Free eBook 20 ways to improve your business presentation skills

Download Free ebook on 20 Ways To Improve Your Business Presentation Skills.

 

This ebook contains the following topics: 

. 40

A) Creating content for a winning business presentation   
1)    The power of a 10 minute analysis   
2)    How to create a Pitch Table   
3)    What if your sales pitch is allowed just for 2 minutes?   
4)    Hunt for selling points – day   
5)    Is your business presentation Romance or Thriller?   

B) Creating better slides for a winning business presentation   
6)    Are you making flea market slides   
7)    What do your slides say about you?   
8)    Your childhood habits may kill your presentations   
9)    Don’t trigger the ‘Scan it’ button   
10)    How many slides are ideal in a sales presentation?   
11)    Is it possible to use Presentation Templates?   
12)    How to crunch your number of slides with concept diagrams?   
13)    Using concept diagrams   
14)    Zen slides can kill your sales presentations   
15)    Present with simple diagrams   
16)    The curious case of an invisible presenter   

C) Creating the mindset for winning business presentation   
17)    Are you asking your audience to throw you out   
18)    Tips for a better handshake   
19)    Don't get too close to your customers   
20)    5 ways to sell yourself in a business presentation 

10 Minutes To A Great Presentation

As a business presenter, you are always faced with deadlines to create your presentations. How can you create good quality presentations quickly? Here is a simple three step process:

1.       Start creating a mind dump:

It is very tempting to spend time waiting to get inspiration to start creating your presentations. A cup of coffee to ‘get you in the mood’ turns into a chat on the phone that goes on forever. Alternatively, many presenters open up their presentation software, select a standard presentation template and wait for a flash of inspiration.

Stop wasting your time, and realize that there is no shortcut to great ideas. You need to generate a lot of ideas for your presentations reject the poor ones and go ahead with the good ones. There is no way to bypass this process. 

So, when you need to create your next presentation, here is what you do. Get a piece of paper and start noting down all your ideas on the sheet. Do not ‘think’ at this point. Just focus on exhausting all your thoughts on the subject. 

Soon, you will reach a point where you either start repeating your points or draw a blank. That is the time to pause and take a look at all the thoughts you have noted down. 

2.       Club related ideas under various headings:

You would see that a number of points in your thought dump are related in some way. Start clubbing them together by giving each group a headline to represent the nature of the points. For example – features like push back seats, ample leg space and thick cushion can all be clubbed under ‘Seating comfort’. 

3.       Arrange the headings into a coherent story:

The last step is to arrange your various headings into a coherent story. This story is the ‘outline’ of your presentation. Start noting down the relevant data and the images you need to explain each heading. Once you have the outline, it doesn’t take much effort to convert it into slides. 

This method helps you to see the big picture first, before you start creating your slides. So, your presentation will have a clear flow.  I recommend you use professional presentation templates to reduce your time even further. BuyAPresentation.com is one such site that provides templates to help sales and marketing presenters to reduce time. 

You can crash the time for creating your presentation, from many hours to a few minutes.

The additional benefit is that you can get all your approvals for your content based on your outline, instead of your slide deck. Thus, you avoid the painful rework of your presentations. 

Hope you found the method useful. Happy presenting!

Is it possible to use Presentation Templates?

Is it possible to use Presentation Templates?

Every presentation is unique. The ideas are unique. Is it possible to use readymade presentation templates to make your slides? 

First, take a moment to get back to your childhood days. Do you remember how they used to make wooden furniture those days?

A team of carpenters would cut, drill and polish individual pieces of wood, to make a table or chair. It would take days of hard work. It was impossible to imagine making furniture any other way.

Nowadays, when you order a table over the internet, the table arrives in a cardboard box. You unpack and fit the various pieces in the boxes, to create a table in minutes. Modular furniture has changed our living rooms, our kitchen and our lives. 

In the same way, it is possible to create high quality presentations by assembling relevant templates in a meaningful way. It only requires you to see your presentation as a set of ‘modules’. That is all.

Take a look at the slide decks you prepared in the last few presentations. You will notice that you used a set of standard ‘modules’ to make your presentation. You used an opening slide, an agenda, a process flow, a timeline, a transition slide etc. The content may have been different, but the modules remained more or less the same. 

When you realize this simple fact, you can reduce your time for preparing your presentations and produce professional slides in a matter of minutes..

How to use templates in your presentations?

It is very simple. Start with your usual bullet point slides. See the way the points are related to each other. Is the relationship a process flow, a time line, a list? Then, choose an appropriate template from the template set. ‘Cut – Paste’ text from your bullet points to the simple diagrams in the templates. 

Since the templates are professionally animated already, you can present your ideas in stages to avoid information overload. The whole process of transforming your bullet point slides into professional slides using templates - doesn’t take more than 15 minutes. But, the results are stunning. Look at the videos at http://www.buyapresentation.com/apps/videos/ to see how easy the process is and the kind of change you can make.

Needless to say, you need to use premium templates from a trusted source. I recommend you to use www.buyapresentation.com. They have a wide range of unique animated PowerPoint® templates for sales and marketing presentations. You can explain your concepts and ideas easily using their diagram templates (which is the best in the category). You can learn about how to express your ideas visually by downloading their free ‘180 degree shift’ e-book. 

Take a minute to visit the site, and you will never make slides the same old boring way again. Happy selling!

How to create a pitch table - BuyAPresentation

How to create a pitch table - BuyAPresentation

Influencing customers is tough

If you have been in sales for a while, you would realize that, it is one thing to know a lot of information about your product, and completely another thing to know how to use that information to influence your customers.

What is a pitch table?

A pitch table enables you to see your information as an answer to the 4 critical questions in the minds of your customers. The 4 questions that a pitch table addresses are:

1. What concerns of your customers are solved by your product?
2. What features of your product solve those concerns?
3. What is unique about the features of your product compared to the alternatives available?
4. What is the proof for your claims?

Since these are the questions that a customer considers intuitively before making a purchasing decision, having the information available in one readily accessible table is extremely useful.

An Example

I have tried to construct a ‘Pitch table’, for our product - ‘Premium Animated Powerpoint templates for Sales and Marketing professionals’ as an example.

To give you a quick background about the product:

Our customers are sales and marketing professionals. They have excellent products and ideas that make a difference to their customers’ lives. But, they don’t have the time, or the design expertise to create professional looking POWERPOINT™ slides to convey those ideas powerfully, and make a lasting impression in their customers’ minds. With our premium, animated POWERPOINT™ templates, we help them win business. Now, they can spend their time to think and add value to their customers, instead of spending time on designing their slides, to get a professional look.

This is how the table looks:

What the various benefits of a ‘Pitch table’?

This table gives you all the information you need to convince your customers at a single glance, so it serves as your ready reference to address any type of customer objections. 

You can even arrange the points in the table to appeal to specific segments of your customers. That way, the information can be helpful to start a conversation with your customers.

You can use the information to write an email to your customers, like – ‘The 5 reasons why our service is different and better than any other alternative.

So, start making your pitch table. It is the starting point for all your sales presentations. Happy selling!

Converting verbose slides into simple diagrams - BuyAPresentation

Converting verbose slides into simple diagrams - BuyAPresentation

  A few months back I met up with one of my friends who sells mission critical software to financial institutions.  His pet peeve is that in his industry sales cycles are very long and the competition is tough. It is difficult to get the decision makers to sit through a presentation.

As my company is into presentations, he discussed his problems with me.

 He said, “These sales presentations are killing me. I just don’t have the time to sit and make ‘good looking’ slides.”

He is quite an expert in his field and knows his banking and software inside out. But his problem is in translating that knowledge to slides that convince his audience.

This is what I told him. 

 

First off, most presenters don’t realize that, creating apresentation involves two very different types of activities that demand two different skill sets: 
1.      Ideating the content for your presentation

•  Ideating effectively requires a strategic bent ofmind, a thorough understanding of the situation at hand, practical ideas tosuggest alternatives, and a clear vision to drive execution.

2.      Translating the content into effective slides

• Slides need to hold your audience’s attention and influence their purchasing decision.

• To translate effectively, you need visual thinking,design sense, knowledge of the presentation software and loads of time

As you can see, the two are very different skill sets, and itis not fair to expect a presenter excel in both.

But, unfortunately – the market doesn’t care about that reality. A lot of wonderful ideas get completely ignored by the audience, just because the presenter could not translate his ideas into an effective presentation. On the other hand, beautiful ‘Zen slides’ may entertain theaudience, but not deliver the results.
Let us try to address this problem.
If I look at the above two skills – ideating and translating, it seems your job is more to do with ideating than translating. You are paid to think about the strategies that work, anticipate the moves of your competition and devise plans to counter their attack.
The second part of the work, is about translating and requires specialized technical skills and time.Unless you have years of specialized experience, it is not possible to createprofessional and clear slides in a short time.
My friend agreed to this and said, “I realized the issue, so I hired a graphic designer to rework my slides. But, it didn’t really work out. The slides looked good, but the message was lost. “
For which I said:
There are 2 ways in which presenters try to address this translation issue:
1.     Hire graphic designers: There are 2 issues with this.

• They are expensive and time-consuming
• There is always a huge gap between what you have in mind, and what a graphic designer comes up with on his slides.  Though the slides look ‘beautiful’, they do not help you make your point effectively. This is because most graphic designers specialize in print media. The rules that apply to print are very different from the rules that apply to slides.

2.  Get free presentation templates: The issues here are different:

• These free templatesare in reality just some gaudy backgrounds. The designs are not veryprofessional.
• They add verylittle in terms of providing clarity to your message

My recommendation to him and to you is to visit our site www.buyapresentation.com and take a look at the concepts and diagrams templates. They offer value to you because:
1.      Created by professionals, for professionals:The templates are created by professionals with years of corporate experience and a flair for design. They understand what you need as sales and marketing professionals to make your presentations effective.
2.      Unique templates with diagrams and concepts to help add clarity: There is a whole range of templates to help you explain all the concepts in your presentations. Each template is professionally animated and is editable to save you time.
3.      Reasonably priced: They are very reasonably priced at a $1 or less per template.
When you make a one time investment on the Mega Pack and download the folder to your desktop, you can create insightful presentations quickly and for years to come.

Isn’t that a smart thing to do as a sales and marketing presenter - use someone else’s technical expertise with your ideas? Go try it. Happy selling!