How to make a powerful sales presentation and product deck ?

The whole point of a party is to sell a product or service, and yet we’ve all seen a boring party at least once. Unfortunately for the speaker, we did not remember much. You don’t have to remind yourself that a presentation has to appeal to your audience’s emotions to be impactful. So you have to develop a common thread, tell a story, create twists and never neglect the form if you want to interest your customers. If you’re wondering where to start, here are the steps you can take to make a powerful business presentation and product deck template.

Start by writing the outline of your product deck

The best presentations are those that follow a common thread. You need to know exactly what will show on your last slide before you even start writing the first one. The point of departure for design is very often an insight which is defined by the Mercator as: “the consumer’s perception of an unresolved problem or dilemma concerning the category of products in which the brand operates”. From this insight, you will be able to write the message and set up the course of your presentation. Here is a very simple example: if you have to present a product catalog to a customer who wants to sell down jackets to athletes, the insight could be “the colder it is, the more athletes dress warmer”. The resulting message would be: “play sport in any weather”. Normally, if you have done your product catalog well, you already have the insight and the message that you have converted into a teaser on the cover. Build your presentation the same way. The solution to this problem is to purchase one of the down jackets. Always keep this in mind. So start your presentation by presenting the problem(s).

Remove the superfluous from your slides

A good product deck template contains very little text. Don’t use whole sentences, prefer keywords. No need to insert all your pitch in your slides. This may harm you. Remember that your audience’s attention span is limited: the person you are trying to convince may receive an SMS, an email, doze off for a moment … etc. Limiting the text of your presentations means limiting the cognitive fatigue of your listeners. Most of the time, you have to create slides that will be read in 3 or 4 seconds. The best way is to put only one idea per slide. This will allow you to create suspense, but will also leave a lot of room for all your oratory digressions. Guy Kawasaki recommends putting only two words at most per slide, taking the age of the oldest person in your audience and dividing it by two to get your font size. He adds that a minimum size of 28 or 30 is optimal for people in the back of the room to read you. If you want to be easy to read, use sans serif fonts. According to the journaldunet, “a study has shown that the two best fonts to use for a presentation are Gilles Sans and Souvenirs Lt.”

Insert animations to multiply the power of your ideas

To give your product deck template more impact, add animations. They will clearly help you bring the information you are presenting sequentially. Thus, it will give you the opportunity to create more surprise by not showing all of a sudden. Take the example of the product catalog for down jackets. Imagine an animation of a man running in the rain, well protected by his down jacket. All of a sudden, the rain turns to snow, and the snow then turns to hail. Finally, your catalog teaser appears: “Exercise in any weather”. This is still a basic example, but it gives you a glimpse of just how much animation can give your idea more power if you know how to play with suspense before revealing it. In addition to playing with the emotions of your audience, the animations will be used to draw their eyes to the information you want to highlight and to hold their attention for longer. France Culture declares that “the ability of human beings to concentrate has dropped by 4 seconds in 15 years, to become shorter than that of a goldfish”. Animations can be a solution to this attention deficit, but be careful not to insert too much either. Always ask yourself these two questions before inserting an animation into your presentation:
-Does this animation serve my narration?
-Does my animation allow my audience to better understand the idea I am presenting?

Get ready for the big day

Steve Job is considered one of the best public speakers of all time and he was practicing three weeks before his presentations. Success does not come overnight, it is not the night before you start training. If you want to master your subject from start to finish, you need to prepare yourself. This will save you the annoying blanks that can discredit you in the eyes of your clients and allow you not to read your slides. Dave Paradi, an author who has published more than 9 books on this subject, has conducted a study which proves that what irritates the audience the most during a presentation is the speakers reading the slides. We cannot control the things that are beyond our control and foresee everything, but we can at least prepare and try to anticipate events!