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Secret Sauce to the Perfect Pitch Deck
A compelling PowerPoint presentation that is clear, persuasive and engaging, can back and boost your sales pitch. With the right ingredients, a PowerPoint presentation is a key tool that can help to create a first impression with your clients. So, how do you ensure your pitches and proposals engage the audience and capture their attention?
1. Pitching Through PPT: Know Your Customer
It is important to know who exactly your target audience is, before putting your pitch deck together. Put yourself in their shoes and focus on what they need, and you will be well on your way to a successful presentation. Your presentation should cover why your prospective customer needs you: your presentation is only as valuable as the business problems you can solve for them.
2. Have a Clear Objective
Once the target audience is established, the next step for a sales presentation deck is to identify a clear objective. For most sales PowerPoint decks, the focus should be on the benefit you could deliver to your customer. As you work on a pitch, tailor it to the customer’s vertical and ensure it is action-oriented and outcome-focused. You can also focus on three to five key topics you want to cover in the sales pitch and put them in a logical order.
3. Tell a Story
Experts say the stickiness of stories makes them a useful tool in creating an outline for the sales pitch. One can incorporate the benefits for the customers within a story, as prospects tend to remember key presentation points better that way. Read how storytelling can influence a business decision. Stanford University professor Chip Heath, who had co-authored ‘Made to Stick’, spoke about the importance of storytelling with the help of an exercise with his students. He divided them into groups and asked them to deliver a one-minute pitch based on data he had just shown them. Then he asked the class to write down what they remembered about the pitches, many of which used data points rather than stories. 63% remembered the stories, while only 5% spoke about an individual data point.
4. Customize the Pitch
Personalize the content and aesthetics of every presentation. While the PowerPoint slides can have content most relevant to the target audience, you can consider using a potential customer’s brand colors. The pitch can also be tailored to highlight customer success stories relevant to the prospect – even a case study of a specific product or service can win big. The presentation should end by charting the future course, guiding your customer on the way forward.
Visual display is another secret sauce to a successful PowerPoint presentation, giving it that extra zing. Your customers do not want to read a wall of text; they are looking for visual info, creatively formatted in the right font and colors. However, preparing an impressive sales presentation is no mean feat.
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