powerpoint presentations are extremely easy to throw together with a minimum of training. That is both their strength and their weakness. Sales presentations are complex undertakings that require effective communication of your idea. But as well as what you are communicating, you need to consider how it is communicated. Powerpoint design can either strengthen your presentation – adding to its effect and convincing your audience of your ideas – or it can badly detract from it. If that’s the case, it may not matter how good your ideas or competitive your bid. If you lose your audience with a bad presentation, they’re not going to be interested.

That’s why Powerpoint has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s a fantastically useful program and, used well, it can add significantly to the effect you are hoping to deliver. However, it has become the expectation that sales presentations should be accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation. That adds a pressure to put something – anything – together, even if it is amateur. Needless to say, relying on an amateur slide presentation is a recipe for disaster.

Part of this is simply our culture’s love of multimedia. The more parallel strands of information we can access, the better. So a talk isn’t complete without visual representations of what you’re saying – pictures and, better still, film clips. The problem arises when these distract from the core content rather than adding to it. Simplicity is important. But additionally, the presentation needs to contribute something different. We’ve all attended lectures where the spoken content is mirrored on the screen – and, quite possibly, in a handout too. Thus the message is simply triplicated, and you could equally scan the handout in five minutes than sit through the hour of speech. It’s frustrating and a waste of time – and something to be avoided in your own presentations.

So, powerpoint presentations need to complement, not replicate the content of your sales presentations. Careful Powerpoint design will enable you to communicate more effectively, rather than detracting from your spoken message. This is vital, since the expectation that a talk will be accompanied by overheads can force well-meaning but misguided speakers into hamstringing themselves and losing their audience on what would otherwise have been a fascinating talk. If that costs you a contract, then it’s easy to see that a little training or outsourcing can be an investment that is worth making and can pay for itself over and over.

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

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