Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Secrets of a prese
ion designer
Introduction
Sales presentations are a vital part of business, especially as our world becomes more and more virtual and technology-focused each day. There are many different factors to consider when designing, producing, and performing a sales presentation, and often it is hard to decide which presentation tactics are necessary and valuable and which ones are not. Throughout this eBook, professional presentation designer Jan Schultink provides an abundance of presentation knowledge and key tips in order to help ease your fears when creating your next presentation. By the time you finish, you will be wishing you read this eBook years ago.
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This book was created based on two presentations that professional presentation designer Jan Schultink gave at two SalesCrunch presentations at NYU in New York, April 2011. Slide design, eBook layout, and original content by Idea Transplant. Text transliteration and editing by SalesCrunch. The content of this book is licensed under a creative commons license: it is OK to use it, as long as you give us credit. Please do not sell (part of) the content of this free eBook. If you think that any of the images used in this book infringe on copyright, please notify us via contact@ideatransplant.com. Idea Transplant is a professional presentation design firm based in Tel Aviv, but serving clients all over the world. Visit blog.ideatransplant.com for almost daily advice that can make you a better presentation designer. SalesCrunch is a social selling platform that that takes sales from fuzzy art to repeatable process by capturing, measuring, tracking & training the sales process across the organization. For more information goto www.salescrunch.com
Your challenge
The key to presentations is really a simple rule: Make sure your PowerPoint does not look like PowerPoint!
If you have achieved that, youre already on your way to a good presentation.
IMAGES
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BULLET POINTS
No bullet points!
Possibly the most important rule is this one: Do not use bullet points. Set yourself a challenge of eliminating any bullet points at all in your PowerPoint presentation; it is perfectly possible to design a great presentation without them. The use of bullet points is an unpleasant practice in presentation design.
No bullet points!
! ! ! ! ! !
By the time I have nished Reading out these bullets to you You read them already plus Managed to check all your Emails on your blackberry and Even sent a few responses
This image best explains why. People in the audience can read bullet points much faster than you could possibly read those same bullet points to them, so this is not a way to excite an audience or get your audience excited about your messages. Once the audience figures out you are a presenter who will just read the slides top to bottom, they will direct their attention away from you and start doing something else. Its incredibly boring and not an efficient use of their time.
No bullet points!
Read letters Construct words Construct sentences Deduct meaning Store impression
Theres a reason for this in psychology and neurology. A bullet point basically means we have to read the letters, construct the words, make a sentence, create an impression and finally the idea gets stored in your brain it takes a lot of work. Why not instead create a shortcut and go straight to the end by using images to make your point?
Short cut?
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Emotional shortcuts
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iStockPhoto
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Flickr CC
Flick/AlexKess
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Proportions
White space
Here is an important concept called whitespace, where a large part of the image of the slide is actually left blank or empty. People always see this as an opportunity and feel the need to fill the space with information. Presentation of a slide can be much more powerful when the slides are actually left blank. Often people object and say they have a restriction My boss said I could have only 10 slides, or Half of the slide is completely empty, I can make this presentation look a lot better by just filling it up with as much information as possible. My advice would be to ignore that limitation but stick to the other important constraint your time limit.
White space
Even if you choose not to align at all, the worst thing is when you attempt to align and things are just slightly off. Simply find your alignment button in PowerPoint to fix your objects
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We have momentum!
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Data charts
Here is an example of a poor chart that can be improved dramatically. There are a number of violations: the double axis, the very small labels, the tick marks. Additionally, the colors of the bars do not match the color scheme, and the item that the chart is actually depicting (revenue in millions of dollars) is small and written at the bottom of the slide. The whole thing is cluttered, messy, and not very clear. The slide is also using 3 dimensional graphics, which makes it harder to read. Just because Powerpoint can do these things (add 3D graphics and shading, etc.) does not always mean that you have to use it in your presentation.
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Data charts
Instead, in your data charts you should use much calmer slides that really focus on the message you would like to give. Utilize one row of numbers, calm colors, and keep everything in harmony. The above image is an example of a good data chart: the right colors, rounded numbers, simple messages. It is very similar to the charts you would find in magazines such as The Economist and newspapers such as the New York Times. Data charts should be simple, clean, and just focus on one trend. You can tell that there is one clear message.
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Consistent colors
Theres a different way to create your look and feel. Its very simple: use your colors consistently. Which colors you use is a very personal taste, but at least pick a few colors and keep them consistent in your template. There are many good software tools you can use in order to get your color schemes. Adobe Kuler allows you to upload an image and then the program will just extract color codes for you. If you are part of an established company, you will probably be using the colors that are part of the companys logo. Its just a matter of programming the color codes in your PowerPoint template and then
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STORIES
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We will summarize item 1 to 4 We will present item 1 We will present item 2 We will present item 3 We will present item 4 We will summarize item 1 to 4
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Build a story
The better approach is to build a story. Stories are much more interesting. Here is a short one just 6 words written by Ernest Hemmingway: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. When you read this sentence immediately your mind grows curious and tries to fill in the missing parts Wait a minute. Whats happening with that baby? What happened? Your mind wants to fill in missing pieces and learn more about it, so it gets excited and intrigued by a storyline. This is the exact opposite of pounding in and repeating facts until the brain gives up the resistance. Here the brain actually wants to learn. You have more questions and are more interested, and this is something that definitely can be leveraged in a presentation.
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Spatial memory
The memory in the brain likes to put things in a framework in a story, in a 3d space, in a room. You can see this effect when you run a brainstorming session in front of a whiteboard. You completely fill the space up in a span of 2 hours and take a snapshot, and when you look at the same image three or four weeks later, you probably are able to remember the entire richness of that particular discussion very, very accurately. And not because you managed to read the comments on the page - but somehow your brain has given the content of discussion a two-dimensional space and stored the entire richness of the discussion back in your mind. This is how we remember things: we put things in two or three-dimensional spaces.
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Frankensteining
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Go analogue
Shut down PowerPoint and take a piece of paper and go analog. Start from scratch and dont even look at your business plan. Try to tell your story in 20 minutes to a friend without any visual help and listen to what came out during that time. What did I put first? What did I spend time on? What didnt I spend time on? Where did I find the urge to take a pencil and draw a very simple diagram just to show how things work? This is a very good starting point to creating the natural flow of a story that comes to you if youre not restricted by PowerPoint bullets or a framework that you learned Mindmapping can be an excellent tool to support this initial phase of presentation design.
CONTENT
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Meeting
The actual sales meeting is only part of the input a client uses to decide whether to buy your product or service. There are other factors and emotional influences. Before or after the presentation, the client can view your website or play around with a demo - facts are taken care of usually through these or other ways. This basically will show them how you are and how it would be like to do business with you. The impressions your client gets is irrespective of the content written on your slides. The customers impressions of you can be very subtle yet can make or break the deal.
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Avoid buzzwords
Whenever you ask a salesperson what they are about, many times they simply throw tons of buzzwords at you. They dont really stick into peoples minds and oftentimes are not very meaningful. Below is an example. Salespeople think that because they have only a limited amount of time, they need to load up with all the buzzwords or all the hottest terms in technology, throw them all at you and state that this is what we are. After this enormous storm of information nothing actually has really impacted the customer. It was just a lot of noise.
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p tap tapper de tap tap tap tap tapper de tap tap tap
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A revolutionary device that will disrupt the media value chain while delivering a great and seamless customer experience 10,000 songs in your pocket
The perfect example is the almost-clich slogan by Apple 10,000 songs in your pocket. For the same product, however, a strategy consultant or sales manager would instead provide something along the lines of the first statement above. Apple could have said, We have this great service and its going to disrupt the media value chain and bring great benefits to all consumers. You can easily see the difference between the two statements and how will they speak very differently to the client. Make sure your slogan is very specific - just a snappy and short sentence.
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Addletters.com
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Multiple audiences
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Maintain momentum
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This number
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This number
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This number
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This is probably the most important thing you can do before any sales presentation: rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. It is rumored that Steve Jobs spends three full-time working days rehearsing a big product announcement presentation. Steve jobs is a great presenter and you will be too if you spend three whole days rehearsing your deck. Your presentation will be pretty high quality after all that practice. Its a strange contradiction, but you actually have to be completely on top of your content in order to be spontaneous. Spontaneous does not mean winging your presentation. You need to completely know your content and only then will you come across as a great spontaneous presenter.
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Planned nish
Cut off
Key point
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Cut buzzw
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Analog
Images
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bullets No
Align
Stories
Emotion
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