Pump Up Your Presentations to Make the Sale
By Elizabeth Hilla
You have a big sales meeting coming up. Adding some PowerPoint slides is just the ticket to make your presentation more powerful, right? Well, maybe.
PowerPoint or other software like Prezi can indeed make presentations more compelling – or they can take away from the power of your own sales pitch. The secret is building a presentation that supports your message rather than distracting from it.
Here are three important points to keep in mind when building a slide presentation:
Your slides should show, not tell
Your slides shouldn’t “tell” your sales pitch – you should. No matter how compelling your visuals are, your voice and personality remain two of your strongest assets when presenting to others. Your customers don’t want to read dry, lifeless text; otherwise, you could just drop off a flyer with pertinent product information and move on to your next sale. So use your slides to provide visual “evidence” to support what you’re saying. For example, a close-up photo of that unique product feature or a graphic showing how your customer’s stock-outs decreased thanks to your new inventory management program.
Keep it short
Too much information on a slide often causes people to focus more on reading what’s presented rather than listening to you. Add value to your overall message by creating compelling slides that feature brief insights to pique your customer’s interests. Ultimately, this will lead them to ask the important questions that you probably would have addressed anyway and for which you can assert yourself as a consultative resource.
Make your message pop
This may seem obvious, but it won’t make any difference what you present if your customers can’t see the information displayed on a screen or monitor. Use high-contrast colors for text – black or a dark-colored font on a white or light-colored background is ideal. Use large fonts for content – anything below 20-24 points is hard to read – and even larger fonts for headers. Similarly, be careful about using statistical tables or graphs; often, the original text from these sources will get compressed when transferred into a presentation. If you need to use these to support your point, provide the same information in a handout as well.
In this fast-paced healthcare selling environment, customers are looking for information just as much as they are listening for it. An effective presentation can be one of your most useful selling tools if it conveys the right data that resonates with customer needs and visibly demonstrates product capabilities. Enhance your pitch by outlining the key take-home messages for those whom you are trying to persuade, and ultimately you will have more staying power long after you’ve left the building.