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The first, and probably the main goal of any presentation is to sale. That is what most presentation authors forget about. Sure, presentation must looks nice and sure, it must be a little funny, but its main goal is to sale your product, your business your consulting service or something else.
So how to design presentation that not just show something, but sale it? There are some key principles, which will bring you right to the successful presentation.
First, I'm sure you know a lot about presentation topic and you can describe your product or idea in details, but let's be honest, it's not a whitepaper and people are not going to read it all over again trying to get some well developed idea. Why? Because they expect presentation to promote something, so if you what to talk and write about some how-to things, consider adding a whitepaper as a free bonus to your presentation. So, the first principle is keeping presentation simple.
Seconds, what about the number of slides? Should there be 10 or 100 slides in your presentation? Sure, it depends on what time you will have for your speech, sometime it's really needed to talk a lot and in details, but for most cases, you will talk about 30 minutes. How to find out if your presentation is overloaded with details? Well, test it!
Third, the most important. Test your presentation in different ways. You should test the catchy title, you should test the structure of your presentation, you should test your facts and your conclusions. How to do the actual test? Do it yourself, ask your colleagues or even invite someone of your family members. Need to have more accurate test results? Consider using google for this purpose - find keywords, title and descriptions that people are willing to click. This will be a key to understanding your audience.
What about sales techniques? For sure, presentation is not a sales pitch, but you still have to use to texts that will make people buy. If you talk about the product or the service, then focus on key benefits. It is a good idea to compare your product against competitors'. In this case you should just focus on getting people interested in your product.
If the goal of your presentation is to sale your expertise in some area, then your sale affords must be focused on words like "we helped to...", "we did this to ...", "our experienced proved that ...", this is the most simple way to tell people - we know what to do to help you. Finally, don't forget to put information about your service in the bio block of the presentation and in the very first slide. If there would be some other speaker then your information will be showed a little more than your speech duration time.
Assume, there are some people in the room who where interested in your presentation, your goal is to make them finding you and your product easily. Prepare a special business cards and give them out after speaking, make it look different in comparison to simple business card. Make sure people will remember the name of your presentation, that's why you need to test the title before doing presentation.
Finally, make it easy for all listeners to get a copy of your presentation. Give away a cd with your presentation, or share web address where it's possible to view the presentation in flash format. Making presentation web-friendly will bring more incoming link to your web-site too. Test and share your presentation to achieve success.
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