White Papers: Interactivity in PowerPoint - Key to Effective Sales Presentations

Some of the well-known key pointers for a successful presentation are:

- Understand needs and interests of the audience through meaningful conversation
- Gain attention, channel it to build engagement and get the audience actively involved
- Render complex information in a simple story-telling way
- Dynamically change the flow and content of the presentation to suit the audience requirements

Sales presentations which are one-way speeches attempting to describe products or services, and emphasize benefits are often not useful. In such presentations, the sales people may miss out on the fact that some portion of the information can be irrelevant or uninteresting to the audience. Silent participants may become obstacles to sales because they may disagree with the general message or misunderstand the offerings.

Sales presenters therefore try to enhance their presentations by including graphics, animations and special effects to the presentation. However, visually overpowering presentations do not go beyond creating the first impression.

“Interactive” is the key word in driving sales through presentations. True and meaningful interactivity goes beyond seeking verbal feedback, or asking the audience to raise their hands for a poll. To close business, sales professionals must ultimately be able to map their product or service offerings to the needs and opinions of all customer stakeholders.

Through interactive presentations, sales people can accelerate the process of building interest and gaining agreement through all decision criteria to quickly focus on a winning solution, and close business.

In conclusion then, for a successful presentation, a meaningful conversation with the audience is necessary. In such situations, the sales person cannot rely only on graphics, visuals, special effects and animations alone. What is needed is interactivity.

This white paper describes how interactivity can help in various sales situations such as creating a memorable first impression, building instant rapport with your audience, dynamically changing the flow and content of your presentation to suit your audience requirements, helping in rendering complex information in a simple story-telling way, making it easy to describe your value proposition and facilitating effective meeting closures.

Once you are convinced that to make the presentations appealing and compelling, you need interactions such as Brainstorm, Show of Hands, Flip Book, Interactive Quadrant, Comparison Chart etc., you need an easy, flexible and quick way to embed such interactions in your presentations. This paper also lays out options like conventional approach and rapid interactivity approach for embedding interactivity in PowerPoint presentations. With conventional approach, the sales people need to take help of the creative team for preparing the presentations. The creative team obviously needs design and development skills to be able to deliver the required effect. The creative team needs graphic design skills and technical skills such as Flash programming, VBA programming or macro writing in PowerPoint. With the use of Rapid Interactivity approach, the sales people can create highly interactive presentations in less time and also get the complete flexibility to edit the presentations themselves.

You can download the complimentary copy of this white paper at presentation.harbingergroup.com.