When walking into a sales presentation, your hands begin to sweat, and you feel the butterflies in your stomach. Even if you know you have a product or service that can meet the needs of your target audience, the challenge is getting them to understand that. Will they have objections you didn’t foresee? Will they understand the value?
Ever since the dawning of PowerPoint, pitch decks have been used in an attempt to deliver more impactful sales pitches. We all know the token presentations where a monotonous sales person reads every bullet point displayed on their slides. It’s only made worse by the cookie cutter templates, corny clip art graphics, overload of text, and painful transitions (fade to black). This format is outdated and doesn’t pack the punch needed to engage a client and pique their curiosity, let alone close a deal.
An effective pitch deck should illustrate the concepts being presented in an imaginative way. It should do more than just state the facts, but tell an engaging story that the client is invited to become a part of. How can you achieve this and what does it look like?
How to design a winning pitch deck
Integrate high-quality visuals
Did you know that 90% of the information transmitted to the human brain every day is visual and 65% of people are visual learners? The preference of visuals can be seen in the fact that content with graphics and text is shared 94% more than content with text alone.
Further stats show that people retain 80% of what they see, 20% of what they read, and 10% of what they hear. So if your pitch is all vocal with no visual component, very little of what you say will be remembered. By including a pitch deck of text, the odds are better but still don’t compete with the retainment level of visual presentations. Knowing this, it is important to create custom high-quality visuals that represent and illustrate the messages you want to share.
Here is an example.
The stat in this slide could have been presented as a bullet point with a clip art graphic of an old television. However, the image used transports you back to the 1970’s and gets your mind thinking about that period. You may wonder what television was like back then and how much it has changed in such a short time. The next slide reinforces that train of thought.
Here you get another stat about the number of ads watched per day in the 70’s along with a look at how a typical living room looked. This further engages the imagination.
These are perfect examples of high-quality custom visuals that can help engage your potential clients while increasing the percentage of your presentation that they remember. Get creative and show your message in addition to telling it.