PowerPoint gets a bad rap when it comes to business presentations. Here’s how to transform yours to impress your boss or to increase sales:
- Know what your audience needs. The worst thing you can do is talk for 30 minutes on the wrong subject. Before you write your presentation, check out who will be attending the event and what they want to get from your talk. Put the aim at the start of your PowerPoint slide deck and ask the audience if they have any questions.
- Super structure. Always tell it in three parts – make sure you simplify the contents list to three key elements. It makes it easy for your audience to work out where they are in the presentation plus you can signpost each part. Try using “who, what, when” or “ends, ways and means” to help frame your talk.
- Get the audience’s attention with a story. Cut as many words out of your presentation as you can and instead give your audience a single and engaging image per subject. Use a photo to start the story and get over your point with a real life example. If you have slide after slide of detail, maybe you need to find a different way to get over the information?
- Use the Glisser add-in for PowerPoint. Glisser’s a ground breaking new extension connects you to your audience, giving you live Q&A and a Twitter stream within the presentation view. Real-time polls can be added by dragging and dropping into place between your slides. Your audience can view live slides via a URL and interact with you on their smartphone. All interactions are logged with audience email addresses, making sales follow-ups painless.
- Punch line. Your audience have sat and listened to you. What do you want them to do next? Like a lawyer in a courtroom summing up, you need to summarise what you have told the audience and tell them why and what you want to do next.