5 tips to make a more Professional Company Presentation

At the end of every college year, companies start brushing up their presentations to make it more professional and interesting. Their aim is to get the best of new talent and they compete with companies from across industries for this.

Here are 5 tips on how to make your presentation really stands out and attract maximum new employees.

1.       Use professional presentation templates

Many times managers find it is convenient to use the existing presentation with modified data. Company presentations have too much space allocated to logo and color related branding. The people you present to will get their impression of your company based on the quality of presentation you use. Low quality images, poor opening slides, unprofessional ppt backgrounds etc. reflect badly on your company. Check online on sites like BuyAPresentation for professional ppt templates that truly reflect what your company is about – from title images to slide backgrounds to diagrams.

2.       Sell your company

A company presentation is not just about your company, but also about the audience. Include slides that will tell them what they can expect when they join you. This will ensure that they attend the company interviews with interest. Tell them what is unique about the company, how their career will progress. Give them examples of people who have done well with you.

3.       Dress to reflect your company

It is not just about the slides and the presentation template. You also reflect your company image.  Dress the way you would dress to work on a good day. If your company  is professional one, wear a suit, if it is about fun and being laid back, wear what feels comfortable.

4.       Prepare for question and answer questions

While a professional company presentation covers basics like salary, locations and career paths, potential employees are bound to have questions beyond that. Leave enough space in the allocated time so that you can interact with them and answer their questions.

5.       Leave behind

Those really interested in your presentation will want to follow up by looking up sources. Give them websites, books, references where they can look up to know more about your company.

As you can see, a company presentation is not a simple information presentation. The slides and the presenter need to be geared to treat it as a sales presentation.  Even if the presentation is being made internally to people who have just joined the organization, it needs to go beyond just providing information. Every company presentation is a professional sales presentation and needs to be treated as such.

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!

What do your slides say about you?

Here are some pictures of people. Please take a sheet of paper and answer the 2 questions for each person below:

      1. Do you expect the person to honor his commitment.

      2. Will you trust the person with your money?

Finished writing your answers? Good.

Now, what made you to come up with those views? You haven’t seen their faces. You haven’t met them personally. Then, on what did you base your opinion?

Yes. You made a guess based on their attire. 

As a sales presenter, it is important to realize that your attire speaks a lot about you, even before you utter a word. Your customer forms his opinion about your dependability, professionalism and trustworthiness in the first few seconds of your meeting him.

If you create an unfavorable impression in your first 6 seconds with him, you need to work extra hard for the remainder of your presentation. So, what is the action point?

Spend that extra money and buy yourself a really smart outfit. It is one of the finest investments you can make as a presenter. Let your attire pre-sell for you. Let your presence build the trust. 

When you look dependable, you will sound dependable. 

Another important point;

It is not enough if YOU look professional and your slides look like they are made by an amateur in a hurry. Your slides are the outfit for your thoughts. Make them look professional.

Spend that little extra to buy a set of professional templates for your slides. It is possible for you to transform your usual bullet point slides into professional slides in a matter of 15 minutes when you use the right templates. 

 

I recommend that you visit www.buyapresentation.com and take a look at their presentation template sets. The templates are made by business professionals with exceptional design sense. They have the world’s widest range of animated concept templates for sales and marketing presenters. 

Go and explore the options. Happy selling!

How many slides are ideal in a sales presentation?

When I conduct a Presentation workshop for sales and marketing professionals, the one question I always get is – How many slides should you use in a presentation? 

The opinion ranges from 3 slides to 25 slides. 

The reality is that there is no study that suggests that short presentations are more successful than long presentations or vice versa. But, there are a couple of suggestions about slides to help you make clear and convincing presentations.

Suggestion 1: Don’t spread a single idea over multiple slides

I have seen presentations that drive the audience crazy by dividing a single sentence over multiple slides. What is more, in these types of presentations – the presenter keeps moving the slides at break neck speed, while reading the sentence to the audience. Unless you wish to insult your audience’s ability to read English, don’t use this method in your sales presentations. 

It always helps to put all the relevant elements of an idea onto one slide, so that the audience can see the connection. If you divide your message into multiple slides, the audience needs to strain their memory to recollect the details of the previous slides. 

Suggestion 2: Don’t put more than one idea on a slide

A slide is like a paragraph in a novel or newspaper. You should always start a new paragraph for a new thought. In the same way start a new slide to convey a new thought in a presentation. 

This ensures that audience gets the time to absorb your ideas completely, and build their understanding in gradual steps. It also allows you to use meaningful diagrams to convey your ideas visually.

So, crunching your entire sales presentation into 2 slides – is NOT a great idea.

Conclusion

When you follow these two suggestions, you will automatically come up with the right number of slides for your professional presentations. 

Remember what matters is whether you are able to influence your customers to make a purchase decision, by giving them sufficient information. It doesn’t matter how many slides you use.

Happy selling!