Powerpoint presentations are a mainstay of corporate bids, and just about any meeting that looks to influence your audience. Sales presentations are given in their thousands, day in, day out. So what distinguishes the outstanding ones, the five or ten percent that really wow people, from the majority that are forgotten almost before they are done? The answer is Powerpoint design. It’s something that is apparently so simple that many businesses don’t give any real thought to it. The software is accessible enough for anyone to use. The problem is that it’s challenging to use well, and all too often that shows  both in the presentations themselves and your audiences reactions.

As a general rule, Powerpoint slideshows are provided as a bolt-on extra to spoken presentations. In other words, the speech is written first, using all of the sales material and research you would expect for an accomplished pitch. This is where the real work goes in. But then the slideshow that goes with it is put together afterwards, typically without a lot of work. It’s treated as something thats there because it’s expected (can you imagine a sales presentation without a Powerpoint slideshow…?).

This is a big mistake. Often the accompanying Powerpoint presentation adds nothing: it just restates what is being said. The outcome is worse than if there was no visual presentation. It distracts the audience from what you are saying, offering no benefit in return.

The real challenge is to use Powerpoint design to communicate in a way that complements your sales presentations, providing facts and insights that cannot be communicated in the spoken word. There’s a maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words. Powerpoint is great for projecting graphs and pie charts, the bottom line that is complex or tedious when written down but possible to take in at a glance in this format. Powerpoint presentations appeal to a different level of communication. People generally take in information best in one form. That might be on a descriptive, intellectual level (your detailed spoken presentation). It might be on an emotional level (which you can tap into with stories, film and illustrations). Or it could be on an instinctive level, where everything is pre-digested and presented in easy-to-read format for immediate consumption and assessment. Powerpoint is best used as a supporting tool in a presentation that has been carefully crafted to meet all of these learning types.

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