If you pause for a while, do you subjectively think that your company is in reality better than the image it happens to have? Can you imagine that improving your image would help you to attract more customers and improve your overall results?

Have you ever thought about this? Or do you even have a presentation at all? Truth be told, while a good presentation can help you double or even quadruple your sales, the bad one is a sure way to lose customers. If sales meetings are necessary for you to close deals, sales representatives are your storefront. It is their job to look attractive and make what it is that you do look appealing.

There are two most important elements that create a successful company these days:

A, Being able to deliver promised product or service

B, Being able to sell your promise

Thanks to great employees, know-how and lots of work, companies are able to deliver the first part very efficiently. The issue is the second part. Being able to sell you as a company can be tough, especially if you do not have experiences with marketing and promotion. If you pause for a while, do you subjectively think that your company is in reality better than the image it happens to have? Can you imagine that improving your image would help you to attract more customers and improve your overall results?

1. Having no presentation at all
This does not even need to be debated. Having no visuals to support your message is a sure way to fail at the meeting. This is not to say that you need to force your presentation at every event under all circumstances. Nor you have to start every meeting with your laptop open. However, if your success depends on meeting with customers and potential customers, presenting your solutions, addressing objections and managing accounts on a regular basis, there is a huge chance that professional presentation is going to make you much more successful while making your daily job easier.

2. Using wrong type of information
The primary goal of your presentation is to share information. To be able to decide what content to use, you need to know your audience. Who are you talking to? What is he interested in? You probably do not want to use jargon that nobody understands, nor you want to bore your partner with details he does not care about. Concise, short messages usually work the best and considering average adult’s attention span is 15-20 minutes, you want to use those minutes efficiently.

3. Poor design
As people, we are attracted to nice things. Naturally, we prefer beauty over ugliness and that is why your presentation needs to “look wonderful” even if it is easier said than done because “nice” mean different things for different people. Back to researching your partner. What is sure, ugly slides ruin even the best pitches. Inappropriate visuals, colors, different point-size fonts, unnecessary animations - these are a few of elements that will surely make your job of a sales person much harder, if not impossible.

Remember, people are visual animals. Nine out of ten things that you are aware of are the things you saw. We remember what we see eight times better that what we hear.

4. Wrong breakdown of your portfolio
It is unnecessary to try to cram everything into one slide. Much better approach is to logically break your portfolio down according to multiple categories and tailor it to the interests of your partner. The right mix of information and visual representation of what it is that you offer will address his objections and make him interested, curious and even glad that you value him and his tome because you are so well prepared.

5. Talking characteristics, not benefits
The last but not least is the mother of all presentation issues. Yes, you need to make a bullet point list of all characteristics. But that is only the half of the job. What needs to follow is crafting every relevant characteristic into a benefit and reframing it so it sounds as a true benefit for your partner. We are not attracted to “display with a resolution of 326ppi” but once you say “display with so many pixels so close together it makes human eye see a continuous lines” it is pretty impressive.

If your business depends on meeting with clients, your account managers are the face of your company. The future of your firm is fully influenced by how successful they are in doing their job and so is your firm’s profitability. The more successful your sales fleet is, the better off is your company. Wouldn’t it be a good thing to consider giving them a tool that not only makes their job easier but also more effective? Sales presentation is exactly this tool. What we do is not just a deck of slides for you. We help you design the whole business meeting - from concept to story, content messaging and call to actions. The only part that you need to do is just close the deal.

If you want to learn more about how you can create your next working professional presentation, read the next article here.