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Does Your Sales Presentation Empower or Bewilder?

By Candyce Edelen

PropelGrowth Blog

Death by PowerPoint

end sales deck boredom with Candyce Edelen's powerpoint presentation tipsHave you ever been trapped in a room where someone is giving a long boring sales presentation? The sales person drones on and on about their company, their product, their features without even taking a breath. They read slide after slide of bullets with few visuals, and the graphics they do include are so complicated and abstract that they make no sense. There’s no room for conversation, no time for engaging the customer in conversation, no needs discovery, and certainly no collaboration. The experience leaves the audience bewildered and confused instead of inspired and excited.

One good way to avoid death by powerpoint is to involve the audience in the presentation process. There’s a great article on opening the floor to questions throughout the presentation by Roger Dooley at the Forbes website.

It’s Not About You, It’s About the Audience

Most sales presentations are incredibly self-centered. They start out with a company slide filled with stats, followed by a logo slide of all their customers, followed by a series focused on their products. This generic slide deck gets used with every customer, customizing only the agenda page and maybe one or two slides about the customer need.

A better approach is to focus the presentation on the audience, making them the hero of the story. In her book Resonate, Nancy Duarte points out that the presenter is not the hero, he or she is the mentor helping the hero save the day. “You’re Yoda, not Luke Skywalker.” She goes on to say, “You’re simply one voice helping them get unstuck in their journey.”

John Knuff, the General Manager of Global Financial Services at Equinix is particularly skilled at this. A few years ago, he asked us to help him make several slide decks, each focused on niches in the financial services industry. He created separate custom presentations for exchanges, financial technology vendors, and broker-dealers; focusing each sales deck on the specific business needs of that niche market. The slides aren’t about Equinix. They’re about solving real business problems that are common to that niche. Then John and his team further customize the decks for every individual prospect, based on what they already know about that particular customer’s situation and needs.

Stories Help Customers Discover Their Own Needs

It’s critical to craft a message that will resonate with your audience. While making sure the business problems you’re addressing are relevant, it’s also important to incorporate related stories. Stories convey meaning and help your audience emotionally connect with the content. Stories help make abstract concepts more concrete, and they help the customer discover their own story.

This works like a charm when I’m selling PropelGrowth services. Like financial services technology, marketing strategy can be abstract, and if I talk too much in the abstract, I end up confusing the audience. But if I tell stories about how we’ve helped other clients, the listener almost always responds with fresh ideas for how they can benefit from our services, and those ideas are rarely directly related to the story I just told.

Audience attention spans are short, so to keep them engaged, it’s best to structure your presentation into 10-minute chunks, and incorporate a story in each chunk to illustrate that concept.

Good Graphic Design is Critical to Conveying Meaning

If information is presented in bullet form with oral comment, typically only 10% is remembered after 3 days. But if you add meaningful pictures, images and stories, recall jumps to 65%. Instead of cramming a slide with bulleted text, use graphic design to make abstract, complex ideas concrete and simple. It’s been proven over and over that less is more in slide presentations. Don’t try to cram too much information into one slide.

why visual communication is important in sales and marketing strategies

Creating a visual lexicon of graphics to illustrate concepts can be incredibly helpful. These become hooks that visually guide your audience through the presentation and facilitate their comprehension. Epiphanies come from moments of clarity, and if you can create clarity through your graphics, you’re well on your way to helping your customer come up with heroic solutions to their business problems.

Good design focuses the eyes and mind. It entertains, expresses complicated ideas, educates, and transforms thinking much more effectively than the written word.

So to avoid sending your audience to an early death by PowerPoint, remember to make them the hero, incorporate stories, break your presentation into 10-minute chunks, and use aesthetically pleasing pictures instead of bullets to illustrate your ideas and improve retention.

Want Some Help?

If you’d like to have us take a look at your sales presentations and suggest ways you can improve them, give me a call. Mention this blog post, and we’ll give you a free 1-hour review and written assessment.

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Candyce Edelen
CEO at PropelGrowth
Candyce is the founder and CEO of PropelGrowth. She brings more than twenty years of experience in managing technology companies and has founded four companies prior to PropelGrowth. For the past ten years, Candyce has focused exclusively in the capital markets industry, launching two financial technology companies. Now, she helps financial technology vendors improve their marketing strategy, publish compelling content, and drive revenue through marketing and sales enablement. Contact Candyce at +1 970-300-2280.
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Latest posts by Candyce Edelen (see all)
  • 4 Steps to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Sales Prospecting
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Filed Under: PropelGrowth Blog, Sales and Marketing Tagged With: creative presentations, powerpoint presentations, sales presentations

About Candyce Edelen

Candyce is the founder and CEO of PropelGrowth. She brings more than twenty years of experience in managing technology companies and has founded four companies prior to PropelGrowth. For the past ten years, Candyce has focused exclusively in the capital markets industry, launching two financial technology companies. Now, she helps financial technology vendors improve their marketing strategy, publish compelling content, and drive revenue through marketing and sales enablement. Contact Candyce at +1 970-300-2280.

Company Profile

PropelGrowth helps companies improve their marketing and sales. We start with in-depth buyer research. Then we develop a marketing and sales strategy and customer-centric messaging. Then we coach your team and help you execute on the strategy by developing thought leadership programs, content for every stage in the buying process, sales collateral, and tools to help buyers buy.

Figure out why and how your buyers buy

Develop a customer-centric marketing strategy

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Recent Posts

  • 4 Steps to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Sales Prospecting
  • The Reality of Cold Calling for B2B Sales
  • Can Inbound Marketing Generate Enough Leads?
  • How to Fill Your Sales Pipeline Using LinkedIn for Prospecting
  • Tips from 8 ERP Resellers on How to Leapfrog Your Competition​
  • How to Win 74% of Your ERP Deals
  • Buyer Persona Research, the Key to Niche Marketing
  • 8 Ways a Niche Strategy Improves the Value of Your Practice

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Ft. Collins, CO 80524
+1 970.300.2280

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