between company control and presenter freedom. The appropriate balance depends greatly on the company culture, the level of training that presenters have had, the market in which a company operates, and the strength and approach of the company’s brand. Here are some tips that we suggest:

Ensure your sales team want to use your slides. If slides consist of mainly text, it is too easy (and tempting!) for presenters to adapt existing slides or insert new ones. If you have slides that are good enough that no one in your team would be able to replicate them to the same standard, you reduce the likelihood of such an attempt.

Produce branded PowerPoint templates. It is easy to convince presenters to use the same template to ensure brand consistency. If anything, it is more convenient for them.

Involve your sales team in the decisions. Ensuring everyone delivers the same message can be difficult, but having staff contribute to writing presentations that they will have to deliver is a positive step. Involvement and engagement leads to buy-in.

Share best practice. Get salespeople to send in their best slides, enhance and edit as necessary, and then allow everyone to benefit by including these slides in your company presentation. Make everyone’s best ideas visible – and share them around!

Use interactive presentations that presenters will be able to adapt as they go, according to what the audience wants to hear. Use hyperlinks, live graphs and audience response tools to make each presentation unique – while built from a core deck of PowerPoint slides.

Train your sales team. Ensure that sales people know the best way to present each slide in your company presentation – and, more importantly, why this is the best way. People are much more likely to follow rules if they understand the reasoning behind them.

Consider using software to deliver the right slides to presenters. Slide library software can also force compliance where this is essential – so that legal disclaimers must be used, for example.

Company presentations involve a certain tension between consistency and control, and flexibility. By involving presenters in the process of identifying and choosing the strongest messages, designing attractive and effective slides, allowing a certain amount of interactivity, and providing training to presenters, companies can resolve this tension in the most successful way.

Fast-forward ten years to business school, and almost without fail, every lecturer used slides. PowerPoint had become ubiquitous. Most slides were made up of lines of text, with font sizes as low as six points. Some lecturers used the university template, others plain white or blue. Clip art was widely abused. Nearly all lecturers spent hours either reading sides aloud, or attempting not to read slides aloud by saying the same stuff that was written on the slides in a much less efficient way.

My fellow students and I were reduced to being spoon-fed, and long parts of each lecture became enormously boring and unhelpful. Worse, everybody knew that this would be the case well in advance. Teachers weren’t teaching effectively, students weren’t learning effectively, and everybody knew it. Strength in numbers ensured that lecturers all felt safe continuing to read their bullet points aloud.

One of our team was invited to present at Surrey University recently, as part of a programme of enrichment activities. Shortly afterwards, we received the following message from a student who attended the session:

I recently attended a “killer presentations” session taken by Alex Hardy at the University of Surrey. I would just like to say thank you for the advice and tips given to me during that time. I learnt a tremendous amount during the one hour that Alex presented and after having a brief look around your website, I can safely say that I will learn a great deal more in the future. This sort of information and advice should be provided to universities up and down the country. In the two lectures I sat in today, I could not believe the lack of effort put into the slides. A brief look at this website (or indeed a training session) would ensure lecturers transformed the learning experience to facilitate a better transfer of knowledge.

This got us to thinking: Why do educated people present in such a thoughtless way? What mistakes are made in the use of PowerPoint in university, and what should lecturers do instead?

Most lecturers (in our completely unscientific study based on asking recent graduates in the office to ask their friends) use slides for nearly all of their material, make these slides full of bullet points, and then distribute these text-heavy slides as handouts. This creates three fundamental problems:

1. If slides make sense without the presenter, then during the session the lecturer is redundant. Many presenters try to get around this problem by adding additional material or attempting to explain the material on the slides – but students will tend to disengage, feeling they can already see the key information. Besides, it is impossible to read and listen at the same time, so audience members simply ‘block out’ the lecturer in order to focus on reading the slides. It’s really hard to present self-explanatory slides well.
2. An opportunity to use genuine visual aids is missed, and a chance to actually teach goes missing. If students come to lectures to read abbreviated text books, then those lectures are a waste of time.
3. As any student will tell you, if the handouts contain the information that will be presented in a self-explanatory and unembellished form, there’s really not much point attending the lecture. Pick up or download the slides, and then go do something else instead.

If reading slides aloud is so ineffective in teaching, how has the technique become so widespread? Why have lecturers everywhere adopted a technique that students recognise as ineffective? Why copy an approach that doesn’t work? After all, most lecturers have attended presentations given by others, and been utterly bored. We would postulate that there are a few factors:

1. Using the latest technology makes presenters seem up-to-date and avoiding it risks giving the impression of being old-fashioned;
2. Everybody else is doing it. For those teaching who aren’t experts in pedagogy it is easy to just copy what everyone else is doing;
3. Using visual aids that can be re-used year after year reduces overall effort;
4. Delivering a lecture by reading slides seems easy – the lecturer doesn’t need to think too hard about what to say;
5. When expected to produce handouts, using text-heavy slides reduces overall effort;
6. Anybody can do it. Typing into PowerPoint is extremely easy.

The accessibility of PowerPoint has caused problems. Most people can draw diagrams – however messy – onto acetate or a blackboard. Switch to PowerPoint and these same people – experts in something other than graphic design or software – no longer have the ability to create diagrams. PowerPoint certainly doesn’t force people to use bullet points (check out these PowerPoint slides), but doing something else does requires an investment of time and effort.

So, what should a university lecturer interested in teaching effectively actually do, given that they are unlikely to have time or inclination to master presentation software? With no budget, but a vague wish to stop being hated by students, what is the best way to use visual aids?

1. Visuals should help students to understand material. Find helpful visual concepts – a timeline, process, map, matrix or graph – and create simple PowerPoint diagrams. If a visual aid doesn’t help the audience to understand material, what is it for?
2. Don’t worry about slide count. Be prepared to use more slides, but with less content on each slide. Remember because the slides won’t be printed as handouts, they won’t waste paper.
3. Use simple graphs and charts. Graphs for projection should be clean, and build. Check out our tutorials on creating PowerPoint graphs.
4. Show photographs. Not just stock photography, but photos taken specifically to demonstrate a point or illustrate issues.
5. Use video clips. Shooting video is relatively easy nowadays, and interviewing people can demonstrate points forcibly (e.g. Google ask what is a browser?)
6. Show quotes and definitions as slides, but present them by saying nothing and letting the audience read for themselves. Don’t read aloud when the audience are reading for themselves.
7. Don’t feel it’s necessary to use visual aids for all material. Prioritise the areas where visuals will most help – definitions of concepts, relationships, presentation structure and comparisons, examples, and for summary. Better to have a few helpful slides than dozens of pointless slides.
8. Use the whiteboard. Not everything needs to be prepared in PowerPoint in advance, and drawing “live” on a whiteboard can be engaging for students.
9. Use a tool like Papershow to annotate slides in real-time.
10. Produce handouts in Word, not PowerPoint. Because slides shouldn’t make sense without a presenter, but handouts should, the same material can’t be reused effectively. Consider recording narration if distributing slides to students.

Remember, PowerPoint is not the enemy – but nor should it be abused. Use the whiteboard, use acetates, use video clips and use PowerPoint. But do not present self-explanatory slides.

Want to see how academic slides could be improved? Submit some lecture slides to our PowerPoint clinic, and we’ll transform a selection of those we receive, free of charge. We’ll emphasise approaches and techniques that are accessible for those without a studio of PowerPoint designers to rely on. This one is for lecturers only – no class assessments please. (We’ve tried that before, and most lecturers mark presentations down if they don’t have enough text. Honestly.)

The Art of Visualisation – Further Examples

As we discussed last time in our article ‘The Art Of Visualisation’,  the idea of using images, diagrams and animation can be a powerful way to more effectively communicate messages within a presentation. This article looks at three further examples of how messages can be communicated in an engaging, memorable and effective way using visualisation as the cornerstone to achieve this.

Visualisation Example Diagram

This visualisation demonstrates the power of using a diagram in a presentation rather than text and bullet points.

Visualisation Example Timeline

This example reveals how events over time can be more effectively displayed in a timeline format.

Visualisation Example Bar Chart.

This slide uses a bar chart to demonstrate how data can be presented more effectively

Effective Presentation

As before, by combining a core message, with simple (but not necessarily basic) diagrams built up with animation, presentations and concepts can be better understood by your audience and more memorable for longer periods.

Cut down on the company overview

Most sales presentations talk in great detail about the company’s history, locations, values, mission, and even diversity policy. Most of the time, for most of this content, nobody cares. Say enough to build credibility and establish empathy, but no more.

Decide which benefits are most powerful, and relegate the others

Have trouble deciding which of the dozen or more benefits you offer is the most important? The common approach is to just list all of them and hope that some of them resonate with your audience. The problem, of course, is that by saying too much you overload your audience and most of your message is forgotten. Which parts are forgotten? That depends – each audience member may remember your value proposition as something different. Great for causing confusion, awful for sales.

Move the ‘Summary of Benefits’ slide from the end to near the start

There is little more stupid when it comes to sales presentations than only talking in terms of benefits at the end of a presentation when the audience are already bored. Maximum attention levels are often after about three or four minutes – so start talking about benefits then.

This short video tutorial delves into the theory behind creating a slide that summarises the key benefits of your product or service, and how it can be used to create a structure to your slides that will help you to deliver a compelling presentation.

Sixty slides of text is too much detail

If your sales presentation usually lasts more than an hour, your prospects might wish they never met you. Often, information can be cut without being missed. When presenting a particularly complex product, or if you are expected to present for a long time, consider using multiple presentations and presenters, or hyperlinks to present in a non-linear way. This keeps the audience focused, and allows your prospects to set some of the agenda.

Let the audience know where you are in the presentation

Ever been reading a book and flicked to the back to see how many pages you have left? How would you feel if once you started reading you had no way of finding out how long was left? Without an agenda slide, and reference to the agenda during the presentation, that’s what being an audience member is like.

Reconsider the slides full of technical specifications

Technical details are often important when selling. But don’t fall into the trap of including every technical detail. Eliminate the details that are no different from competitors (unless you need to persaude the audience that you have finally managed to catch up). Instead, produce a product specification sheet, and hand this out. Then, try to bring the remaining specifications to life in your presentation. If you have an important technical advantage, what does this mean in practice? Compare directly to competitors (named or ghosted), and illustrate the benefits in real-life settings. Make something that’s hard to destroy? Take a video showing it working after being run-over by a truck. Think Steve Jobs, the MacBookAir, and an office envelope.

Listing all your products is not the same as selling solutions

Don’t just present a few slides on each product you offer. If you want to sell solutions, understand the problem that you can solve, and then present one integrated view of the solution you offer. Finding slides from five different product presentations and putting them into one jumble of a presentation isn’t the same as presenting a solution.

Eliminate bullet points

We say it all the time, because it’s true. Bullet points don’t work. The audience read the text, and ignore the presenter – they can’t listen and read at the same time. It’s the reason why we stop and look up when somebody disturbs us reading a good book. Six bullet points per slide on your current sales presentation? Find the visuals that help you explain the same points. Otherwise your audience will just read your slides but ignore you presenting.

Think about when to open the laptop

Some sales people “show up and throw up”. That’s to say they get face-to-face with a prospect, open the laptop, and present everything that they have to say without stopping to find out anything about the specific needs or interests of the audience. Psychologically this may be easy to do – but it isn’t effective. Instead, think of your sales presentation as just one part of a broader conversation, and consider making the presentation interactive to ensure that you address the interests and concerns of each audience.

Need help in improving your sales presentation? Contact m62 – we would be happy to help.

Audience Attention Levels

It is commonly assumed that audiences pay maximum attention at the start of a presentation, and that attention levels decline steadily until after a certain point most audience members have simply switched off. This isn’t quite true however – which dictates optimal sales presentation structure. At first, audiences are typically focused on what they were doing before the presentation, and only partially engaged. The first few minutes of a presentation are spent considering whether the presenter is worth listening to, or whether the time would be better spent day-dreaming, checking email, or writing a novel. Most audience members have wasted too many days of their lives listening to mindless presentations to simply assume that a presenter deserves attention.

The fact that audience members don’t automatically pay maximum attention at the start of a presentation guides how sales presentation introductions should be approached. Go in assuming that the audience will be paying attention from the start and the audience might miss your key points. Leave your best content until last and the audience might have nodded off to sleep before you get to it.

What to do at the Start of a Presentation

How to start a presentation will depend greatly on what you are trying to achieve with your presentation, and of course on what kind of presentation you are delivering. Even within a single type of presentation – sales presentations – there are a number of different approaches to the start of a presentation.

Build Credibility

Audience members decide early on whether a presenter is worth listening to. Most enlightened presenters understand that boring the audience with dozens of slides about the presenter’s company is inappropriate. Yet, a couple of slides that demonstrate that a company has the right experience can put the audience into a constructive frame of mind – seeking to find ways to use what the presenter is offering, rather than seeking to find holes in your arguments.

Encourage Interaction

If audience attention levels don’t start at their maximum, that isn’t to say that it is impossible to quickly raise them. One way to start a presentation is with a question or challenge for the audience. By presenting a well-judged puzzle and asking the audience to solve it, attention levels can quickly be raised. Anything too hard or too easy and the audience may disengage though, so be careful.

Demonstrate Empathy

Prospects are usually looking for somebody who understands the challenges they face, and who can offer a solution to these problems. So, draw the audience in by presenting an outline of the issues they face to show that you have understood. Then, spend the rest of the presentation – after this introduction – showing how you can solve the problems you understand the audience to have. The key issue here is to make sure that you actually talk to the audience’s challenges; if the audience don’t recognise themselves in your portrayal, then you won’t succeed in displaying empathy.

Force Attention

High impact animation sequences can start presentations with a bang. Add music, video, interesting pictures, and a good script, and the audience are drawn to a presentation like moths to a flame. But, remember; while grabbing the audience’s attention may be easy, keeping it is hard. Shiny animations will draw an audience in, but without relevant content in the rest of the presentation, they are wasted.

Abolish Pre-Conceived Ideas and Reframe Evaluation Criteria

When audience members think they understand an issue, or know what a presenter is going to say, they don’t always bother to listen. Even when they do pay attention, it’s all-too-easy to fall into the trap of hearing what one expects. Abolishing pre-conceived ideas at the start of a presentation isn’t easy – and is often best done in conjunction with techniques that force attention. Try being upfront, and acknowledge that you know what the audience are thinking. Then, give clear examples of facts that clearly contradict the popular misconception. To reframe evaluation criteria, outline what you think the audience are looking for, and then explain why they are looking for the wrong thing, and what they ought to be looking for instead. You don’t have to change audience members’ minds at the start of a presentation – only open them.

Clear Hurdles

Some companies are looking for suppliers and partners who see the world in the same way that they do. Others will only work with companies with certain accreditations. If the presenter doesn’t reassure them, they may spend the rest of the presentation trying to guess if the presenter’s company is the right cultural fit, or has the right certificates. Presenting to Starbucks? You’d best talk about environmental policies up front, rather than leaving your audience waiting until you tick the right box.

Delivering the Start of a Presentation

A lot of presenters are nervous of presenting. Nerves can be reduced when the presentation introduction is well-planned, though-out, and rehearsed. If a presentation starts well – most presenters tend to relax. So, work out what you want to achieve with the start of your presentation, and then practice presenting these first few slides, again and again.

Delivering a sales presentation and having a job interview may not seem that similar, but in actuality the comparisons are many. Does the feeling of being under harsh scrutiny sound familiar? The mild panic? Sweating palms? The need to persuade somebody to choose what you have to offer?

Here at m62, we are experts at preparing sales presentations and have helped our clients to win billions of dollars worth of deals. A job interview is all about selling yourself – making it the ultimate sales presentation. We’ve identified a systematic process that we use time-and-again to help our clients present effectively. The process works, and now we’re sharing it with you. The following tips are key lessons on how to both win over an audience, and on how to impress a potential employer. Use them to sell a product, or to sell yourself. If you know somebody looking for a job please pass them this article, and see if it helps.

Prepare

Consider the importance of your presentation: surely it justifies more than knocking-up a few PowerPoint slides on the plane there? Your audience will be able to tell if you are simply rehashing old material. The time involved in making sure your presentation is completely suited to the client is often gravely miscalculated. Spend longer than you think you’ll need (hours, not minutes) – and practice, practice, practice! If you don’t have time to prepare properly for every prospect, consider pitching for less, but putting more time into each pitch.

Similarly, it is painfully obvious when someone hasn’t taken the time to prepare for a job interview. The majority of candidates seriously underestimate the time required to prepare; you should be setting aside ten hours for every interview, not thirty minutes. Apply for fewer positions, but give each application the time and attention to craft an effective response.

Do the research

Check the website; make some calls (if appropriate). Look into your prospect’s background. What are they looking for? What could you convince them they are looking for? Is there anything, perhaps a recent business deal or public announcement, you could use in your presentation? It’s amazing, but even in this day and age, with so much information publicly available, sales people still walk into meetings with prospects without having done any proper research.

The same goes for a job interview. Learn as much as you can about the company you wish to work for, and the sort of things they do. Has the founder written a book? Read a copy. Do they publish white papers on their website? Analyse them. Do they give webinars? Attend one. Most importantly: read the job description! It actually tells you what they expect of you.

Think from the audience’s point of view

What are they looking for? Why should they want to do business with you? If you are pitching to a company who are looking to expand into Asia, talk about how you can help them with your Asian distribution partners. If you are selling to a company that is focused on the environment, describe how your company would help them continue to reduce their carbon footprint. This sounds obvious – but presenting 20 slides about your company’s history really isn’t seeing things from the audience’s point of view.

Make sure to really get beneath the surface of what your prospect is saying, and work out what is truly important to that company. Don’t take everything at face value – lots of companies say they are focused on the environment, but only some really are. Most importantly, don’t simply include lots of irrelevant facts that you think they might like to know: chances are, they won’t.

At most interviews, prospective employers have an idea of the kind of candidate they wish to hire. They describe this person in their advertisements and other materials. So, use the job description to find out what the employer is looking for, and then spend time working out exactly how you can prove that you meet the requirements. If the job you are applying for requires someone with good people skills, think of past experiences you could use to demonstrate this – and then make sure you’re amiable on the day…

Have a clear value proposition

Messages can get lost in translation during a presentation. So many presenters try to say too much, and thus end up saying nothing at all. Consider what you can offer to a prospective client and then group and prioritise. Consider listing the five greatest benefits you offer to the prospect as your value proposition. Any less and you run the risk of leaving out something important; any more and your audience will struggle to remember. Tailor your entire presentation around these five points and relate everything you say back to one of them. Don’t simply ramble: stay clear and focused.

Likewise in a job interview, have clear ideas as to what you could bring to the company if you were hired. Identify the key things your prospective employers are looking for and focus your interview on demonstrating how you offer these things. Don’t claim to be brilliant at absolutely everything; you won’t be able to devote nearly enough time to each point, and your interviewer is unlikely to believe you anyway.

Provide relevant proof

Think of your benefit statements and consider how you can provide evidence that each of these can be delivered. If one of your company’s main points in a pitch is that you can deliver a project quickly, produce a case study in which you did just that in the past. The key is to only use information or evidence that is relevant. Don’t distract the audience with an off-topic story that doesn’t aid your argument, however funny you think it is.

The same is just as true in a job interview. If one of the key skills you are advertising to a prospective employer is a good writing ability, bring an example of some of your work with you. Filling your CV with information about how you waited tables for five years is unlikely to improve your chances of getting a job in journalism, but demonstrating A-grades in English and time editing the student paper just might!

Be memorable

First impressions count – yet decisions are rarely made there and then. After a presentation it is likely that the audience will delay a discussion, often reporting back to a higher power before coming to an ultimate decision. Be memorable – but for the right reasons. For a good example, watch Bill Gates’ presentation on malaria at TED – even though we wouldn’t recommend letting mosquitoes into the boardroom unless you can afford good lawyers.

Job interviews are often conducted one after another and you could be right in the middle of a long list of potential candidates – how are you going to ensure that you are remembered? Use relevant stories to demonstrate your good points – these are much more likely to be remembered than just a list of your qualities. In practice, this means thinking of, and writing down, a few stories to illustrate each point in your value proposition. Having these stories to hand well in advance will encourage a conversational style, and a memorable job interview performance.

Don’t get defensive over questions

See questions as an opportunity, not an attack. Think about what is being asked of you, and then link everything back to your value proposition. This is a chance to further impress your audience with relevant information, so make the most of it. Interviewers almost always manage to come up with a question you’d never have thought of, so don’t be thrown off if you don’t immediately have an answer. Think about how to use the question as a hook upon which to sell, and then answer. Questions should be answered quickly. Don’t ramble.

When preparing for a job interview, create a list of potential questions you could be asked, and decide for each one how it relates back to your value proposition. Job interviews are mostly in the form of question and answer, so unless you focus on turning answers into a chance to sell yourself, you may fall into the trap of simply rambling.

If an interviewer asks how you work under pressure, don’t panic that they’re trying to catch you out – instead, provide an example in which you performed brilliantly at the eleventh hour (using one of your pre-prepared stories that prove your value proposition), thus proving that you’re dependable and quick-thinking. Whatever is asked of you, see it is an opportunity to state a strength, not cover up a weakness.

So, what are some of the common mistakes that presenters and bid managers make? What should you not do?

Agenda

Ignore the prospect’s agenda and instructions. They won’t care if you talk about the things they ask about or not. If they are grappling with some difficult issues right now, they would probably rather you didn’t remind them.

Instead: make sure that you talk about the things you have been asked to address, and if the prospect is facing challenges, offer a solution to these challenges.

USPs

Only talk about the things that the prospect has asked about, so that your pitch presentation becomes indistinguishable from your competitors’. Don’t consider your competitive value proposition, and don’t think about whether you could map your competitive value proposition to the topics you have been asked to cover. Under no circumstances attempt to shape the prospect’s thinking in a new way to match your USPs.

Instead: don’t be afraid to try and shape the agenda. If your story flows in a certain way, tell it that way and spell out for the prospect how you are covering the items you have been asked to address. If you think the prospect would benefit from seeing the issues in a different way, attempt to change their thinking.

Focus

List all the reasons why the prospect might possibly want to choose you. The more the better. Make sure that you have so many arguments that each member of the pitch evaluation team will remember something completely different. That way, when the decision-makers sit down to discuss your pitch, they won’t be able to agree on what you offer.

Instead: structure your presentation with a clear and memorable value proposition. Five items is memorable, any more might not be.

RFP and Pitch Presentation

Use the pitch presentation to talk through the detail of your written submission. The tender response is most likely full of technical detail. Most high-level decision makers are keen to have you explain all of the technical detail of your bid in fine detail, and don’t need to hear any arguments actually selling the merits of your bid.

Instead: keep your pitch presentation at a high level, and concentrate on selling, not explaining.

Question and Answers

Don’t worry too much about Q&A. You’ll be able to handle the questions as they arise – after all, you know your business, and no question would be too hard to answer. Anticipating questions, preparing answers, and building slides to support the answers will only ruin your spontaneity, and take away from the excitement of the pitch.

Instead: prepare for Q&A by listing possible questions, and thinking about how your answers can relate back to your value proposition. Prepare slides to support answers.

Solution vs Ability to Deliver

Spend all your time presenting your solution, and don’t say anything about your ability to deliver that solution, or in giving a sense of what you would be like to work with. After all, if the audience like your ideas they will have to choose you to deliver them. They couldn’t just ask a competitor to adapt their solution.

Instead: talk about your team and your company, not just about your creative solution.

Rehearsal

Try to make your sales pitch slides perfect. Spend the night before making dozens of changes to the presentation, making sure that all of your presenters are exhausted during the pitch. Let everything else eat into rehearsal time, so that none of your pitch team has ever presented any of the slides before they do it for real.

Instead: lock down your slides the afternoon before you present. From that moment on, get great at delivering the slides.

Presenter Involvement

Let your bid team get on with things, and only bring in your presenters – who are busy senior executives – the night before. They can make sure they are happy with the direction of the pitch presentation at the last minute.

Instead: if a presenter is going to play a significant role in your pitch, they need to be available, and involved in enough time to have input to the direction the pitch is taking.

Bullet Points

Use bullet points. Every prospect loves to have somebody save them effort by coming in to read aloud. Spruce-up any text-heavy slides with clip art, a really busy PowerPoint template, or an incredibly complex diagram that is labelled in six-point font.

Instead: replace bullet points with graphics, images, charts, and animations. Don’t read aloud to grown adults.

Attractive Bullet Points

Bring in a design agency to make your slides look good. You realise your pitch presentation probably shouldn’t just involve your pitch team reading slides aloud, or talking around the bullet points that your audience have already read and understood. So, why not make the slides look better with a bit of design? Your audience may still be able to read your bullet points for themselves, but if the design is pretty enough they won’t notice how boring the presentation is.

Instead: replace bullet points with graphics, images, charts, and animations. Don’t just make bullet points look pretty.

How can PowerPoint presentations be made interactive? We list some ideas for you to try.

Questions

Ask questions. It sounds obvious, but a lot of presenters will have a fixed set of information they want to present, and deliver this information almost regardless of circumstance. Yet, not all audiences are interested in the same material, and often too little time is spent on the things the audience care about.

When presenting to a small group, make sure to gain an insight into what the audience want to hear about. The easiest way to do this is through good old-fashioned dialogue, initiated by the presenter asking questions. Then, from within a larger deck of slides, simply hide those you don’t need to present, or skip to those you do. Anticipate by preparing slides that answer the most frequently asked questions.

Hyperlinks

Use hyperlinks. Typically, a presentation will be delivered from the first slide to the last slide in a linear fashion. An interactive presentation allows flexibility – slides can be presented in any order, without having to exit show mode, find the next slide, and then hit F5. The best way to create flexibility in presentation structure is to create index slides – for different products, services, features, or benefits. Hyperlink from each item to a sequence of slides, and end the section with a hyperlinked repeat of the index slide.

If hyperlinks are too complex for your PowerPoint skills, this effect can be hacked by remembering that when in show mode, entering a slide number then hitting enter goes direct to that slide. Put your first sequence of slides at slide 10, your second at slide 20, and so on. Not elegant – but easy.

Annotation

Sketch and annotate. Don’t just present your slides – write and draw all over them. For pre-planned additions, it might make sense to just use animation to introduce new elements to a slide. But, for real spontaneity, and to respond to unexpected audience questions and comments, draw on your slides. This can be done easily in PowerPoint using a mouse (in show mode with PowerPoint 2003, right-click on the slide, select pointer options, then select a pen type), or use a tool such as Papershow if you want to use a real (Bluetooth) pen and paper (covered in tiny dots).

Audience Response Tools

Use an audience response tool such as TurningPoint (when face-to-face), or use the voting functionality built into most online meeting software. Audience response systems provide a great opportunity to guage opinion at conferences, or to check understanding in training presentations. Combine audience response with hyperlinks so that different material is presented on the responses the audience gives (for example, extra training material if the audience don’t answer questions correctly).

Challenges

Set a challenge. Trade Extensions sell software that finds the best solution to (sometimes complex) business problems. One difficulty the company faced when writing a new presentation with m62 was in showing prospects that often they thought problems were easy to solve when in fact they weren’t. Trade Extensions worked with m62 to design a simple puzzle with which to start their presentation. Sometimes, they even offer cash prizes in return for a correct solution – which draws the audience in to engage with the subject matter.

Live graphs

Collect and display audience data. Ask the audience a question, and use a graph to display the responses. Prepare a PowerPoint graph built around dummy data, and then enter real data into the spreadsheet used to build the graph when face-to-face with the audience. This technique can be used to show how an audience compares to average, and can generate useful insight, as well as serve as a starting point for further discussion.

Back channels

For Silicon Valley, or for those with audiences who just can’t concentrate on one thing at a time… Consider opening a “back channel” for your audience members to communicate with each other and comment on your presentation in real time. Use a hash tag (#) with Twitter, and project tweets with that tag in real time on a screen alongside your slides. This technique will mean giving up any control over what your audience pays attention to (phone, slides, presenter, Twitter feed), and so should be used with extreme caution. We really wouldn’t recommend it if you want your messages to be remembered. In addition, if your presentation goes wrong, remember that all the negative comments will be projected behind you, which may not be everyone’s idea of fun.

This article has listed seven ways to make a presentation interactive. Do you have any other ideas? Please share in the comments below.

Turn off the lights to use the projector.

Slide titles should summarise the content of the slide. This allows the audience to grasp the point of a slide immediately. The problem is that if they think they understand the point of the slide before the presenter even starts to speak, they will disengage and not pay attention to the detail the presenter provides.

The management consultant’s version of this tip is that slide titles should link together so that somebody reading just the title of each slide would have read a prose summary of the entire presentation. This tip might make sense if you are sending slides to a busy executive to read – but tips that work for “PowerPoint documents” don’t work for presentations as they make the presenter unnecessary. If the presenter isn’t needed, presenting effectively becomes almost impossible. Need to send a presentation? Send a link to a web presentation instead.

Always maintain eye contact with the key audience members. Of course, no presenter should spend too long looking at the screen. But, used appropriately, breaking eye-contact with the audience and looking away can give the audience time to read, process, and think. When someone is looking at you, thinking is harder, as so much mental capacity is used in processing facial expressions.

A good presenter never turns his back on the audience. A more accurate piece of advice might be: “if you turn your back on the audience, it had better be for a good reason.”  To engage with a truly seamless stream of audio and visual information (i.e. an effective presentation) it is necessary for the audience to switch their attention between you and the screen. They will take their cue from you, so if you want them to notice a build, watch it happen as you click. If you want them to read some text from your presentation, break eye contact and look at the screen (but don’t read aloud). This way of presenting gives the audience a cue so that they don’t miss anything important, and allows them to actually read, without having to block you out or feel rude by ignoring eye-contact.

Use handout view to produce leave behinds. If your slides make sense when they are printed as a leave-behind, they will also make sense when you are presenting them – even before you open your mouth. If your slides make sense when printed as handouts, they won’t be engaging when you come to present them. Instead, produce a separate document as a leave-behind – using your speaker notes as a starting point. Or, for greater impact, use online meeting software to record your presentation, and provide a link. That way you can control access, see who has viewed your recording, and make it harder for your competitors to get hold of your slides.

From Guy Kawasaki – the ‘10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint’ – ‘a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points’. Because Kawasaki is a well-known blogger and entrepreneur, this advice has gained a lot of exposure. And sure, following this advice might give better results than using 100s of slides crammed full of ten-point text. But is this good advice for all presenters to follow? Not really. The number of slides in a presentation doesn’t mean much – it would be possible to animate a ten-hour presentation onto a single slide, or to use fifty slides in a short presentation. Likewise, just because venture capitalists can only concentrate for 20 minutes doesn’t mean that presentations should all be that short. It makes a lot of sense to use soft breaks in a longer presentation, but in fields like education and training, twenty minutes just might not be long enough. Don’t apply Kawasaki’s advice to areas it was never intended for.

Use one big image for each slide. This is a trend that started with Beyond Bullet Points, and was in many ways reinforced by Presentation Zen – two interesting books on writing and designing presentations. At m62, we love good PowerPoint design, and we hate bullet points. But is the answer replacing each set of bullet points with a stock photo? For a keynote address or speech, to provide a backdrop, this might make sense. Have anything complex to communicate? Need your audience to understand and remember your message? Use charts, diagrams, graphs, and animations – but not just one photo on each slide. Stock photos have a place, but can a picture of a healthy family really communicate the intricacies of a health insurance offering?

Use high-quality photos of people to build an emotional connection with your audience. Eliciting an emotional response involves your audience mulling over the picture for much longer than you can afford. We cannot help but be utterly engrossed by pictures of people – simply interpreting a facial expression uses most of our mental energy. For this reason, overuse of large, high quality pictures of people is just likely to make your audience drift off into irrelevant thoughts when they should really be listening to your point.

Use a script. This might make sense for a politician or CEO, for whom avoiding an uncomfortable soundbite on the evening news is essential. When presenting in a smaller setting however, using a script to present can serve as a block between presenter and audience, making the delivery sound stilted, stale, and boring. Use notes, rehearse key sections, but don’t just read aloud.

Agree? Disagree? Know about some other awful tips you want to warn the world about? Write a note in the (moderated) comments, below.

When writing a sales presentation, sales presenters and those in marketing who support them need to choose their messages carefully and understand that the real value and return lies in being a great editor, rather than a prodigious publisher.

Many companies spend considerable time and effort on marketing activities and lead generation to actually get sales people face-to-face with prospective customers. Yet, this investment is often rendered useless by the failure of the sales presentation to deliver clear and succinct messages that convey value to the audience. Poor sales presentations are two-a-penny; the common denominating perception that they are boring, irrelevant, and forgettable.  However, the good news is if everyone else is writing and delivering awful sales presentations, you have the opportunity to shine and stand out, by writing a sales presentation that does exactly what it ought to; to write a sales presentation that is succinct, visaul, and that is recalled.

Focus on the Audience

Capitalising on these opportunities to get your foot in the door requires writing a presentation that is audience-focussed and not presenter focussed. Narcissus was only ever truly popular with himself.  Writing a sales presentation that is audience-focussed necessitates understanding your prospect. In some sales processes, this can mean using a first visit or phone call to fact-find, and only then presenting. For others, a meeting can be used to question first and present later.

Where prospects expect some sort of a presentation before they will open up and answer questions, then consider presenting opening slides to build credibility, stop to ask questions, and then present the rest of a sales presentation, emphasising those parts that will be of most interest.

Write Analogue, Not Digital

Start writing a sales presentation in ‘analogue’ form. Don’t open PowerPoint, don’t even open your laptop. Paper and pencil work fine; many people writing a sales presentation use Post-It notes to capture each key argument, and then move these around until sections of the presentation, and a good flow, are settled.

Lose the Script

m62 would not recommend using a script when delivering a sales presentation. Use of scripts can ruin spontaneity, and make presenters seem less ‘human’. Where certain sections of the presentation are given more focus (the introduction, the value proposition), it can make sense when writing the sales presentation to write a script for those slides. But writing the script is useful here not because it will be used (it shouldn’t), but because the process of writing  can help the presenter rehearse what they should say (even though they aren’t going to read aloud from a script).

Less is More

It is important to realise your audience is limited in the amount of information they can actually take in. However enlightening, witty or entertaining your presentation, the message remains that too much is too much – it’s just wasted information and wasted time.

A great many presentations will contain numerous slides of bullet points. However, bullet points do not actually equate to succinctness – and shorter bullet points are not easy to process. If your presentation has 30 slides with five bullet points on each, that is 150 pieces of information that you are asking your audience to remember. With all the will in the world, that is simply not going to happen. Far from being superhuman, the average working memory of a human is seven +/- two quanta. If your audience is particularly interested, they will hopefully write things down from your presentation, improving their memory recall further. Even so, your audience are not going to take in 150 pieces of information, let alone remember them.

Value Proposition for Structure

It is critical when writing a sales presentation to create a hierarchy of information, with your value proposition at the top. The value proposition should be used to structure your sales presentation, and should be repeated as a content slide – so that at least this core message can be remembered.

Leave Behinds aren’t Memorable

Whilst the temptation to leave a written version of the presentation behind has merit, the bad news is that few, if any of your audience will read it. A leave-behind cannot replace the need for a memorable presentation in the first place. A sales presenter has one real shot at being remembered – and that is when delivering the sales presentation. A better leave-behind that printed slides or a document is a recording of the presentation being delivered, viewable on demand from the web.

Eliminate Weak Points

Under the value proposition, further information can be used as proof – but even then, more information does not necessarily make for a stronger proof. The key to writing a strong sales presentation is to pay attention to raising the impact of the ‘weakest’ messages; if a presentation has obvious holes in it, the audience will start to wonder where else sales messages are not as powerful as they first appear.

Editor not Publisher

The best way to write a sales presentation is to think like an editor rather than a publisher; to play devil’s advocate with your own messaging and to be brutally honest, deleting as much information as possible. Your audience has a limited capacity to recall and identifying no more than five key reasons that your audience should buy from you rather than a competitor will provide a far greater return than bombarding your audience with dozens of sales messages. In the world of writing sales presentations, it is the editor, not the publisher, who is king.

Here, we share ten tips for those developing corporate presentations, and those who have to deliver them.

1. Set objectives. Why are you delivering a corporate presentation? What do the audience think now, and what do you want them to think? What are the audience doing now, and what do you want them to be doing? If you know the individuals – answer these questions for each key decision maker.
2. See things from the audience’s point of view. We’ve had clients who have insisted on showing a series of pictures of their new office building and staff gym. Ask, Does the audience care about this? What’s in it for them?
3. If you can email your corporate presentation to somebody who wasn’t there to see you deliver it, and they can understand it – then you, as a presenter, aren’t necessary. Unnecessary presenters struggle when delivering corporate presentations face-to-face (the audience can just read the slides instead). Instead, use visual cognitive dissonance to make slides captivating.
4. Make your corporate presentation’s key messages memorable. Most presentations make 100s of points, and this leads to most people forgetting most of your messages. What’s worse, when you have a few people in the audience, they all remember different points. Less is more. A logical structure is essential, and repetition is key.
5. Think about who will deliver your corporate presentation. Often those writing and designing corporate presentations aren’t the same as those who will have to deliver them. Presentation skills training will help the sales team to deliver the presentation, but the material needs to sound credible coming from their mouths. If the CEO helps to write the presentation, it can be worth checking that your sales team are comfortable delivering the material.
6. No bullet points. You spend time and money on your brand – why undermine it when face-to-face with prospects? Use visual PowerPoint slides – charts, diagrams, animation, and photos to appear dynamic and up-to-date, and to get your point across.
7. Use visual aids to help your audience understand your messages. Diagrams and images can help your audience grasp and remember your point. A ‘Presentation Zen’ approach has its place – but one beautiful photo probably won’t convey why one insurance pricing mechanism is superior to another, or explain how a global IT solution is to be delivered. Find the right visual to make your message easy to explain.
8. Tell stories, and use case studies. Ideally, supply a few so that those delivering your presentation can use one relevant to each audience. Stories are memorable, and bring your messages to life. Stories recounting previous customer successes help to present credentials in an interesting way, and reassure prospects that you can do what you say you can.
9. Don’t just list your products. Instead, structure your presentation around the problems that your company can solve, and the benefits that your company can deliver. Then, just talk about your products as you explain the different ways your company can deliver value. This might mean that one product gets mentioned in a few different places, but wouldn’t you rather your prospect got interested in all the products that help solve a problem they are facing?
10. Avoid one-size-fits-all if it doesn’t. Your company might not change much, but your prospects are all different. So, build some flexibility into your corporate presentation. There’s a balance to find between presenting a clear and consistent message to the market, with tailoring your corporate presentation to different audiences. Try to make every prospect feel that you can solve their problems, and can offer what they need. Consider an interactive presentation if you want to give your company’s presenters flexibility to quickly respond to client interests.

Of course, one of the best ways to ensure that your corporate presentation works well is to work with a high quality presentation agency to make sure everything is done correctly. But beware – not every presentation agency is as proficient as they ought to be – there’s a big difference between an effective corporate presentation and making a slide look a bit nicer.

Got any further tips for effective corporate presentations? Share in the comments, below.

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Value Propositions, Proof, and the Winning Sales Presentation

There has been much written and much debate about what makes a winning sales presentation. From the measurement of sales effectiveness, to outlining the sales process, distinguishing between sales messages and marketing messages, developing consistent messaging, and using appropriate slides – many elements must come together to create a winning sales presentation. As important as all of these, however, is creating a winning value proposition.

Value Proposition

A value proposition sets out the benefits that a vendor offers in return for payment; the greater the benefits at a given price point, the greater the value offered. Identifying and communicating value is key to crafting a winning sales presentation. As presentation coach Jerry Weisman writes in Presenting to Win:

“A feature is a fact or quality about you or your company, the products you sell, or the idea you’re advocating. By contrast, a Benefit is how that fact or quality will help your audience. When you seek to persuade, it’s never enough to present the Features of what you’re selling; every Feature must always be translated into a Benefit.”

The temptation for presenters looking to put together an effective sales presentation can be to simply list dozens and dozens of possible benefits – hoping that if enough bets are made, some will be on the winning horse. Yet here, less is more. In communicating 100s of benefits, few will be remembered – and each audience member will take away something different from the sales presentation. Without a clear value proposition, when the audience evaluate your presentation afterwards, there will be no agreement on what you offer.

Fundamentally, the strength of the value proposition in a sales presentation can be determined by three key factors:

• How important the benefits you offer are to the client,
• How these benefits fare in comparison to your competitors’ value propositions, and
• The extent to which you justify the claims that you make about being able to deliver benefits.

Benefits

As the starting point in developing a winning sales presentation, development of your value proposition is of paramount importance. First, brainstorm a list of the benefits that you offer to your clients.  Some people find it hard to express ideas in terms of benefits rather than features – but at this stage this doesn’t matter; in fact, at m62, we often build a value proposition using features or advantages, and allow the presenter to explain the benefit that the feature offers verbally. This is to avoid allowing the audience to disengage if they feel like they fully understand what the presenter is going to say by reading the benefit listed on a slide.

Having established a list of features and benefits that might be of interest to clients, the question of how important they really are to the client must be addressed. There are a number of ways of evaluating items on a list – the idea is to focus on things that you offer that your potential customers care about. This increases your chances of winning – if prospects don’t care about the benefits you offer, they aren’t really benefits for those customers. Many companies are happy to make educated guesses as to what customers care about – where a research budget exists, it’s possible to get pretty scientific.

Competitive Advantage

Offering benefits that your audience care about isn’t always enough for a winning sales presentation – you also need to consider competitive position. If your company can offer benefits, but your competitors can offer the same benefits for less money, or the same benefits but more of them – then your presentation will not win. Rank ideas for your value proposition in terms of both importance to the customer, and the extent of competitive advantage that your company has. These elements – taken together – make up the competitive value proposition.

It is the competitive value proposition that should be the framework of any winning sales presentation. In identifying what is of importance to your client and where you are better than your competitors lies the arsenal behind a winning presentation. The value proposition can be made memorable through passive mnemonic processing, and should be used to structure the sales presentation.

Proof and Justification

With the opportunity to get in front of your target audience at a premium, especially during difficult economic times, this opportunity simply cannot be wasted. The presenter must be able to demonstrate delivery or back up their claims with hard evidence. The simple claim of value with no supportive substance simply will not wash, even if trust can go a long way. If prospective purchasing decision makers simply don’t believe that you can execute, then they will not believe you, however much you beg for a chance. And importantly, they are not going to buy something they do not believe. A winning sales presentation depends upon having a value proposition that appeals to the audience, and in successfully justifying this value proposition.

m62 often recommend a straightforward approach to gathering proof points for sales presentations. This process can be boiled down to four key points of justification: testimonial, process, technical or logical.

Testimonials should be self explanatory. They are the positive things that have been said about your company, product or service by your customers, partners, or those with influence in your industry. This is the testimonial hierarchy; third person testimonials are perceived as objective and independent and therefore trustworthy, the most powerful of testimonials. Second person testimonials can be sourced from customer feedback following a job well done and can be the fastest route to generating content.

A process justification explains how a product or service will work to deliver value. If the value proposition claims that a product will enable faster manufacturing times, the process justification will explain how.

A technical justification relies upon the existence of proprietary technology or intellectual property to deliver a benefit. For example, a client who has developed a unique method for separating oils from water has a competitive advantage in the oil-clean up industry.

A logical justification relies on proof delivered through reasoned argument. If you claim to offer value because you source materials more cheaply than competitors, showing the prices that you pay against those your competitors pay will prove this point logically and unquestionably. Explaining how you manage to pay less will be a process justification.

The Winning Sales Presentation

There are indeed a great many aspects that must go into a winning sales presentation – including visualisation, structure, and design. At the heart of every winning sales presentation, however, is the value proposition. The method is a less-is-more approach, boiling down your key USP’s and making sure that they are presented and supported appropriately.

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1. Successful presentation optimisation (or optimization for our American cousins) starts by having clear objectives. Then, the presentation can be optimised in terms of those objectives. If a presentation isn’t aiming to do anything in particular, how can it be optimised to do it better?
2. Go through all the material in the presentation and eliminate everything that is interesting to you but not to your audience. Limit the amount of information in your presentation, and what remains has more impact. Many companies go overboard in proving that they are big and global and powerful – which has its place, but can usually be achieved in just a couple of slides.
3. Group content into coherent sections. When deciding what sections to create, ask What matters to the audience? What headings would they be interested in hearing you talk about? Five sections is optimal. Any more than seven is too many.
4. Eliminate bullet points. This doesn’t just mean cut down the number of words in your bullet points, or increase the font size in your bullet points. It means get rid of them. They don’t work. Slides that are going to be presented shouldn’t make sense without a presenter talking. If the audiences read your bullet points they think they have understood your point, and they disengage, sometimes without bothering to listen to what you are saying. Use visual cognitive dissonance instead.
5. Look for the visuals that help you get your point across. Presentation optimisation involves turning “visual aids” into something that actually helps the presenter. Does a slide show a series of dates? Then use a timeline. Does a slide explain the order in which something happens? Show a process map. Does a slide compare numbers? Find the right graph. Does a slide explain how something happens? Show this by moving photographs around on a slide. Can’t find the right visual? Use some photos to illustrate your point.
6. Presentation design matters. To optimise your presentation you will want it to look good. Find a tasteful PowerPoint template. Consolidate the number of colours and fonts that you use. Destroy all Clip-Art, and cut out the more tacky stock photography. Reconsider that Word-Art. Only use animation to guide attention or to convey meaning – never to make things look “interesting”.
7. A presentation is about a speaker and their slides. Presentation optimisation must, therefore, optimise the PowerPoint presentation and how the presentation is delivered. Practice delivering the presentation; often, using a camcorder to watch and review can give valuable and rapid feedback. Don’t say what you would say if you were presenting – actually present the presentation, even if only to an empty room. When delivering the presentation, remember that people rarely complain that a presentation was too quick. Don’t speak too quickly – but deliver your material in a concise and pithy way.

slide:ology by Nancy Duarte

Among the largest and priciest books on the ‘Business Presentations’ bookshelf, and written by one of the USA’s leading authorities on presentations, slide:ology promises a great deal.  With its coffee-table-chic format, high-profile case studies and on-the-nose interjections from trendies like Garr Reynolds and Seth Godin, it cries out to presenters who are looking for something more aesthetically inspirational than the abundant boardroom manuals.

In this area slide:ology certainly does not disappoint. Complimenting Nancy’s earnest and passionate belief, the pages make pleasing use of imagery, typefacing, colour, imagery and all the other graphical niceties that the author knows and loves to teach. Unfortunately, the inviting use of white space and friendly ‘one idea per spread’ format that makes this book so accessible also makes it feel suspiciously lightweight. Insightful as most of the key ideas are, the breeziness with which they are dealt and the lack of scientific insight into why they work mean it is the graphic design sections of this book that have the most credibility.

Nancy’s Manifesto: The Five Theses of the Power of a Presentation is, puzzlingly, delivered right at the end of the book:

• Treat Your Audience as King
• Spread Ideas and Move People
• Help Them See What You’re Saying
• Practice Design, Not Decoration
• Cultivate Healthy Relationships

These principles are huge, and it is disappointing to find them right at the end of the book instead of seeing the content of slide:ology arranged around them. Readers will have to flip back through the book to look again for the ‘how?’ behind these ideas, while they might have had more impact by being introduced at the start, proven with hard evidence, and then demonstrated with the rest of the content.

The Art of Presenting, Without the Science

In her introduction Nancy says “This book covers how to create ideas, translate them into pictures, display them well, and then deliver them in your own natural way.” For the most part, this promise is admirably delivered upon. But in the same paragraph she then says “This book will teach you “why””, but it is this part of the picture that is sadly under-represented here.

Yes, pretty much anyone with exposure to presentations and an eye on the media knows that a global evolution from text-based to visual-based slides is gathering momentum. Nancy assumes her reader understands this, makes a strong case for presentations (and a decent case against ‘career suislide’ – the unhappy consequence of sticking with cue card-style presentations), and then launches into the creative starting-point; knowing who your audience is and figuring out what kind of engagement you need to have with them. This reader can’t help but feel that going into more depth about exactly why the tired old methods don’t work (and are actually counter-productive) would have provided enough intellectual ballast to keep everyone afloat all the way up until Chapter 11 – Interacting with Slides, when some of the cognitive rationale behind a visual approach actually starts to emerge.

The justification behind the central theses of the book comes too little and too late. Readers who are reluctant to start learning about design might need some clear facts about what makes bullet-points so harmful, and why audiences find it easier to assimilate visual information, to give them the motivation to keep reading through the dense central chapters on design. Alternatively, they may quite understandably be inspired to rethink their approach and subsequently convinced that Duarte can do it for them. As Nancy says after whetting our appetites for visual techniques in Chapter 2 – Creating Ideas, Not Slides: “Be prepared to enlist the help of a professional designer (you did plan far enough ahead to make sure you’ve got one available, right?)” Excellent advice, but it slightly undermines the tutorial styling of the design chapters to come.

That said, readers who already know that Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Keynote presentation is Duarte’s work will probably be quite happy to take Nancy’s word for all this, skip past the chapter on finding inspiration and sketching out our thoughts on Post-Its (because most of you already know our subject) and dive into chapters 3 and 4 on Creating diagrams and Presenting data. Gore did, after all, win hearts and minds all over the world by clearly and dramatically presenting the right data in the right way.  And in this area, slide:ology is a resounding success.

Killer Visualisation

All too often, presentation gurus claiming ambassadorship of the visual slide paradigm fail to address the critical skill of transforming a complex idea into a simple visual, instead falling into the ‘zen’ paradigm of full-bleed, eye-candy photographs and two or three-word shock headings. By contrast, the insightful creative process Nancy sets out along with pages of example diagrams and schematics is a hugely valuable resource…all the more so given that PowerPoint 2007 already provides many of the example diagrams in its SmartArt feature ready for non-designers to start inserting. The only caveat to these chapters is that sometimes Nancy’s sketching gets a little too enthusiastic….there are diagrams of a complexity that can completely baffle audiences unless considerable thought and work is put into how they are animated and explained.

On that subject, we have to wait until much later in Chapter 9 – Creating movement for some guidance into how to use animation effectively. That’s rather late in the day to mention such an essential and underused component of presentation software. Nancy does provide some great high-level insight into how to use effects to support different types of message (motion paths to show connections, advanced emphasis effects to show takeover or surpassing etc), but she does ask quite a lot of the inexperienced user by looking at animation more from a movie-director’s point of view than a PowerPoint or Keynote designer’s. The most useful tips here are delivered across twoparticular idea-spreads, Designing Time-Based Scenes and Planning Animations, which could easily have been fleshed out into an entire chapter at the expense of the cinematography-inspired theory that follows.

Bringing it All Together

In addition, much of the valuable insight from the earlier chapters on diagrams and visual sequences could have been combined with the animation advice to really inspire a dynamic approach to building and animating visuals that keep audiences engaged, but sadly this never happens. We get a whole Chapter 6 – Arranging Elements demonstrating how to lay out visual elements in sympathy with the eye’s natural flow of direction (at least, the natural Western eye’s direction), and different types of layout that encourage audiences to easily perceive hierarchy, progression and relationships. I can’t help thinking that this would be so much simpler to achieve by building the elements of the slide in the right order with the right effects. There are several very perceptive ideas in all of these chapters, but frustratingly they never quite combine to show how some truly dynamic explanations could be achieved relatively easily.

Design for All?

As much as Nancy tries to make the design-based chapters - Thinking Like a Designer, Arranging Visual Elements and Using Visual Elements – accessible to everyone, readers without some background and/or a keen interest in graphic design will likely find them difficult to embrace and apply. The case studies are certainly demonstrative of the various elements of theory that are expounded, but the slides shown are so disparate that it is difficult to see the principles being consistently applied. In addition, one of the most startling things about the selected slide examples is that they do not fully represent the depth of Nancy’s visual thinking. Too many of the slides still show text of a very small size and in full sentences, which is disqualified by some of the guidelines she sets out in Chapter 11 – Interacting with Slides.

Although there is strong encouragement for presenters to move away from basing slides on text, this appears as more of an afterthought in the final chapters. It might have made more sense first to set up arguments why this is a bad idea and then to build the alternative techniques around them. By presenting ideas about ‘Constraining the Text’, ‘Constraining the Length’ and ‘How Many Slides?’ at the end of the book, one feels Nancy has foregone an opportunity to make a strong case for a dynamic visual style in favour of her passionate expertise for creating attractive graphics. In addition, many of the examples jar with current psycho-perceptual theory with application to presentations; there is an abundance of large, full-face human photographs, which are shown to consume excessive cognitive load in audiences and make it difficult for them to concentrate on anything else. While this would not be an issue in traditional graphic design, there are different rules for presentations when cognitive processing is at a premium.

slide:ology could easily have been two books: one very capable and detailed guide to producing graphics that work well in presentations, and one explaining why bullet-points fail and visuals work. The latter thesis however, would need significant fleshing out to make a convincing case. Conspicuously absent from slide:ology is any attempt to delve deep into cognitive aspects of presenting and how to structure information to make long-term influences on audiences.  There are several brainstorming workshops offered in the book, from psychoanalytic ‘know thyself’ wordgames to exercises for generating and structuring ideas, and while the therapy-style presentation of these may not be to everyone’s taste, they are useful. This book is not focused on business or sales presentations, and readers seeking guidance on creating competitive value propositions and sales messaging will find these exercises lacking in substance.

Conclusion

With all that in mind, slide:ology is one of the best books available on creating visual presentations, even if its reach outweighs its grasp. A lack of psychological insight and a breezy style, that does not do justice to the many profound ideas littered throughout, may leave serious readers unsatisfied. Yet the chapters on presenting data and visualising information are almost worth the price alone, as long as readers have already bought into the approach before picking up the book. Highly recommended, but not quite the bible of effective presenting that it could have been.

Is The Audience Deciding Whether To Buy – Or Which Version to Buy?

Every presenter should ask themselves a simple question during preparation – is the presentation going to address whether the audience should buy at all, or has the need been identified and is the audience considering whether to buy from me versus the competition? In other words, whether the audience’s ‘need to purchase’ has been established is a critical determining factor in choosing which messages to convey.

For example, if ‘outsourcing’ is one of a presenter’s core value propositions, then the appropriate message if this audience were considering whether to buy might be: ‘Why outsource?’ Alternatively, the appropriate message for an audience which is considering which supplier to buy from would consequently be: ‘Why outsource to us?’. The two questions are fundamentally different, in terms of the resulting discussion – although each is potentially relevant and appropriate, depending upon the audience’s requirements and, potentially, the stage of the sales cycle at the point of presentation.

Using the above questions, two possible answers might be ‘cost savings’ and ‘an improvement in service levels’ respectively, for example. The first answer is relevant to all outsourcing offerings and so plays an essential role in establishing why the audience needs such a service – but the second offers a key point of competitive differentiation.

In differing circumstances it is conceivably possible that either the ‘whether’ or ‘which’ messages may be relevant and appropriate during either the marketing or sales phases of the overall sales cycle. However, it’s worth noting that when these two points are presented concurrently in the sales phase for example, they can be significantly more powerful than when presented independently, effectively re-establishing the audience’s overall need to buy, before then delivering the presenter’s specific value proposition to confirm why the audience must buy from them. In other words, sales messages concerning ‘whether’ to buy can help to shape the audience’s understanding of how to choose ‘which’ to buy.

When preparing to deliver a sales presentation, it is highly worth considering whether the audience is likely to be thinking either: “Do I need this solution?” or “Can this presenter provide me with the solution I need” respectively. If the former, then the presenter should aim to make the audience want to buy, ideally without going out to market, but at the very least with a view of what to look for that is tailored to the presenter’s own offering. If the latter, the opportunity is clearly to convey why the presenter is the best placed to offer the service that the audience has already identified is required, via a more compelling and benefit-led sales presentation than the competition.

By considering where the presentation sits within the sales cycle based on whether the audience is considering the merits of a purchase or whether the audience is sold on making the purchase but considering where to spend their money, the smart presenter optimises the chances of achieving the desired positive outcome.

Undoubtedly, producing the correct message for the given audience to assure the best possible outcome is one of the most difficult aspects of creating a great presentation. This article is intended to offer guidance on how to correctly identify whether a presentation is to support either the presenter’s marketing function or sales function – and therefore how to optimise the message and approach accordingly. Recognising the key differences between marketing and sales messages may also be useful to guide wider marketing campaigns, ensuring that these support sales, rather than undermine them.

Marketing as Lead Generation

Simply put, much of business-to-business marketing is a lead generation exercise. Then, sales people are used to close the deal, often with the support of a sales presentation.

Marketing messages should establish or generate interest. Marketing presentations may be given at trade shows, conferences, online, or at product launches – typically, to large audiences. Marketing presentations, and wider marketing campaigns, should compel the audience to find out more, thereby moving from the marketing phase into the sales phase of the overall cycle.

If a marketing presentation or marketing campaign inspires the audience to contact the presenter with questions, such as “Could you?”, “Will you?” or “Do you?” then the presentation exercise has clearly succeeded. Once a company representative is sitting face-to-face with a single prospective customer, sales messages are more appropriate.

Marketing Undermining Sales Presentations?

In terms of the overall sales objective, it is potentially counter-productive for a presenter to reveal too much at the marketing stage. Marketing messages should be sufficiently compelling to encourage the audience to pursue the required call to action – e.g. to pick up the phone. Full product descriptions and feature lists revealed at the marketing stage can prevent further dialogue, by allowing prospects to assume that they know all there is to know about a company’s offering. Instead, by providing a sufficient level of relevant intrigue at the marketing phase, this acts as the basis for discussion during the sales phase, presenting an ideal sales opportunity.

For example, a business might choose to convey relevant successes that have been previously achieved for existing customers in a marketing message or presentation, whereas a full description of how this was achieved and also how this could be applicable might best be held back until the appropriate time to deliver a sales message.

Setting up Sales Presentations

The role of a marketing message is to convey the achievability of some core benefits in relation to the audience’s specific requirement, yet without explaining the exact means of delivering these. Consequently a well conceived and delivered marketing presentation, and indeed marketing campaign, should set up the sales opportunity. The sales presentation should deliver the relevant punchline that enables the audience to understand not only exactly what’s on offer but how it can help address their particular need.

If marketing deliver sales messages to all, sales presentations will seem unavoidably boring and repetitive – everything has been said already. As a presenter, it’s vital to understand which messages are sufficient to make the phone ring. If handled correctly, these messages also provide the ammunition for the commercial sales pitch to be delivered in answer to a prospect’s inevitable questions.

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The last in a series of four episodes of the Killer Presentation Series, this edition focuses on how using the right visuals makes your presentation engaging and memorable.

Third in the Killer Presentation Series, this edition focuses on how to structure your presentation to maximise your chance of success in a sales presentation.