Exceptional presentation skills are a fundamental job requirement for anyone hoping to succeed in sales and marketing. After all, an unprepared, unfocused, and impersonal presentation can bore your clients or worse irritate them. Meanwhile, palpable distress and uneasiness won’t help you convince potential clients of the benefits of buying your product or partnering with your company. Projecting confidence and having the specific knowledge of every product or service and how their customers can benefit from them cannot be emphasized enough.
In today’s high-tech world, many companies are looking for technology to help supplement the gaps where inexperience and lack of natural charisma expose weaknesses in these areas of presenting. With the help of sales presentation apps, videos, and interactive experiences, you can make more engaging, effective, and informative presentations. The technology used in presentations is actually now regarded as important as the presentation itself.
Still, technology isn’t meant to take over your job as a presenter. It’s merely there to complement or expand your skills during a face-to-face sales presentation. But be wary, not all technologies are created equal.
Presentations: The “Make It or Break It” Factor for Sales Pitches
Command.App® can give you the tools to make presentations more effective, and make any presenter come off as an agent of knowledge for their company. However, it’s still your responsibility to hone your skills, be able to read and react to an audience, and put in the effort to connect with them.
1. Customize the story
Marketers often structure brand messaging around telling a story. These marketers want sales teams to center their presentations around that story while still selling a product and keeping the attention of their potential client.
The idea that a presentation needs to be a single thread or linear story does not hold water in today’s on-demand world. Audiences want to hear a story that speaks directly to them and their world view. They want to see the company’s product solving their specific issue in the market and environment they work in every day. They expect to be engaged with only the content that is relevant to them… nothing less, nothing more. Because of this, the presenter has to be ready to shift topics seamlessly. They need to be able to read-and-react to what’s happening during the presentation in real time. They need to be able to approach each presentation as a highly orchestrated “choose your own adventure” story. One where the audience feels as if their presentation was put together just for them, even though it is one of a set number of probable outcomes with every piece of content ready and at the presenter’s fingertips.
To pull this dynamic presentation off, presenters need to have a technology that empowers them with seamless interactivity. It’s this symbiotic combination of presenter and tech solution that makes presentation flow like a highly produced symphony.
2. Gone are the days of presentations filled with bullet points.
When presenting in highly competitive industries, it’s not enough to have an engaging product you also need stimulating dialogue and eye-catching visuals to maintain an audience’s attention.
Although bullet points may make presenting information easier for you, a presentation deck with slide after slide of them doesn’t make retaining information easier for your audience. The modern consumer prefers a combination of visuals — be it pictures, infographics, motion graphics, or videos. Variety in the way the information is presented helps keeps the interest of the audience. Each person also grasps and maintains information in different ways. Being able to address these unique needs with your presentation allows you to continue to engage your audience and build the relationship. Technology gives you the freedom to go beyond the brochure. Showing instead of telling is always better. Sales presentation apps enable you to be interactive with your visuals and dialogue.
3. Give Your Audience a Hand
Body language plays a significant part in convincing your audience that what you’re saying (or selling) is something that can solve a problem for them. As high-tech as your tools may be or how well put-together your visuals are, body language that shows nervousness, lack of empathy, or doubt regarding your products is detrimental to your presentation.
In customer engagement, it’s important to remember that it all starts with a presenter’s physical presence, and nothing is more important than posture and its ability to communicate both internally and externally.
Setting the tone in any presentation starts with people and their bodies. How they enter a room, sit, stand and move in general, all have a psychological impact on how things will go.
At the core of anyone’s physical presence in any situation is… well… their body’s core. The torso, chest and shoulders hold the key to communicate confidence and power like no other device known to man. There is nothing that exudes confidence like a person standing with their chest out, shoulders back and chin held high. This posture can immediately communicate standing up for oneself, standing up for others and standing against the greatest of threats.
Beyond the bold use of the core, the proper hand gesture can highlight the importance of a message or statistic. Gestures create nuances to presentations adding texture to storytelling. They help hold attention and make you appear more open and conversational. A simple hand gesture can help put your audience at ease, allowing them to feel you’re on even footing with one another.
Some easy but effective hand gestures are:
- Using fingers to depict numbers
- Showing the importance of an issue or effect using the distance between fingers or hands (holding hands or fingers closer or wider apart for visual impact)
- Putting a hand over your heart to emphasize emotional statements or topics
- Representing two ideas or groups with each hand
4. Develop Your Presentation Style
Remember, there is no better way to improve your skills than constant practice and real-life experience. Presenters need to start with the basics and combine the methods that work best for you to create your own presentation style. Use a presentation technology that adds flexibility to the style so you can adapt to any situation whether the venue seats 100 audience members or just a few.
Know what works for different presentation opportunities. Understand that presenting in the boardroom to 10 people may require a bolder, broader execution, while the same room with a few people may allow for a more intimate delivery.
Presenters need tools that can adapt to whether you prefer to give a presentation with a ton of visuals or go with an instructor-like approach depending on what resonates your particular audience and what method puts your product in the best light.
Feel free to experiment with different styles or combine two styles to develop your unique presentation approach. What matters is you’re comfortable with it and with the tools you’re using.
Command.App® offers sales presentation apps that are dynamic, easy to use and can be customized to your needs. Contact us today to schedule a demonstration.