By using custom graphics, you can visually simplify the message and allow the audience to be stimulated visually by a high bandwidth channel capacity in a relatively short period of time. The goal here is to move beyond bullets and create a message for the audience. After all, we don’t speak in bullets so the custom graphics should support a general message that allows the presenter to speak their knowledge.

Custom graphics can also make a design play from a brand that has been firmly established by a corporate marketing group. Thus, custom graphics can, for the sake of this presentation, exemplify tastefully the company’s already established brand.

More than an image selection from a stock photo company, custom graphics can spark the imagination of the audience.  Often manipulation of a stock image is required in addition to illustrations and mind-blowing graphics to help support a message strongly.

What’s the content on the slides of a higher count PowerPoint slide deck? More white space, less words. Less words not only creates a visual Feng Shui, and is easy on the eyes of the audience, but it also stops the audience from spending their time reading. It positions them to actually listen and connect with the presenter. All achieved from more white space on every slide.

Have you ever sat through a webinar? Were you fully engaged or did your external distractions such as smart phones, tablets or multiple monitors periodically pull you away from the webinar presentation? PowerPoint certainly gets a bad rapt, after all it’s just an application. It is never more apparent than in a webinar that our presentation skills may be lacking.  We speak but hear nothing and we sometimes ask for responses but get very little in return.

Maybe it’s time to consider that to get something in return from the audience; we as the presenter have to give them something. We suggest dropping the bullets and creating a story wrapped around your data, categories and statistics.  Build more slides than you ever thought about…triple the volume but with significantly less information on each slide. Now you can spend less than a third of the time on one slide than you used to. To the audience they see  faster moving visuals, a reason to stay connected with your story, a reason to engage.

In the  business world of high stakes presentations when selling services, presentations have increased value over companies who develop products. Products are tangibles that prospects can usually research, touch and feel.  Services on the other hand have a higher chance of leaving  the prospect audience with a collective “huh?”  With that higher chance of presentation failure, are you taking extra measures to work your message into a story or point of clarity?

A marketing firm, such as the example shown above, must of course present itself clear and compelling, after all they are a marketing company. Presentation Partners has the right perspective to bring that clarity to the table. Clarity starts with determining where is my audience at the onset of delivering this message and where do we want them at the end of the presentation delivery? Once our mind shifts from the presenting company to the audience, then and only then we are on the right path to clarity in message, because our focus is the audience.

When you present a PowerPoint presentation at a conference, the desired outcome is usually a bit different than the usual sales or investor presentation. The first concern most presenters have, “how do I get through this without embarrassing myself.”  The more confident presenters usually think about elevating their professional status within the respected business community. For either candidate delivery skills are very important, but the foundation starts with building a presentation that is audience centric and allows you to tell a story to the audience. Neuroscience tells us that stories are one of the few things that connect with either left or right hemisphere dominated people. before you begin to create your PowerPoint presentation we suggest that you turn off the lamp (laptop) and pen your story the old fashion way. Draw it out like a storyboard with crude pictures with every sequential associated key thought in your story.  Once this is complete, then transition to PowerPoint and start building out the best conference presentation that you have ever built.

While delivery skills are extremely important half of the battle is building content that allows you to better connect and resonate with your audience. Turn off that computer and build your content and let the power of neuroscience work for you.

Presentation Partners is now on SlideShare! Check out our first uploaded slideshow and learn how to avoid your own cow patty presentation! This deck will give you lots of great tips and information on building a presentation!  Visit t.co/EOAbQaoE to view on SlideShare.

Investor decks come in all shapes and sizes depending on the specific investor audience. Today the topics of thriving businesses or startups has changed. It requires being up to speed on what is happening in the market place. Technology dominates the landscape and if you can’t speak the language, you cannot craft a compelling message.

Loving technology is a basis to dig deeper and understand the nature of the subject. That’s what we do best at Presentation Partners. While we have tremendous insight to the investor world, it would be for naught if we didn’t understand the markets of today, which are largely technology driven. How a technology product creates a user interface that consumers or businesses fall in love with, has a lot to do with what happens behind the scenes. Showing visually in your investor PowerPoint deck what makes things work is a way to connect with your investor audience beyond CAGR and other financial or market metrics. Learn to use technology in your favor with investor decks that work!

A new business start-up certainly has its challenges. Just establishing, branding and messaging can be difficult.  A great way to step towards branding and messaging for a start-up is to build presentation decks. Like the example in the image, the company Airpush, which promotes a push tray advertising platform for Android cell phones, utilized a new core sales presentation deck to help better understand their own early stage messaging, and most importantly the trial and error feedback of a prospective audience which helped them re-shape their initial message. Sharing a custom sales presentation deck can also help gain exposure to the visuals that support your message, thus ironing out visual brand direction.

A presentation can be realized as a less expensive route to helping a start-up iron out the kinks in their branding and messaging.

Bringing top level talent into your organization can be a challenge. When recruiting in groups companies often resort to PowerPoint presentations. If developed properly your recruitment presentation can bring the talent on board.  The developer of the presentation must strike a delicate balance between pushing the organizations values and philosophy and most importantly, articulating whats in this for the potential recruited audience. If the audience sense’s the organization is spending the time to present how good they are, versus how interested we are in you and your integration into our culture, then the top talent goes away and you are left with mediocre recruits.

Thinking about this in another way.  Look at every professional sports team and how important talent is to them. If they have talent they win. When companies recruit they need to put their best foot forward with a compelling presentation and get that talent

Kiosk PowerPoint Presentations

Exhibiting in today’s trade shows especially against the larger players in your space requires multimedia. There are usually not enough workers in your booth to handle the flood of prospects that occasionally hit at the same time. Then there is the issue of attracting them into the booth in the first place. A highly visual animated kiosk PowerPoint presentation can be a great tool to draw in the prospects. These presentations like in the example shown our usually low count slides with simplistic messages where the viewing prospect does not need to see the first slide order to understand the message on the fifth slide. In order to accomplish this you need messaging work to compliment the graphic capability. At Presentation Partners the message is the focus.