The reason for these disappointing results is that many Web sites are unable to tell a compelling sales story. Although online pages are very effective at selling simple e-commerce products like books, t-shirts or cell phones, many products and services require a much more focused conversation to engage prospects.

Very few Web visitors spend more than a few seconds on a page before clicking to a new subject, going to a new page or leaving the site. Most sales stories require a few minutes of focused attention. Potential prospects are therefore lost before they have mentally connected with anything beyond a headline and one or two pictures. Although a Web page for sales is supposed to bring visitors to a follow-on step, Web sites typically don’t get the job done.

Online presentations are potentially much more effective vehicles for sales and marketing. However, presentations for this application must be designed with some common sense rules to be fully effective.

Rule Number One: Take advantage of multimedia capabilities, especially voice narration.

Rule Number Two: Tell a logical focused story in the same way that a sales professional would tell it face-to-face. Don’t distract the viewer with unrelated ideas.

Rule Number Three: Use interactive technology that makes the viewer a participant in the conversation. Ask the viewer to respond to questions that keep him or her mentally engaged.

Rule Number Four: Maintain viewer attention with compelling graphics and photos. Visuals are much more effective than text in helping the narrator to tell a content-rich story.

Rule Number Five: Combine information with emotional appeal. Prospects use both sides of their brains when they are fully engaged in a sales conversation. People buy because of their feelings as well as from the information that they understand. Presentations that appeal to emotions without a logical story don’t create new customers. Conversely, presentations that are content-rich yet dull and unappealing won’t succeed either.

Rule Number Six: Every slide must be an integral part of the story. It must match the narrator’s words by using eye-appealing imagery with little or no text.

Rule Number Seven: Be brief.

More than 40-million people use PowerPoint. It’s the world’s most widely used presentation tool. So many people have used it that we can safely recruit new salespeople and expect them to be PowerPoint users. That means that any organization can quickly train new people to deliver presentations using the same basic tools.

Virtually everyone needs PowerPoint to build a business online. PowerPoint slides may be used like brochures in PDF format, for live presentations in a Webinar or as the basic medium of an on-demand presentation.

The negative side of PowerPoint is that many people think of a slide presentation as tedious and uninteresting. That’s because so many presentations are poorly planned and use only the weakest capabilities of the program. PowerPoint designers at Microsoft designed this tool with so much flexibility that presentations have an unlimited range of styles. Unfortunately, most people take the easiest road, resulting in the weakest possible presentations. We therefore want to offer recommendations for PowerPoint use that will provide the most compelling results for sales and marketing professionals.

Our most important overall recommendation is for every PowerPoint presenter to discover how to use the program’s full capabilities. Don’t re-use an unimaginative presentation produced for someone else. Customize every presentation to leverage yourself and create a professional, entertaining audience experience. Most people—even long-time PowerPoint presenters—don’t understand the incredible things that can be done with this powerful tool. Spending a couple of hours thumbing through “PowerPoint for Dummies” can deliver ideas that totally change the results produced by any presentations.

What are the basics for making presentations more effective? We can begin by following a few simple rules. The first simple rule is “keep presentations as short as possible.” Every slide should contribute to drawing audiences to “the next step” in a well planned sales, training or information transfer process. If any slide in a presentation doesn’t contribute in this way, delete it.

Rule number two is “use as little text as possible. Instead use graphics, photos, videos, cartoons, etc. to make visual statements. Although writing a virtual script of text bullets is easy, audiences don’t listen effectively when forced to read bullets. If the text bullets differ from the presenter’s speech they create confusion. If the bullets are identical to the spoken words, audiences assume that the presenter is simply reading from a script. PowerPoint provides much more powerful tools than simple text bullets. Successful professionals use these tools to be become master presenters, and master marketers.

We still need a few more rules to maximize the power of PowerPoint, and we will cover several of them in later posts.

If you just sit back and wait, you will never know when it happens. But if you proactively create the moment, you can be prepared to monitor and record it. With interactive presentations this seemingly impossible task becomes routine. By creating a scenario in your presentation where you are controlling what the audience is seeing and interacting with, you are in a position to capture their input at a moment when their emotions are highest and they are most likely to move towards a purchase decision.

Let’s say, for example, that you are promoting a new sculptor in your art gallery. The typical approach is to present a slide show of works by that artist and the sometime later, ask the audience what they thought. But what if you provided a 3-D rotating sculpture? The audience rotates the 3-D image to an angle they find most pleasing. On that same screen they provide input through a slider conveying their impression.

You are gathering information when they are interactively engaged and emotionally involved with your product.  This is what we call “Interactivity at Point of Business.”

Try it with your product or service. PresenterNet allows you to place interactive elements on any slide in your presentation providing the ultimate in control over emotion-driven information gathering.

I’d love to hear your comments on how you use Interactivity at Point of Business.

The new paradigm of using a website to its maximum potential is to engage your visitors in an interactive conversation. But how can you do that?

Look at your own website, for example. I’ll bet you have beautiful pages designed that inform customers all about your products or services. They’re full of images, bullet lists, bold headlines to get attention — you’ve done everything right. You are certain they are so engaging that every visitor will read them in their entirety and then beg for the form to fill in to get more. This is a lot like meeting a prospect for lunch, introducing yourself, talking non-stop for 20 minutes then handing over your business card and asking for a call when convenient. In most cases, your prospect won’t ‘get’ it all, will become bored and most definitely will not be calling.

So why not create a simple PowerPoint presentation that engages your prospects in a conversation. Takes slide or scene, show something the prospect cna relate to then ask them how it relates.  This is done very simply with Interactors in PresenterNet. You can save their name to use throughout the presentation for familiarity and you can narrate it in your own voice. In the end, you have collected all the same data you requested in the form but it will have been provided in a more comfortable, honest setting. People respond more honestly when not confronted.

Give it some thought and it you think an interactive conversation will increase your sales, give us a call. We’d love to talk to you about it.

PresenterNet allows you to capture a much larger percentage of your advertising respondees by putting an interactive presentation in frnt of them. When they are working through your presentation, they are emotionally involved in its message. When they interact, they are expressing preferences and interests. And the end of the process, they have clarity about your offer and are much more likely to take action.

Take a close look at your advertising processes and see if perhaps they might be improved by using and interactive presentation as a communication vehicle, rather than a ream of static web pages.

Even in agile organizations running agile software, salespeople and other employees for whom communications is key need to be ‘nimble.’ A person who is nimble is able to make rapid adjustments while remaining ‘light on their feet.’ Agility is water in a stream moving quickly around obstacles such as boulders and fallen logs. Nimbleness is a leaf floating on the water’s surface in that stream.

Why be Nimble?

The answer is straightforward actually — because you are surrounded by an agile environment. The corporate overview slides that preview any sales presentation may change frequently in an agile orgnization. New funds are raised, new customers acquired or maybe a new product line is launched. If you are a field sales rep and are not always in a position to get the lastest PowerPoint presentation from the home office, tools such as Presenternet allow you to ensure that you have the latest information at your fingertips – automatically! When corporate marketing updates the company slides, they are uploaded to Presenternet and instantly deployed to the sales force. This is the power of corporate media asset management and a key component of the Presenternet system.

One of the first steps to ensuring that you are nimble enough to maximize your performance in the field is make a list of presentation materials that might likely change on a moment’s notice and ensure that they are managed by headquarters. Then you’ll never have to wonder if your materials are up to date.

Salespeople know that there are only three TRUE criteria for qualification:

1. prospects must be interested in speaking with them;
2. the product must meet the prospect’s needs;
3. and the sales contact must have the capability to make or drive a buying decision.

Unfortunately, these criteria can only be defined by prospects themselves, not by database searches or even by sales rep call reports.

The most successful sales of any product or service are those that occur when a potential buyer informs a sales organization that he or she is ready for serious discussions. The success of Webinars as lead generators has grown exponentially for that reason, but Webinars alone aren’t the full answer. The fact that a potential prospect attended a Webinar is indeed an indication of some level of interest, but the overwhelming majority of attendees are not prospects, having participated for a variety of reasons other than buying interest.

Webinars on PresenterNet however, add the most important element for qualifying a true sales lead. By providing InterActors on slides that enable attendees to respond onscreen to various questions during a Webinar, they capture information directly from the potential prospect. These are the kinds of questions that a salesperson would want to ask if given the opportunity to speak candidly:

“Would you like us to call you for an appointment?”

“Do you have a need for the kind of product we sell?”

“Are you the decision maker, or should we contact another person in your organization?”

“Do you currently have funding to commit to this area?”

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how interested are you?”

“How do you see our product potentially fitting into your company’s plans?”

Answers to questions like these help sales people to find and close the very best opportunities. Interactive slides with these capabilities therefore become the missing links to making Webinars the top business drivers available to any sales organization worldwide.

The most difficult steps of a sale are often in getting all necessary decision makers and recommenders to attend meetings to discuss products, present business proposals, and negotiate final agreements. When presentations have to be postponed repeatedly due to schedule changes of key people, the sales process is in danger, while the shot clock keeps running.

Web conferencing in general is an important tool in scheduling meetings as early as possible. It enables people to attend meetings remotely without being present for a face-to-face presentation. But what can be done about key people who miss the meeting entirely? How can sales people get a timely repeat performance scheduled, to ensure that the sales process does not bog down?

PresenterNet’s new Showroom version provides a perfect platform for scheduling an encore performance of any presentation. Absent participants can enter a Showroom with a simple Web address, log-in and attend a self-operated version of the presentation, listening to the same speaker, responding onscreen to answer questions or furnish requested information. They can even ask questions, and have responses captured for answers by email or phone.

The new Showrooms can also be set up in multiples, so that different rooms can be reserved for specific customer company executives. This enables sales people to create a customized follow-up presentation with a specific login, to ensure that the right person logs into the right presentation.

The result of using Showrooms in this way is that no meeting will ever have to be pushed back to keep the customer decision process flowing. In effect, people can participate from anywhere and at any time, to ensure that all key people are constantly updated. This in turn means that every sales action can be executed as soon as needed, and the final cycle time will be greatly reduced. That’s how Showrooms help beat the shot clock and close more deals.

But people still insist on using bullet points to deliver their message. Why is this? One reason is that it is easy. Many people organize thoughts in their heads like bullet points. Bullets represent a simple, logical flow of information. But you’re not trying to entertain or inform anyone in your head. I recemmend that all presenters get and memorize Cliff Atkinson’s fantastic book, ‘Beyond Bullet Points.’ The main idea presented in the book is that each slide in a presentation should be a single thought represented by a single image or diagram to support the thought. People will remember more if you deliver just one thought at a time, so why make it difficult for them?

I recommend that all PresenterNet users get a copy of Cliff’s book and join his online forums to discuss techniques. You’ll see your presentation performance improve drastically.