Business Presentations.

In business most of us at some point in our career ends up making presentations – for some business roles like Sales it’s a regular occurrence. Some Presentations are very formal others are more informal and interactive – closer to a structured fireside chat.

But they are all about helping to communicate information in a way that positively informs and influences the recipients.

At the risk of generalizing Business presentations fall into 2 main types:

The first is principally a ‘one way’ communication. For example a presentation by the Chairman at a company AGM informing analysts / shareholders in how the business is performing. In this situation the path through the presentation is linear – starting at slide 1 and progressing through to the end slide. This form of presentation is about transmitting information and does not in itself allow for relationship building. In this particular context this would be more down to the Q/A session at the end of the presentation.

The second is ‘two-way’ where the objective is to use the presentation as an aid to structure something closer to a conversation. Many sales situations take this form. The salesperson may have a limited understanding of the customer’s requirement, and is using the opportunity to establish what mutual areas of interest exist and is also seeking to build or consolidate the relationship.

To facilitate this meeting (in person or virtual) the salesperson may well have put together a presentation based upon their understanding. But recognize that course of the meeting needs to define sequencing of the slides as areas of interest become apparent.

Indeed it may well be that an area of interest isn’t even covered in the deck. So there may be a need to pull in other presentation material.

PowerPoint in spite of it’s moniker ‘Death by..’ is like it or not the tool that most people use for business presentations. However PowerPoint is hardly inspiring for ‘one way’ communications but for ‘two way’ it simply doesn’t get near the mark.

So when we created Presentia our Presentation Management Tool – as the alternative to PowerPoint – we focused on the needs of Business Users and looked to create a tool that worked for all types of Presentations.

The result is a tool that allows you to:

• move in an elegant non linear way through your presentation. Simply dropping into more detail on a particular subject as required.
• have all your Presentations at your fingertips so that you can seamlessly switch into another presentation as the situation requires it with sophisticated keyword searching facilities to quickly get to specific content.
• quickly and simply build a customized deck from existing presentations adding in new slides consistently where required so that the pitch to the customer or prospect is fine tuned.

In essence a tool that has the all flexibility that Sales people need.