5 Sales Benefits of Professional Powerpoint Design
PowerPoint design is a powerful tool that many companies breeze over in the creation of a sales strategy. It’s an unfortunate fact because, in truth, professional PowerPoint design can heavily influence a sales pitch. Whether you hook potential buyers or leave them with a vague collection of content can boil down to the quality of your presentation.
We believe in the power of professional PowerPoint design to help businesses send their sales skyrocketing. Here, we’ll show you five key benefits that professional design has to offer in the realm of sales.
1. The Power of a First Impression
When it comes to a sales presentation, the first impression that you make on potential customers is key. Consider the following scenario. You have been invited to present your product or service to a potential buyer, but before proceeding the buyer wants to compare your offer to your top 5 competitors so they’ve invited you all to present the benefits that you can provide.
While waiting in the lobby with the other salespeople, you notice that they are nervously reviewing their talking points minutes before the meeting because they’ve been up all night trying to struggling to learn how to align the text on each PowerPoint slide. You took another path. You decided that your time was best spent researching your customer, and developing a proposal that meets their needs.
You’ve reached out to the professionals at Presentation Geeks to help you refine your presentation, and create a PowerPoint Presentation that engages your audience, and presents your company in a very professional light. The boardroom doors open, and the other salespeople grab their cue cards and scramble into the business meeting to find their seats.
This is where you start to recognize the value of hiring a professional to help you create the presentation to end all sales presentations. You are calm and fully prepared to present your companies business in the best. light knowing that you have a Professional PowerPoint Design that is about to blow the competition out of the water many times over!
Setting a positive first impression is about more than just presenting a well designed PowerPoint slide. It’s about presenting a compelling story with confidence which is all made possible because you reached out for help when it counted.
Could hiring a company to help you create a presentation make the difference between a no and a yes? We think so.
Although the scenario above is probably not indicative of the typical sales opportunity, buyers often compare you to your competition. Most sales presentations will be used over and over with many different customers. At Presentation Geeks, we recommend that if you review your presentation annually and ask yourself the following questions:
- Is the content in this presentation still current and relevant to my customer base?
- If I were in my customer’s shoes, what would the PowerPoint Presentation say about me, my product, and my business?
- Could a more engaging and professionally designed sales presentation help to increase your close rate? If so, by how much? If a professionally designed Powerpoint increased audience engagement by 5 to 25%, how would that affect your sales?
Depending on your answers to these questions, you may find that a professionally designed Sales Presentation created by a company like Presentation Geeks would help you sell more products and or services, save you time, and expand your marketing capabilities.
A professional presentation design business should have experience harnessing the power of digital design and using it effectively to create a compelling pitch. PowerPoint design presents endless opportunities to formulate a company’s image, telling the audience who you are and what you stand for. That stellar first impression is what will keep customers coming back, as your brand will be the first to come up when they think of your industry.
2. Connecting Presentation Design To Higher Close Rates
Does it make financial sense to hire a professional PowerPoint design team? When you hire any creative agency to develop a marketing asset, there is always a cost to it, but as many companies would attest, outsourcing is a great way to reach customers.
Sales teams often rely on the power of their competitive advantages, their innate ability to connect, but what does a poorly designed PowerPoint presentation filled with paragraphs of poorly aligned text tell your customer about your standards?
We know that a business will pay to acquire its customers and this cost is called the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Prior to your opportunities to deliver sales presentations, your company has probably paid to develop their digital marketing assets, paid to advertise, paid to create print media to promote a product or service, paid a sales team to uncover leads, and paid expenses in many other areas in an effort to drive leads to the point of a sales presentation.
All of the time and money the company has invested in converting a customer add up to nothing if the sales presentation you are using loses the interest of your customer.
It’s common for marketing departments to work with creative agencies to develop many of these marketing assets. When it comes to the most crucial moment, companies leave the development of the PowerPoint Presentation up to the individual salesperson to create.
With little to no help, the typical Sales Rep is stuck trying to learn how to organize each slide so that the text on the screen points their customer in the right direction. Is this the best use of a company’s resources? Could a professionally designed sales presentation actually save time, money, and increase close rates?
When looking at the customer journey through the marketing pipeline, it is the sales presentation that is most often overlooked.
To help us get to appreciate the journey that ultimately points a customer towards you, let’s take a quick look at the marketing side of the business. The customer journey or marketing funnel can be summarized by the acronym AIDA which is short for Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action.
- Awareness – This is usually gained through paid advertising
- Interest – This is usually built up when the advertising points the customer to your website
- Desire – This is developed through a series of professionally designed slides laid out in your sales presentation
- Action – This is the result of a well-delivered presentation. One that you’ve had enough time to prepare for.
There is a hard cost associated with the first 2 steps of the customer journey, but the true or total cost is not converting the opportunity into a happy customer. This is how a professionally designed Sales Presentation can add value to your organization.
Professionals can take a complicated slide filled with text and create a visually engaging and easy to understand slide. An amazing product with the best value proposition in the industry is meaningless if you can’t communicate that to your customer.
Justin Mills from Presentation Geeks believes that the best way to increase a close rate is to use compelling visuals to simplify the message. This can be easier said than done, especially if there are limited or low-quality images of the product or service available.
This is another aspect of your presentation where a professional PowerPoint Design team can help. Designers should be adepts at concepts such as slide layout, slide animation, slide illustration, and more. Using tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe After Effects, a professional presentation designer has more options available to them when creative assets get hard to find.
A professional presentation all but assures that your information will be delivered more effectively and efficiently than if you were to use an amateur presentation. With a better delivery comes a deeper understanding of your product on the part of the audience members.
When people fully comprehend the purpose, features, and functionality of a product, they’re more likely to see a need for it in their own lives. Thus, those audience members are more likely to make a purchase, and voila! Higher sales are yours.
But, the delivery of information isn’t the only sales-boosting perk to come out of professional PowerPoint design. Greater confidence in your presentation with the help of professional design will also give your sales a bump.
Confidence is Everything
We’re sure you’ve heard it before, but it’s worth emphasizing regardless: In sales, confidence is king. The self-assuredness of a Salesperson is what prompts potential customers to have faith in his product. After all, if you’re steadfastly confident in your product, it incites your audience to be confident in it, too.
When you’re working with a less-than-professional presentation, it can become difficult to stay wholeheartedly confident. Amateur PowerPoint design can diminish your brand’s image as an authority, which may in turn diminish your sense of control and influence.
But, with professional PowerPoint design on your side, you’ll have every reason to exude confidence in your sales pitch. Your thorough knowledge and trust in the product will be cemented by a well-organized, visually interesting presentation. When you add an open-minded audience into this mix, it’ll often lead to heightened sales.
Professionally designed slides aren’t the only way a professional PowerPoint design will help increase confidence. After all, a sales presentation is a tool, not the entire sale. To get a customer excited about a product or service your business provides, you need time.
It takes time to get learn about your customer’s needs. It also takes time to learn about what your competitors have to offer and where you might be able to exploit a gap in their offerings. You will likely need to do some research into their business, or the business of your competitors. After all, the best presentation in the world isn’t going to close a deal if you are presenting the wrong solution to your customer’s needs.
In addition to the time needed to research your customers and competitors, you also need time to practice the delivery of your presentation. An interested customer will likely stop your presentation and point to a specific piece of text on a slide to bring up an objection. That’s actually a great sign because it shows you they are interested in and considering your product or service. But… if you haven’t taken the time to research the top 5 objections, and prepare solid talking points for each, your sales presentation may not be as great as you’d hoped.
A professionally designed sales presentation not only provides you with a way to stand out, but it also provides you with the time needed to focus on other areas of the business that will add more confidence as you are working your way through the slides.
3. Presentation Designs Are Recyclable
Making the choice to invest in professional PowerPoint design can be a tricky one, especially for start-ups and small businesses. We understand the logic: Why pay for a service that we can complete ourselves?
But, when you invest in professional design services, you’re not just getting a presentation to get you through your next sales pitch. You’re getting a top-caliber presentation that reflects the image and mission of your brand. At Presentation Geeks, we work closely with our customers to gather information and fully understand your goals, creating a presentation that exemplifies your brand.
We often get the question…
What is the most professional PowerPoint Template?
To which our answer is always the same… none of them. Slides should be created with the customer needs as the focal point. Will the slides in your presentation address a customer need that your business can fulfill? Will the slides look and feel like the brand that your business has worked hard to develop?
Although PowerPoint has over 50 PowerPoint templates to choose from, the themes developed in those slides are generic and aren’t able to deliver a consistent, customer-focused experience. This is one reason that a professional presentation design company will want to use your branding standards.
They want to ensure that the presentation they develop uses the same fonts, colors, logo placement, and more on each one of the slides that they develop. This is key to developing a great sales presentation that can be used throughout your business.
This can also add cost savings to your presentation development. Great slides that are developed with your company’s brand guidelines can be used within other areas of your business. In many cases, there internal cost-sharing across multiple business units can make the development cost of a professional sales presentation a great investment.
To continue to drive value, companies will often centralize variations of their presentations or use an organized presentation design company who has access to slides from past presentations. This can create a great resource of slides when building new presentations.
If you need to change out a slide, you can go into your library of slides and copy what you need. You may need to add or change some text, but overall this can make the development of a new presentation more efficient. When people from all over the business make their own presentations, sharing of slides is rare.
Professionally designed presentations (or slides from them) won’t just be used once: they can be used whenever you or someone else within your business needs to make a great sales pitch to a new potential client. In addition to lowering the development cost for your business unit, sharing the sales presentation with other business units will great greater value company-wide as many people use the presentation again and again.
4. Give Your Information Greater Impact
Did you know that only 10% of spoken information will be retained by an audience after three days, but 65% of that information can be retained after three days if a corresponding image is provided? This statistic goes to show that when information is paired with a supporting image or visual, your audience is far more likely to engage with it and, ultimately, remember it! The use of visuals to make presentation slides more memorable can add a lot of value to your presentation.
When you work with a professional PowerPoint design team, you gain access to a whole gang of experts in creating successful presentations. Designers like the ones at Presentation Geeks use their experience to take slides filled with text and change them to create something that visually supports the purpose of the slide.
Sometimes having an including a fresh outside perspective can make a lot of sense as well. What might be clear and obvious to someone working within your business who fully understands the value of your product, might be unclear and less obvious to an outsider.
A great design company will dedicate a project manager to work with you throughout the entire presentation development process. They will use their time to gain a better understanding of your business so that each presentation slide can deliver your information to make the greatest impact. They will read through a past deck or read articles to check their understanding. This is an example of attention to detail that you should expect when hiring a professional presentation design company.
One of the areas where this is extremely relevant is the data slides. Charts or data sets are usually included to in a presentation to help provide some contextual support behind your talking points. Usually, the person presenting these elements takes for granted that they can be confusing at first.
A simple data set may use less information, but might create a greater impact if it were simplified. on the surface, it may appear better to include more information, but customers will rarely raise their hands to say that they don’t understand a data slide. Instead is probably more likely this slide will go right over their head. A skilled designer will use their judgment to help make your data easily understandable.
Further, Professional Presentation Designers will use the best strategies for presenting those text-heavy slides, whether it be inserting corresponding images or developing a compelling color scheme. These nuances can greatly affect how your product is perceived, absorbed, and retained, which in turn influences the sales that the presentation brings in.
When your presentation is made for maximum impact, your audience members will walk away with a thorough understanding of your brand and its offerings.
5. PowerPoint Design Translates To Audience Trust
Building trust is a significant component of any sales strategy. According to Brian Tracy, customers do business with companies that they know, like, and trust. To pay for a product, customers are looking for a sense of assurance in the quality and reliability of your brand. After all, would you purchase a product from a company that presents as unpolished?
Professional PowerPoint design aims to frame your company, product, and service as a reliable, forward-thinking, and amiable brand. Using years of experience in presentation design and its impact on sales, PowerPoint professionals understand audience perceptions.
With that knowledge, we presentation geeks can build a PowerPoint that seals your company as an industry-leading authority. When you use a professionally designed presentation, it supports your customer’s view that you know what you’re doing, they’ll be instilled with the confidence needed to invest in you.
Businesses across all industries have at least one thing in common: they’re all consistently vying for boosts in sales. From what we’ve learned here, it’s clear that a professional PowerPoint design could be the gap in your sales strategy.
The good news? In this tech-centric world, the top-caliber PowerPoint design is right at your fingertips. If you could use a professionally designed presentation contact the Presentation Geeks for a free evaluation.
