Sales presentation report: PresentationHelper

• By: Admin
• On: 26/10/2007 11:42:30
• In: PowerPoint Presentations
• Comments:

Well firstly, let me start by saying no. Actually no to how did my client react to my presentation. And no to did PresentationHelper's Essential Presentation Skills work. And no to did I win the contract.

So let me break this down.

In order to be truely impartial and completely fair to PresentationHelper I used one of their free to download PowerPoint Templates, http://presentationhelper.co.uk/free_powerpoint_template.htm. And of course the quality of these templates are nothing to write home about. Actually not even worth remembering, but never the less I used one of them that was inline with the presentation subject, but I already felt that when the client sees the standard of design in the template, they probably won't be expecting too much from our products. Maybe a simple "Made in Taiwan" label?

This is what PresentationHelper say, "If I said that I could double your chances of achieving your objectives in a presentation with just one piece of advice you would probably be very skeptical. And yet if you use visual images that is just what happens."

So when I removed most of the bullet points and arguments from my slides in accordance with their claim and instead used images.  This is what happened. The client was listening to what I was saying and yet his eyes flicked back and forth to the presentation screen to study each image. In effect what happened was the images broke his concentration and completely destroyed my eye contact and connection with the client.

Have you ever been talking to someone and you feel as if they are listening and yet they're not? It's almost as if by instinct they are nodding their head and saying, "hmm" in all the right places but they're not really there. Well this is what happens when you remove your bullets and arguments and fill your slides with images instead. What I discovered was that the client spent more time "working" than absorbing. He should have been absorbing all our sales arguments instead of using energy to interpret, and connect.

Now when a graph came up that was simple. It was easy to see one direction versus another direction and the point was made. But when comparisons were to be made and I used a table like PresentationHelper suggest, then basically the whole presentation stopped. Instead confusion reigned. The client began to ask questions about what was this box and what was that box etc., Which totally destroys PresentationHelpers second essential presentation step, Rehearsal.

It was impossible to rehearse or time the presentation correctly because the discussions that arose with the introduction of tables meant that we were not even able to finish the presentation and instead I gave a rapid summary of about nine slides in three minutes. Disaster!

PresentationHelper's final essential presentation step is the rule of three. The idea that people can only remember things in three's. Of course they use many quotes to underline this, but of course, Getting people to remember a quote such as "Friends, Romans, Countrymen ", or "Stop, look, and listen", is completely different to the practise and exercise of a presentation.

Normally the aim of a presentation is to achieve a goal of communication such as, Remember our brand as being innovative, or show that sales growth this quarter is higher than the previous quarter etc. It's simply impossible to get an audience to remember three things about the presentation. The whole aim of a presentation is to achieve a goal or communications ambition, which is why we give presentations a title. Not three titles.

I have to say that all in all I was really disappointed with the outcome of the presentation, and the validity of PresentationHelper's essential presentation guide. To be honest, I've performed much better previously, and I've never been in a situation where the audience spends more time looking at the screen than me, or where I've had to rush through a third of the slides because of the introduction of tables.

So the first of the self proclaimed presentation experts PresentationHelper.co.uk, advice is definetly one to be missed. And certainly not advice to entrust an important presentation to.

Next up is PoweredTemplates.com. This Ukranian based company claim to be presentation experts and have the best PowerPoint Templates on the net. Well i'll be putting that claim to the test next week on  Tuesday 30th October, in the second of my online self proclaimed presentation expert guides, to put their expertise to the test.