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The quality of your sales presentation directly affects the volume of sales you make. The more time, thought, and money you invest in creating a perfect presentation, the more conversions you achieve.

Sales presentations require a creative approach mixed with elements of surprise, personalization, high-quality content, and a bit of humor. Whether you’ve worked on sales presentations before or are tackling the task for the first time, you need some pointers.

We’ve collected the most useful methods of creating a successful sales presentation in this short article. Read on!

1. Pay Special Attention To Relevance

Generic sales presentations are highly ineffective. Don’t make the same mistake your competitors often do. Make sure you focus on the subjects relevant to your potential clients. In order to do that, you have to invest time and money into extensive research.

Your marketing department has probably done part of the work for you defining the parameters of your target audience. Dig a little deeper to answer questions they may have and offer solutions they require.

Since not all your listeners are created equal, you may need to divide the presentation into parts to cater to all of their needs. Your pitch may be generic, but subheadings could be modified to fit each particular group of customers.

According to experts at PresentationGeeks, PowerPoint slides should contain focal points to convey the message to your audience. Stick to one point per slide.

2. Get to the Point Quickly

The attention span of an average consumer today is about eight seconds. Your target audience is likely to be too occupied to listen to lengthy introductions. If you don’t manage to catch their attention quickly, your entire presentation efforts may be in vain.

Identify the key points of your presentation and get to them as quickly as possible. Make sure your listeners understand that you are here to solve their problems rather than overwhelm them with information.

Meanwhile, a strong introduction should exist. It’s an attention catcher, which should make the audience interested in what you are saying next. In fact, the first couple of sentences are one of the most important parts of your sales presentation.

It would be smart to invest a formidable amount of time in them.

3. Know When to Stop

Knowing when to stop talking is extremely important to the success of your sales presentation. At some point, your audience is ready to buy your products. If you continue talking, you may scare them off. Too much information is never too good. So once points are made and questions are answered, hurry to end the presentation.

Your goal is to say on top of your game. Any extra information can push you off the hill. The overall point is to keep the presentation as short as possible. Try to stuff as much useful information as you can into as few words as you can.

You can start by drafting a large sales presentation. Allow your inspiration to work and pour words out. Then start compressing them into shorter sentences and throwing out unnecessary stuff. When you feel that you can’t make the presentation any shorter, cut it in half.

4. Add Q&A Section After Each Point

Many presentations end with a Q&A section. For a sales presentation, you should add such sections after making each point. If you are addressing different problems, which can be solved by your products, failing to answer questions timely could spell disaster.

You can convert a client with the first part of the presentation, but one thing keeping him or her from making a purchase could be a simple question. Hardly anyone is ready to wait for the entire presentation to end to ask something. Most likely, the impulsive wish to buy will disappear. That’s why you have to make sure all questions are answered as soon as they arise.

Always listen to what the customer has to say. Don’t rush to the next point. A client who asks questions is interested in your product. Don’t let such prospective buyers off the hook. Never interrupt the listener or argue with the audience. You should have several phrases in your arsenal to get the presentation back on track.

5. Make It Fun and Energetic

As the attention span decreases so is the desire to listen to something boring. Audiences may be willing to concentrate on information that could bring it money. But when you are trying to get them to spend money, it’s another story.

You have to keep trying to make your presentation fun. Which means you have to dilute your industry-specific information with jokes, images, animation, and the like. Look for relevant media to insert in your presentation. Some companies invest in custom-made videos for promotional purposes. You could borrow a couple of short ones from your marketing team.

Don’t stick to text and voice. Add some diversity to the presentation.

Meanwhile, you should train your voice to sound energetic and full of enthusiasm. Any monotonous presentation is doomed for failure. Run your presentation by friends and family to find out how you sound. Or record it with your smartphone to hear yourself speak.

6. Believe in What You Are Selling

You may be surprised but audiences can feel falsity a mile away. You must believe that what you are selling can solve a problem. You should be ecstatic about your chance to share your products or services with other people.

Be genuine about your desire to help people. With such energy, you can sell virtually anything even if your presentation is not perfect.

To understand whether you are doing a good job convincing clients of your enthusiasm, ask someone who is not in your industry, to listen to you speak.

Meanwhile, make sure your speech doesn’t include “eh”, “ah”, “hmm” and the like. These interjections act as mood killers for the audience. Have several phrases ready to use when you are at a loss of what to say (for example, in a Q&A section).

7. Pay Special Attention to the Format

No matter how amazing your sales presentation sounds, it should also look good as well. That’s why you need to follow several formatting rules.

• Use only classic fonts. For example, Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana. Anything fancy may make the presentation tough to read.
• Avoid bullet points to simplify the reading process. It’s better to operate with short sentences rather than try to stuff more information into a slide with bullet points.
• Take advantage of new templates. If you use PowerPoint, all the standard, free templates have been seen by your audience several times. Don’t be boring. Use a fresh template.
• Pay special attention to the color. Try not to use more than two colors other than black and white. Otherwise, you could make the presentation too bright and tough to read.
• Limit punctuation. Try to avoid exclamation points. Emphasize the text with your voice rather than symbols.
• Avoid sound effects. Sound effects and bright slide transitions are outdated. It’s better to use a video in a slide.
• Use charts and graphs. They are a great way to illustrate your points with minimum text.

Final Thoughts

A sales presentation should be catchy. Try to avoid too many words or too much text. Your goal is to grab the listeners’ attention and make a conversion. For that, you have to be enthusiastic about the product you sell while following formatting tips.