Presentation Design Agency is key to a great bid

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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Powerpoint presentations that sparkle

powerpoint presentations have long been a double-edged sword. Good sales presentations using decent Powerpoint design can be a great asset to a company. A poor presentation, put together by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, can be a liability.

One of the issues with Powerpoint, as well as its advantage, is that it is so easy to use. Without any training, someone with basic computer literacy can put together a slideshow without too much trouble. It’s extremely powerful, allowing you to embed all kinds of different graphics, movies, audio and other effects. So much is built in that a speaker hoping to make a good impression can really go to town, incorporating as many as possible of its toys.

This, however, is often a serious mistake. Powerpoint design is a fairly fine art. Like any audio-visual medium, doing it well is difficult. Just because you can put together a brochure with desktop publishing software, or a home movie with a video camera, doesn’t mean that the outcome will convince the audience.

Worse, Powerpoint is so common in the business world that there is often the expectation that it will be used – both on the part of the audience and the speaker. That means that presentations can be thrown together simply to fulfil that expectation. Whilst well-designed powerpoint presentations can add a whole extra dimension to a speech, giving complementary information and appealing to listeners for whom the spoken word isn’t a natural medium, a poor presentation will turn people off. Put another way, not having a Powerpoint presentation is better than having a bad one. This can hamstring otherwise competent speakers, because they find that the slideshow actually detracts from what they are saying. This is never more the case when it simply repeats the material verbatim – a mistake that is all too common.

The purpose of sales presentations is to close a deal. Good Powerpoint design can help you with this; bad Powerpoint design can end up losing you the bid. If you are in any doubt, compare a few successful presentations – yours or other companies’ – with others that haven’t gone so well. What has been the difference? Where Powerpoint adds to clear and effective communication, it is an asset. Where is makes things more complicated and distracting, it’s best left out. The trick is finding out how to do it well, every time.

Please visit http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Powerpoint design – a key tool in the business world

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.

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Telepresence video conferencing uses the most advanced communications technology available

The future of video conferencing has arrived. Audio visual conferencing has progressed in leaps and bounds since its inception, which arguably dates back to the late 1930s, when the German Post Office (Reich Postzentralamt) successfully created a network in several cities. These connections featured closed circuit television systems, which were connected by cables. Since then a technique was developed, chiefly by NASA on the first manned space flights, to link televisual information using radio frequency links. This is the type of link, still used today, by news teams to deliver reports from distant locations. This kind of communication is all very well and good for high profile media presenters, or space expeditions, but it can scarcely be viable for businesses, educational purposes, or telemedicine practices: it is simply far too dear. telepresence video conferencing, as we think of it today, uses much more economical technology, and so it is much more accessible to businesses and individuals throughout the world.

A good visual link enables you to communicate remotely to the fullest extent possible – visually and verbally. But the road to having the sufficient level of technology to achieve this has not been easy, since there have been a number of difficulties that have made things hard. In the 1980s a breakthrough was made when developers used Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) digital telephony transmission networks to support compressed audio and visual transmissions, with some amount of success. In the 1990s, however, video conferencing built on Internet Protocol (IP) became available, which amounted to a revolution in the industry. This is because among the implications was the fact that televisual communications on personal computers was now a possibility, and the race to release a widely available software solution had started.

Today, audio visual conferencing solutions are available left, right and centre, from the free, albeit relatively low quality, Skype and iChat webcam plugin services to high-end telepresence video conferencing firms dealing with large multi-national companies. A huge range of solutions are available, and can be catered to the individual needs of any business. Video conferencing is said to be the way forward for global communications in the future, so some communications companies are competing to stay on top of the game as far as the technology is concerned. In an age where virtually everybody in the western world already seems to have mobile telephones, it seems only a matter of time before we are all communicating with mobile video technology as well.

Please visit http://www.edgevision.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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