It’s not about you, it’s about them.

Social Media 101 has taught us that one-sided broadcasting is a cardinal sin. Our world grows ever more social by the day and there’s no room or time for  ‘all about me’ shows where we tell our audience why we think we’re great.  Our role now is to inspire prospects with informative and insightful content.

The same holds true for corporate presentations. Your pitch to your audience is your golden opportunity to explain how you can help them, not why you think they should become your customer.   Has this ever happened to you?

Has this ever happened to you? Unfortunately corporate presentations tend to follow the same formulaic trajectory of who we are, what we do, and how we do it, and all by way of uninspiring bulleted lists, clip art images and data charts.  Image courtesy of duarte.com

As a result, the conventional corporate presentation often fails to align with a prospect’s needs and interests. The way to grab and hold their attention is to transform your corporate content into a visual narrative that that speaks to them, and about them.

Relating and relaying content to your audience.

As addressed in a previous post, you can use slide presentation software like SlideRocket to create attractive and functional presentations. But designing the deck is only part of a bigger process. First you must begin with a plan for displaying your content in a style and flow that is cohesive, informative and engaging.

At MarketPlane we are avid fans of Slide:ology, a book by Nancy Duarte on the art and discipline of crafting visually inspiring PowerPoint presentations. Slide:ology is rich with processes designed to help you conceptualize and illustrate your content. There is too much to summarize here, but a few helpful jumping off points include:

  1. Identify pain points or issues that your organization solves and apply real world scenarios to illustrate them.
  2. Make the most important data and point the focus of each slide. Giving everything the same weight will leave your audience wondering what’s most important.
  3. Plot out a storyboard for your presentation
  4. Keep your charts and graphs simple and clean by using with pleasing color palettes and linear styles.
  5. For IT companies, break out complex architecture or process diagrams over a series of slides to better illustrate how the technology works.

    slide:ology presentations

    Through a series of best practices, Slide:ology teaches you to relay less on PowerPoint as a teleprompter, and to use it as a vehicle to guide your audience through a narrative of your value proposition.  Image courtesy of duarte.com

    How do we create a visual narrative?

    The first step is a good old fashion brainstorm. Begin by stepping away from your computer, grabbing pen and paper, and jotting down ideas for how can take the text out of your content and replace it with meaningful imagery. Scrawl diagrams, consider relevant metaphors, plot out storyboards, etc. Really try to step outside of your elevator pitch and think of real-world scenarios of how you can bring value to your prospects.

    This level of conceptualization can be challenging for some B2B companies whose products aren’t as conceptually relatable as more consumer-focused organizations. However, your offering exists for a reason and it exists to solve a problem. The story is there – you  just have to create it. In the end, changing the way you present your corporate pitch can change the way you earn business.

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