I had been doing sales presentations for a long time when my boss took me to one side and started to question why my performance was not as strong as the rest of the team’s. He asked me to give him one of my standard Powerpoint presentations, to give him a better idea of what I was doing in my meetings. He wasn’t totally unimpressed by my efforts, but he thought that my use of powerpoint design could do with being updated. I hadn’t been on a course for a while and had been concentrating on the content of my presentations at the expense of the style, which is more important than I realised.
My boss sent me on a brief course which I found really useful. It really made me aware of all the tools in the program that enable you to really make your presentation into a multimedia experience that is less at risk of boring the audience to tears. I found it particularly useful thinking a bit more in depth about the visual element of my presentation. I had always included pictures, but the course highlighted how carefully these need to be considered. Rather than picking a vaguely appropriate picture to go with a statistic, it is more effective to use a pie chart or bar graph that properly reinforces the statistic.
The course also reminded me that, while Powerpoint design does allow for very technical and detailed slides, simplicity remains key. As the audience only sees each slide for a number of seconds, a hectic page is unlikely to make an impression and convey all the information on it. The classic rule that audiences can take in three points at a time is worth remembering, and extra elements such as video content should be seen in context of this. I was glad that the team at the training course also worked with me on my existing presentations, looking at how I could improve the effectiveness of the message I wanted to get across. General advice is always useful, but I really felt that I got value for money when I was able to see how much better my new presentation was than the one I would traditionally give.
When I got back to the office I was actually quite excited about showing my boss my new Powerpoint presentations! He agreed with me that they did a much better job at getting my point across, and were more interesting as well. My next sales presentations went quite well, as I was much more confident about my new presentations, I think this improved my confidence and therefore my presentation style. A bit of powerpoint design training certainly went a long way.
Please visit http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.
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