How do you stand apart from the competition when selling a product or service? A creative sales presentation is key to impressing an audience and persuading it to make a purchase. Remember, how you present your brand is just as important as any product details.
Designing an effective sales presentation isn’t a task to take lightly. It requires careful preparation and thorough research to properly educate prospects on not only the details of a product or service but also how the marketed solution can help them.
Before sales teams can start creating their presentations, however, they first must outline their ideas. Looking for creative sales presentation ideas to close your next deal? Read on for a greater sales deck understanding and top ideas for designing one that works.
What’s the difference between a sales deck and a pitch deck?
While a sales deck and a pitch deck both serve a promotional purpose, they are distinct types of presentations provided to different audiences. A sales deck is a presentation designed to convince a prospective customer to make a purchase by highlighting the features, benefits and value of a product or service. A pitch deck, on the other hand, refers to a presentation given to investors, detailing a company and its vision, products, financials and market. Technically, both offer some type of pitch, but with different objectives.
You need strong communication skills and an audience-centered focus to deliver an effective sales presentation, and both a sales deck and a pitch deck will contain many similar elements, including video, data and infographics. Sales presentations, however, often are more detailed than those designed for investor pitches.
Top sales presentation ideas to close the deal
You’ll need plenty of creative ideas to design an effective sales presentation that closes the deal. Audiences quickly grow bored viewing a monotonous slide deck that lacks color, movement and other captivating visual elements. Likewise, prospects aren’t going to buy what you’re selling if your sales presentation lacks information. Check out the following top sales presentation ideas that will help teams make more sales:
1. Set your agenda
Immediately set audience members’ minds at ease by outlining the key points you plan to cover in your sales presentation. Not only will setting an agenda help your audience to follow along with the presentation, but it even can create anticipation for what’s to come, a quality that will keep your audience interested during the slides to come.
2. Integrate a story
Human cultures evolved by communicating information through storytelling, and modern audiences continue to respond to tales. Integrating stories into your presentation, therefore, is a highly effective way to engage audience members and hold their interest, while persuading them with emotion.
3. Include vivid imagery
Bright colors, interesting images and other stunning visual elements are powerful tool for entertaining audiences and capturing attention. The largest part of the brain is dedicated to processing visual information, so it’s no wonder why people respond to vivid imagery.
4. Incorporate hard data and statistics
Consumers consistently rely on data when making decisions, so providing persuasive data about a product or service for sale is an effective way to close more deals. By providing audiences with a scientific or mathematical basis for making a purchase, you automatically boost your credibility and trust in your brand.
5. Add infographics
While data is key to an effective sales presentation, data alone can overwhelm many audiences. Instead of adding pages of numbers to your slides – a tactic that likely will eliminate any persuasive power the data might have held – communicate the same information with engaging infographics. Diagrams, charts and graphs are not only eye-catching, but they provide valuable insights into the data’s importance.
6. Customize a theme
A custom theme helps tie together the content of a sales deck, while adding an extra creative element to a presentation. You even might customize a theme that speaks to your target demographic, with a color scheme and images that relate to your product and its customers.
7. Keep it simple
As a general rule, the most effective sales presentations are fairly short, sweet and to the point. While it’s vital to cover all the pertinent details about a brand, product or service, the presentation should provide just enough information to pique prospects’ curiosity and leave them yearning to learn more.
8. Use video
Integrating video into a sales deck lets presenters enhance their storytelling efforts. Provided the video is relevant and conveys the desired message, the media only boosts an already-effective sales strategy. Plus, playing a short video can offer a presenter a much-needed break.
9. Involve your audience
It’s far easier to keep an involved audience engaged with a presentation. Try asking open-ended questions that relate to the presentation, and make sure to express interest in and show empathy for audience members, which helps build trust. You might even hold a brief activity for your audience to better connect with those in attendance.
10. Include testimonials
Testimonials have long been hailed as a highly effective sales strategy, and a presentation is no exception. To infuse your customer testimonials with a visual element, add quotation bubbles to your content instead of plain text. Your prospects value others’ opinions, and this social proof will help them choose your brand.
11. Transition concepts
Don’t make the mistake of hastily changing topics during your sales presentation, or you’ll surely lose your audience’s attention. Smoothly transition between key points with verbal cues, and don’t forget to add animated transitions between your slides.
12. Leave white space
When designing the slide deck for your sales presentation, pad your images with ample white space. Failing to leave space between the various elements on a slide will create a cluttered appearance, and it will be harder for your audience to absorb the information.
13. Highlight with word art
It’s hard to illustrate some concepts with a photo. To highlight key terms during your presentation, create a slide with word art, also known as a word cloud. This cluster of words in varying sizes serves as an effective tool for communicating the importance of abstract ideas.
14. Include competitor details
Your audience might be impressed by your sales presentation, but we bet just a few people are still wondering about your competition. Proactively address these inquiries by including competitor details in your presentation. Highlight the ways your solutions differ, focusing on why your product is superior. You’ll win bonus trust points if you also mention a way the other guy excels.
15. Demonstrate your product
Sure, you can talk all day about the benefits of your product, but your prospects want to see it in action. Make sure to include a product demonstration in your sales presentation, when at all possible. If you can’t showcase it in person, substitute a video portrayal.
16. Design on-brand slides
It’s easy enough to throw together a slide deck with whatever colors and images happen to look pretty. A professional sales presentation, however, will feature a consistent theme and generously integrate branded assets like a company’s color palette and logo. You can save time by customizing a theme with these essential elements, so they apply to each slide.
17. Use a template
You don’t have to hold a visual design degree or spend countless hours designing your sales presentation. Instead, choose an applicable presentation template from a PowerPoint alternative software solution like Beautiful.ai. A host of templates are available with slides perfectly curated to convey the desired message. Plus, when you use Beautiful.ai, you have the assistance of artificial intelligence automatically applying good design principles and adjusting your slides every time new content is added.
18. Personalize the final slide
No matter where you planned to end your sales deck, be sure and add a final slide with your contact details. If you’ve done a good job on the sales presentation, audience members will want to know how to follow up for more details or to make a purchase.
19. Add a call to action
Any good salesperson knows you can’t end a pitch without a call to action, and a sales deck is no exception. Don’t assume your audience knows what to do, make sure you ask them for it, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for an email list or any other desired outcome.
20. Remember to animate
You might have designed all the slides for your sales presentation, but you aren’t quite done yet. Animating the deck will add an additional visual element – movement – to your sales presentation, helping you attract and hold your audience’s attention. If you’re using Beautiful.ai to design your sales deck, you easily can add animation to every slide at once with just a couple of clicks of your mouse.
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