Apr 11, 2022
Whether your potential customer buys from you or the competition depends significantly on the quality of your sales pitch! An effective sales presentation tells a story, highlights your value proposition, underscores your point of difference and carefully aligns your customer’s needs with your offerings.
The quality of your sales presentation and its effectiveness will determine the outcome on whether or not you close the deal. In this article, we will share five proven tips that can help you design, produce, and deliver a moving sales presentation – a presentation that gives your customer a reason to care, to listen, to engage, and most importantly a reason to buy.
1. Do Your Homework
Now that you’ve created the next revolutionary product or service, it’s time to get it to market and bring customers aboard. One of the most critical parts of any sales presentation is to get organized. As a presentation creator, you must draft and organize all the details and materials well ahead of creating the slides. A sales presentation is incomplete if it fails to highlight any of the pointers, such as what you intend to sell, the competition, the market, and the customer.
Before you jump on to PowerPoint and start creating your next sales presentation, you should sit back, collect and streamline the above requisites. Start with the product, know what you’re selling and explore it inside and out. Further, you should move on and research the competition. This involves identifying the advertisement literature, discovering strengths and weaknesses, and capturing market information. Lastly, you should become acquainted with the customer, their problems, and how your solution can be the best fit.
2. Leverage PowerPoint Templates
Once you’ve got all the information handy, it’s time to transform it into an effective sales presentation. Now when it comes to creating a captivating and winning sales pitch, presenters can leverage ready-to-use PowerPoint templates. Specifically created to help you cast a lasting impression on the corporate audience, business-ready free PowerPoint templates can help you close more deals than ever. Not only do these templates encompass pixel-perfect design, professional layouts, but ease of use and quick customization as well.
Presenters should note that their sales pitch should be able to capture the interest of stakeholders at a moment’s glance. Here, ordinary or stock PowerPoint templates may fail to entice the audience. Leveraging out-of-the-box and interactive PowerPoint design ideas can help you elucidate the information better, get your message across the room & cast a lasting impression in your next sales meeting. Hence, focus on creating quality content for your slides while worrying less about slide design and layouts with readymade PowerPoint templates.
3. Set a Clear Agenda
When you start creating your winning sales presentation, the primary focus should be assembling a crisp and clear agenda. Sharing & setting the agenda for your sales pitch helps stakeholders and potential prospects recognize your professionalism, set you apart in terms of communication, and make them aware that you intend to respect their time. The step helps you build rapport with the audience which goes a long way in achieving presentation success.
Further, the agenda makes sure that the meeting is on track concerning areas to be covered and that all the involved individuals understand what is happening and what’s next. Not just that, when you set an agenda, the attendees have the luxury of seeing the listed items at all times, and they can gain more awareness from it. Hence, before you start pitching to investors, venture capitalists, or board members, you should take time beforehand and clarify the plan and purpose through agenda-setting.
4. Keep the Focus on “Showing” Rather than “Telling”
Often PowerPoint presenters overwhelm their slides by including a ton of information. This can either be in the form of never-ending text paragraphs or a series of non-exhaustive numbers. Presenters should note that the goal of the presentation should be educating and influencing the audience, not putting you out of the picture. Your slides should complement what you say with relevant information. This is where visuals come in handy!
Presentation creators can get their hands on interactive, professional-looking visual imagery such as 3D charts, graphs, infographics, and slide themes that bring life to the information. We all have heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. It is relevant for your presentations as well! Transforming random text into compelling visuals can help your audience understand the content better, generate key inference, and stay engaged, at all times! Further, this will also help you keep the slides clutter-free.
5. Establish an Emotional Connection with Your Brand Story
It doesn’t matter who your audience is or what you intend to sell, storytelling is such an art that can help presenters entertain, educate, influence, and engage the audience. Especially for salespeople, being a good storyteller is good for relations. Infusing your sales pitch with persuasive, memorable, or inspirational anecdotes can help you woo your prospects and initiate a successful call-to-action (CTA).
The goal is to transform presentation delivery into a memorable storytelling experience for the audience. If done right, you can allow the audience to resonate with your products or services better, earn their trust and make it personal, real & relatable for your audience. Further, don’t forget to leverage metaphors to create a strong impression. The more immersed the audience becomes in your sales presentation, the more likely they are to buy into the pitch.
Wrapping It Up
An ideal sales presentation helps the audience develop trust in you, your services, and your business. A carefully designed sales pitch has the potential to draw a line between a closed sales deal or a missed opportunity. In times like today when there is cut-throat competition between companies offering similar services and products, an out-of-the-box sales pitch can help you stand out and do wonders for your business objectives.
If you want more tips and tactics on how to close more deals and win more new customers this year, let’s have a conversation. And as always, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me @toprightpartner, or if you want to go deep on transformational marketing, order a copy of my new book, Marketing, Interrupted.