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Everything is coming together. You have prospected, contacted and now, finally you get to do your presentation. You have gathered all the information to present your product or service, but how do you do so in a way that is truly effective? Here are a few tips to help you do an effective presentation:

Keep It Simple

Keep the presentation informative, yet simple. You might know all the minute details on how your product or service works, but now is not the time to go into that in extreme detail for a couple reasons.

If your plan is complex, cumbersome and loaded with details, your client’s decision will also be complex, cumbersome and loaded with details. Keep it simple and make it simple for them to make a decision to work with you.

Also, if you begin talking too many details with someone who is not detail oriented, you will talk them into and out of working with you in the same conversation. Watch for eyes glazing over.

Follow the 4 Steps to the Anatomy of a Presentation

Uncover your prospect’s pain

Before you ever go into what you and your products and services can do, you have to find out what is motivating them as prospects, their why. There is some reason why they are talking to you. What is it that they have too much of or not enough of? There is something in their life that is causing them discomfort or dissatisfaction. What is it for the person or people you are presenting to? It is imperative that you find out. Think about all the features and benefits of your product or service. By asking your prospect some High Yielding Questions, you are able to quickly uncover their pain and check those items off mentally on your features and benefits list that are important to them. You want to make sure you highlight the right things in your presentation.
Present the solution

Tell them why your company, your product or service, or you are a solution for their pain. If you have skipped step 1, then you will spend your time going down a laundry list of all the features and benefits without really connecting to their needs and you will appear to have a one-size fits all approach. Remember to keep it simple and don’t go into too many details, yet give them enough information so they can see that you really do have a solution for them.

Determine their interest

This is where you summarize the main points and recap how these things will be of benefit for them. Then ask them how they see your company or product or service benefiting their challenges. This will insure that you did a good job in steps 1 and 2. If you didn’t make a good connection between their pain and what you offer, this is a good time to go back to step 1 and ask more High Yielding Questions.

Call to Action

Don’t let the presentation just fizzle to an end, make sure you ask the prospect if they are ready to get started today. If they are not, then set up a time to follow up. A “no” is often a “not yet” which is fine, just make sure you follow up.

Practice

“Amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.”

Don’t forget to practice, practice, practice. You will be more confident and relaxed and your prospect will be able to sense that. Learn to LOVE Practice!

Microsoft does not know a heckuva lot about presentation design, but one thing they do correctly in PowerPoint is to make available different types of graphs so that you can match the graph type to the point you’re trying to make with your data. There are twelve different graph types available with PowerPoint 2000, but few of those styles work well in the low-resolution world of computer-based presentations. With few exceptions, here is how you want to use the following types:

o Pie Graphs for Share

o Bar Graphs for Comparative Amounts

o Line Graphs for Trends, Time

Pie Graphs

Pie graphs (commonly misnomered pie charts) are one of the more overused, and hence misused, types of graphs, primarily because they are so easy to make, and easy to make look good. They are misused when chosen to show amounts rather than share. The beauty of pie graphs is that they show so clearly what they are supposed to show, i.e., how much of the whole each element contributes. In most cases the actual amounts – in this case percentages – are actually secondary to the area of the slices in terms of telling the story.

When you look at a pie graph with five or fewer slices, your brain can quickly ascertain which groups dominate. We often see pie graphs with more than 5 elements, but they then become more difficult to comprehend in short order. In most cases, consider whether your story needs to include details about all the players, or whether a group of insignificant contributors can be grouped as “others”.

If you want to show how much volume each element contributes, rather than what fraction, you’ll want to use a bar graph.

Bar Graphs

To show relative sizes of different segments as well as the actual amounts, you’ll want to use a bar graph. Bar graphs are designed to show volumes against a y-axis that clearly delineates the units of measure. By having a series of bars next to each other, we can see how each element compares with the others as well as what absolute volume the element represents.

There are variations on the bar graph, such as a stacked bar, where different elements are stacked on top of each other to form a series, or a 100% bar graph, where all the bars are the same height but are split to show what percent of the whole the volume reflects. In a presentation environment, esoteric options are best to be avoided.

Line Graphs

Line graphs have the unique advantage of speaking to inherent right-brain prejudices about information. That is, when typically conditioned western minds see a graph with no labeling, they automatically assign “volume” to the y-axis, with “up” meaning “more”, and a time-line to the x-axis, with the left side meaning most recent. Just as we read from left-to-right, rightward motion subconsciously means positive motion.

You would want to use a line graph, then, to show a progression in amount from one point in time to another. The elevation of the line at any one point represents the quantity of the tracked data at that moment. Audiences, wanting to be the first-to-know, will automatically make assumptions about the types of values x-axes and y-axes represent. Don’t disappoint them.

Data labels

Graphs are a great way of making complex information easily understood. But graphs work best only when you properly integrate words, numbers and images. Whenever possible, label the elements of your graph directly on the elements themselves, rather than relying on the ever-popular clarity killer, the legend. Legends require too much effort on the part of listeners to discern exactly what each data point is. Just be certain your labels don’t clutter up the otherwise clear “picture” a good graph can make.

If you have a number of graphs in your presentation, you’ll want to avoid dumping a data overload on your audience by over-labeling each one. In fact, in many cases you can tell your story forcibly enough by only the size of your data elements, without burdening their minds with numbers that they’re likely to forget by the end of the presentation. However, it’s also not a bad idea to have what we call “reference slides” that do contain all the data attached to the end of your main slide deck. To really impress your crowd, install hyperlinks to these slides from the ones in your main show, and when some vice-president makes a stink about wanting to know the whole story, zap to your total-info slide and give him what he wants. He probably won’t ask again.