How you can make your sales presentations “pitch-perfect”

Today’s fierce sales market means you must be creative in how you present your goods or services. How you show the value of your products or services may be just as important as what you are selling.

Your sales presentation is the perfect opportunity to impress your audience by showing how your product or service will solve their problems and persuade them to buy. But don’t rely on just one slide or a specific sequence of slides to do this. Instead, incorporate multiple ways throughout your presentation that illustrate the value of what you’re offering.

Center your audience for the sales presentation

Numbers, products, and services are all well and good, but a great sales presentation is about more than that. It’s about making your audience feel good about choosing you.

You’ve heard the advice—always put your audience first. But it’s not enough to just tell yourself that. You have to do it. Because a good sales presentation isn’t about you; it’s about your audience. And everything in your presentation should be designed to address their needs, interests, and concerns. Here are three ways to make sure you always focus on them:

01 Show them you get it

Don’t just spit out some industry facts and expect them to be wowed. Put the information in context, so they can see how your product or solution is a perfect fit for their challenges.

02 Speak their language

If your audience is data-driven, give them visualizations and infographics. If they want a story, swap your charts and numbers for “to-the-point” bullet points.

03 Respect your clients’ time

They have other things to do besides listening to you, so keep your messages clear, concise, and direct.

Your prospective client is probably expecting a boring presentation from another sales rep rambling on about their product or service and how they are the best. Don’t give in to that expectation. Break the mold from the very onset with something attention-grabbing.

The start of your presentation should be exciting and engaging. Give your audience something to remember, such as an opening statement that demonstrates how market trends, industry transformation, or societal change create an overwhelming need for your product or service.

Master the art of storytelling: in a sales presentation, you need to do more than simply recite product details and recite facts and figures. To sell your product or service, you need to get the “why” behind it. Storytelling helps with this because our brains are built to remember stories.

Storytelling is a powerful way to show change over time. For example, rather than saying, “Improvements to the new Widget model,” you could say, “Over the last year, we made five improvements to our new Widget model. Here’s how those changes have helped you.”

And remember that to give presentation design the effort and attention it deserves. Effective presentation design enhances your presentation, not distracts from it.

To put together an effective presentation design, follow these steps:

Be bold

Make slides that speak for themselves and show that you’re confident.

Add some drama

Don’t just add pictures to your slides; use breaks for powerful imagery instead. Give them something they didn’t expect.

Keep things simple

This is probably the most reiterated advice and yet the least heeded. Remember, your content is your most important asset, so don’t let anything get in the way of people understanding it.

You don’t have to be a sales pro to give a persuasive presentation, but you do need to focus on your audience and make sure they understand what you’re saying. By honing your content, simplifying your design, and keeping things clear and concise, you can put together a sales pitch that will leave any room full of people feeling like they just had a great conversation with an old friend.

If you don’t have the time to do all that and want someone else to take care of your sales presentation design headache then reach out to us at Prezlab. We love sharing great insights around presentation design and if you don’t believe us, check out some of our other blogs such as McKinsey-style business presentations and How to avoid the dreaded “Death by PowerPoint.”