6 Ways Presentation Software Can Deliver a Serious Return on Investment

What separates successful companies that deliver a great return on investment from those that don’t? Ask 100 different managers and you’ll probably get as many different answers. Many business leaders point to a strong management team since steady leadership can make timely decisions and provide direction whenever things go sideways. There are those who might opt for a strong product lineup, with each variant filling a niche. Some will say a strong brand identity helps keep clients focused on their company. In between these takes, maybe some managers will point out efficiency.

Efficiency at work isn’t about having the most popular products or getting the best salespeople. You can have a very popular product that’s cheap to make and affordable to many. However, the added cost of marketing it to a saturated market might squeeze profits to a minimum. Or, you might have a product that boasts bigger profits but requires a costly, complicated manufacturing process. As a result, you can’t churn out as many items as you want, cutting profits down. The bottom line: the more your team can deliver without adding to cost, the more likely you are to deliver a healthier return on investment.

Efficiency is about maximizing resources to produce maximum profits. It may not be as flashy as some other strategies, but running an efficient company means more consistent results and fewer headaches. Would you rather have a popular product that earns pennies on the dollar or efficient operations that allow a maximum return on investment in the quickest time possible?

Sales Efficiency Is A Must When Presenting the Company’s Products and Services

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In a sales and marketing context, efficiency is indicated when revenue exceeds the money spent dollar for dollar. Calculating sales efficiency means dividing new business by total sales and marketing costs during the period. As long as you score above “1” the whole time, you are earning more than you spend.  The higher the number, the better the return on investment for your efforts.

Efficiency also comes from consistency in materials that present the company’s story and showcase its products and services. Using the right presentation software can help companies develop a better connection with prospects, leads and existing clients. If people respond and engage better with a company’s sales and marketing materials, it means employees are doing a great job selling the company. Efficient communication means less back-and-forth, and more honest data and informative content.

The Choice of Presentation Software Can Impact Return on Investment

Using the right tools can spell the difference between a job done and a job done right. Many off-the-shelf programs can complete the work, sure, but the shoddy final product might leave more questions than answers. Your message can be hampered by your software’s abilities, so it pays to make sure that your presentation software contains all the tools you need to get your message across—for both clarity’s and efficiency’s sake. You will save time and money by utilizing an application that can help craft and develop your message, provide supporting information and engage clients all at once.

Choosing the right presentation software can help your company achieve an improved return on investment. Here are six key ways having the right set of tools can cultivate more efficient sales and marketing teams.

1. Presentation Software is a Key Element of Sales

Presentation software helps turn ideas into something tangible to share with others. It doesn’t matter if you want to share information with fellow sales and marketing team members, submit updated sales figures to top-level management or present a pitch to clients—making communications that are easily accessible and highly intelligible is the point of presentation software.

Your presentation software’s tool range will dictate your content’s extensiveness and creativity. Basic slideshow presentation programs usually only offer a few text and images options: maybe a small clipart library and some fonts. To differentiate from other users, you’ll likely eat up time and effort customizing font sizes, adding colors and plying on any transition effect you can find. Unfortunately, none of these things help clients get the information they want. Instead, you’ll annoy them with an assault on their senses.

How Do You Create Great A Sales Presentation?

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Sales presentations are about making the buyer agree that what’s on offer is a solution to their current problems. So before attempting to draft the presentation, the author needs to understand his audience. The more you relate your message to the buyer’s wants and needs, the easier it will be to determine the presentation’s content. The presentation should have enough information to answer the buyer’s questions.

Create Some Structure

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If you’re going to tell a story, you need to pay attention to structure. Besides a beginning, middle and end, you need to have some direction in the story you’re telling.  The audience will always expect a pitch after a windup. It’s the same as expecting a punchline to a joke. There will be cases when a presentation can stall when an audience member asks questions or requests more details.

With run-of-the-mill presentation software, handling these unexpected interruptions is usually a matter of halting the whole slideshow, answering questions and picking back up and moving on. Slideshows only go forward, and having to go back to a particular section often leads to some awkward moments.

But wouldn’t it be great if the presentation software contained tools that let you improvise and deviate from the story flow as needed? Ingage’s software, for example, allows users to adjust story linearity on the fly and embed graphics, charts and whole websites into slides. This allows your story to follow your clients’ thought process, anticipate any questions with ready answers and have certain data stand out for easier reference. When clients ask for details, instead of pausing, you can enable data to pop up in strategic locations on the slide.

Liven Up Your Presentation’s Appearance

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Nothing kills the mood quicker than handing clients a jumble of data to wade through while reciting your memorized narration spiel. You need to consider your audience’s attention span. Ideally, a presentation should take no more than seven minutes from beginning to end. That’s the maximum amount of time an adult audience can concentrate fully on a particular topic. Anything more than seven minutes, and your audience will begin to disengage: commence shuffling feet, phones sneaking out of pockets and surreptitious glances to see if lunch is in yet. Of course, there are some presentations that will need more than seven minutes. In this case, be sure to have some breaker activities ready to refocus your audience’s attention.

More importantly, your slides shouldn’t bore your audience. Whether you’re planning to show seven minutes or sixty minutes’ worth of slides, they need to capture your client’s attention. For this, you need dynamic and interactive presentation software to liven up your message. An intuitive software filled with powerful features such as interactive buttons, scroll motion and video can result in better presentations. The less time spent tinkering with controls, the more time you can devote to your content.

Make the Presentation About How You Can Help

Clients often have a threshold on the level of detail they need at the moment. Sure, they want to know what you're selling. However, they’re often more concerned with how this product solves their problems than its technical aspects. Many salespeople are so eager to make the sale that they forget this and overpitch and oversell. This is what product brochures are for. Keep your presentation focused on how you can provide the solution your clients need.

Having the right presentation software can help streamline your story.  Instead of displaying every little detail of your products, software like Ingage lets you apply interactive options to keep certain details hidden until needed. This keeps the presentation compact and to the point, but ready to provide more information if needed. This can minimize back-and-forth, saving time and—you guessed it—provide a better return on investment.

2. Deliver Branded Marketing Content Across the Board

Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat—these are some of the platforms outside of traditional web advertising that you need to stay active in to navigate today’s marketing environment. Unless you’re one of the few brands that are already ubiquitous in the public consciousness (think McDonald’s, Nike, Coke, etc), you’ll need some effort to stay in your target market’s minds. Social media is a great way to establish the widest possible reach without stretching your budget too thin.

Establishing a brand presence across various social platforms ensures your brand stays afloat amid the noise and clutter. In itself, this is good advice—which is of course why all your competitors and every other company with digital aspirations are also doing the same thing. This means that you need a better way of presenting your company, your products and your brand.

Create Consistent Brand Content

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Every social media platform operates slightly differently. Some encourage photos over lengthy captions, while others are entirely text-based and yet others still are entirely video! Creating content for each platform is both time-consuming and expensive, and doesn’t make sense.

Instead, most brands opt to create multiple versions of the same campaign. This provides consistent messaging no matter which platform clients use. Sales and marketing teams then have multiple formats available to use in presentations for interactivity purposes. And when it comes to presenting, interactive multimedia is king. In fact, 91% of B2B buyers prefer interactive content to static content when viewing presentations. Interactive content can generate up to five times more views compared to ordinary content! More views mean more chances to score a sale, which leads to a better return on investment.

Use Presentation Software With Interactive Content

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When creating presentations for clients and leads, adding interactivity is now the rule rather than the exception. If you can’t engage your client within a few minutes of the presentation, they’ll be long gone by the time the pitch comes around. This is why your choice of presentation software is crucial in delivering content.

Adding interactivity means handing your audience the reins of the presentation to explore your content as they please. Interactive buttons provide additional information and add a level of detail. Video snippets can explain a feature or concept better than static text or pictures can. Nonlinear presentations give audiences a better way to navigate through the presentation. Presenting data in an interactive and graphical manner helps audiences absorb and retain information better.

Presentation software with these interactive features is a must for any company that wants to deliver multi-platform branded content. It’s time to say goodbye to static stacks of image slides with too much text. Interactivity means more attention, which leads to better selling opportunities, which ultimately leads to (one more time now) a better return on investment.

3. Boost Sales Enablement with Presentation Tools

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Presentations are collaborative efforts, not solo projects. Teams in marketing and sales especially have to coordinate and work together on presentations that can wow internal and external clients no matter who is presenting.

While sales teams go out to land the client, the rest of the company (especially marketing) will need to work on providing sales with the resources they need. Teams support and enable sales efforts by providing the sales team with resources to close the deal. Among the many sales enablement tools that can help engage clients are sales and marketing materials. This includes the production of customized client presentations.

It’s no secret that in many companies, sales and marketing operations often experience a bit of a disconnect. What marketing finds important may not be a priority for sales, and vice-versa. Despite companies’ best efforts to encourage collaboration, the way marketing qualifies leads might require a different set of variables compared to what sales consider as leads.

When Sales and Marketing decide to hang up the boxing gloves and team up instead, they produce better results. Eighty-seven percent of sales and marketing leaders say that collaboration between the two teams promotes critical business growth. But in order to do so, both teams need to understand each other. Sales teams can provide better insights for marketing teams by sharing their experiences with actual clients. This allows Marketing to identify and understand what customers need and want. The insights can also help Marketing develop better qualified leads, which sales can approach with improved confidence. Together, these teams can construct an improved profile of their core market and develop better solutions.

Sales Enablement = Better Return On Investment

Fundamentally, all departments are either in sales or in sales support. A company's most basic objective is to produce goods and services to sell for profit. Adopting sales enablement formalizes the understanding that everybody needs to assist the sales effort. If employees are not directly benefiting from sales enablement, then they are expected to contribute to it.

A substantial increase in sales revenue leads to increases in employees’ salaries and benefits. This makes it clear that all employees have a reason to participate in sales enablement. It’s not just Marketing, it’s everybody in the chain: Finance, Manufacturing, Logistics, et cetera. Generating an improved return on investment involves cooperation not just from Sales and Marketing, but from everybody else too.

Applying Best Practices Means Better Return on Investment

In order to maximize returns through a sales enablement approach, teams must learn to understand what they can and can’t derive from it. More importantly, they need to know that they can contribute to the sales effort no matter their own department.

Set Clear Objectives and Specific Tasks

Every team participating in a sales enablement program should have an idea of what they want to contribute. For Sales, the objective is easy: gather, learn and apply everything they can to effectively engage leads and convert them into buyers.

Meanwhile, support teams can use their existing skills to provide what Sales needs. Can Marketing produce materials that outline the features and benefits of each product? Will HR impart tricks and tips on how to conduct presentations and deliver messages? Can Logistics help explain the process of how a product goes from the manufacturing line to the warehouse to the client’s doorstep? Will Finance provide multiple payment options that clients can choose from? How can Marketing and Sales collaborate further to map out new buyer journeys?

Ensure That Sales Teams Practice Sales Enablement

If sales is a continuous effort, then sales enablement is similarly a continuous process. It doesn’t have to be through training programs: communication materials like regular newsletters and weekly reminders can help instill enablement ethos into the sales team.

Otherwise, you’ll find your business awash in communication materials nobody reads or training programs that sales teams can’t attend. Instead of increasing the revenue stream, unmonitored and uninspired sales enablement can contribute to a lower return on investment.

Collaborative Presentation Software Can Help Fill the Gaps

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When considering presentation software, check if the program you’re eyeing offers collaboration options. Having collaboration features makes it easier for different teams to work together without the hassle of passing files back and forth and risking version control issues.

For example, Ingage’s cloud-based interface enables sharing access to presentation materials, allowing teams to collaborate on content, review information and provide better resources. All these edits, additions and deletions can help improve the content better. Having multiple perspectives offers a deeper understanding of the target audience. Presentations that resonate with clients have a better chance of landing a deal. Increasing chances of scoring the sale can lead to a serious return on investment if it pays off.

4. Communicate Effectively with Employees

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Keeping co-workers on the same page is sometimes harder than it should be. Different employees have different motivations, and clients also have different attention spans. However, this doesn’t excuse them from training. But subjecting them to too much training can be a strain. Plus it gives them less time to do what they’re paid to do: sell.

It’s not that employees are resistant to training by nature. However, how you execute training can affect how workers respond to subsequent invitations. If a majority of attendees are bored or disengaged, there might be something wrong with the training program itself. When collecting feedback, if many say that they would better grasp the training ideas if the company would just print a handout, changes in your communication process may be needed.

Training Employees To Use Presentation Materials

Like sales enablement, learning how to use presentation software is a continuous process. It may not be as extensive or as frequent as a sales enablement doctrine, but as presentation software continues to integrate newer technology, education is the only way to keep up to date.

Learning how to operate the software is often a user’s first investment. However, it’s equally important to learn what to include - or not include - in presentations. Many people get carried away with the idea of explaining themselves further. Presentation software is not meant for you to transcribe your whole thesis. At most, it should serve as a visual accompaniment. Otherwise, you might be better off distributing handouts to your audience and letting them figure everything out.

When drafting a presentation, here are a few suggestions to consider:

  1. Outline your ideas on a storyboard—just a quick outline of the presentation. You can expand or challenge initial ideas later on.
  2. Establish your audience. Who are you writing for? Who is presenting? Both considerations should fit the tone of your draft.
  3. Map it out, flesh out items, and see where the story goes. And be mindful that too much material can overwhelm the audience!
  4. List all possible questions about the presentation. This way, you can anticipate the questions and prepare for them.

Improving Training and Communication Materials

Create a Clear Communication Plan

You can’t teach people how to reach an objective if they only have a vague idea of what the objective is. Outlining objectives and expectations should always be the first part of any training course. This ensures both trainers and trainees will have an idea of whether the program worked.

Modernize Communication Tools

Time is money, and insisting on trainees to give up productive hours for training will require a high degree of persuasion. Instead of bartering, provide tools that make for a more efficient communication and training session. Cloud meetings and videoconferences remove the need for in-person training and are appreciated by employees working from home or on the road. Consider using a productivity suite which eliminates the need to learn separate applications.

Don’t Go Full-Text Mode

Your co-workers deserve better use of their training time than just reading pages of text. Instead, provide infographics or highly visual presentations in place of text-heavy slideshows. Video training modules and interactive or gamified programs can also raise engagement levels compared to sitting in a classroom taking notes.

Engagement through Entertainment

Today’s workers would like to at minimum enjoy their workplace. Communications don’t have to take a stone-cold serious tone—work some lighter segments into the corporate newsletter, or introduce programs or contests to stoke employees’ competitive spirits.

Measure the Metrics

Sharing internal analytics can show which employees are ahead of the curve. It could be something as simple as workplace audit findings or something tangible such as sales team revenues. People react to metrics, with many wanting to improve after finding out they are lagging behind. But while some healthy competition is good, don’t let it get so far as to create rivalries!

Make Communication Two-Way and Collaborative

Leaving a feedback mechanism is not a new idea, but it is effective. Getting employees to share reactions to policies or developments can help gauge how they feel about changes. Out-of-the-box suggestions coming from employees can also inadvertently solve long-running problems or improve processes. Additionally, supporting interdepartmental initiatives can help better establish communication links between parties.

Less is More

Don’t overdo the communication. You don’t need to send constant reminders to employees after office hours. They can appreciate the communication once they’re back at work the next day. Plus, it’s important to maintain some space between information dumps.

End Messages with a Call To Action (CTA)

While communication’s objective is to inform, companies can take it a step further with engagement incentives. A call to action (CTA) can elicit insights and genuine reactions from people. A reply or reaction means someone cared enough about the content to share their opinion.

Using Presentation Software To Create Interactive Training Materials

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Collaborative, interactivity-capable presentation software can help create training materials. Instead of producing text-heavy training modules that are eerily similar to company brochures, you can create highly customized training content.

Even better, presentation software with analytics capabilities like Ingage can help measure training effectiveness. Metrics such as total time consumed and which sections generated the most and least interest can be gathered immediately. Once you have the insights, it’s easier to customize or refine training programs.

5. Deliver New Content and Materials to Distributed Teams

When delivering custom content for clients, it’s important to ensure three things: First, you need a sales-focused storyline that outlines the buyer’s journey and ends with a solution.  You also need supportive design elements that enhance the story without overwhelming it. Finally, you need interactive elements to increase engagement as well as help viewers retain information.

Having presentation software capable of providing the above elements is a huge step toward getting the job done right. Possessing an intuitive tool means content creators can focus on the content rather than fighting with features that don’t serve them.

Making Sure Everybody Has The Updated Version

Legacy presentation software constantly posed a problem when it came to controlling and maintaining versions. Once you distributed copies of a presentation to members, making changes became near-impossible. Even the most minute corrections or edits meant redistributing copies to teams and clients all over again.

Thankfully, modern presentation software that relies on a cloud interface like Ingage can ensure consistency. Edits you make are saved on the original file, which in turn triggers updates across all versions found on the network. This convenient auto-update push action ensures everybody remains on the same page.

Creating Product Marketing and Demonstration Presentations

Sales and marketing teams need to create two distinct presentations: product marketing pages and product demonstration pages. The first requires creating a catalog that outlines all company products, with detailed information on their specifications and instructions on how to market them. Meanwhile, product demonstration pages are the instruction guide for conducting product demonstrations.

Creating a product demonstration script entails developing three parts: the pre-demo, where you set the mood and introduce the demonstrator; the actual demonstration; and the wrap-up or post-demo, in which you conveniently recap the whole demonstration, emphasizing how the product solved the problem.

Presenting To The Client: Delivering Top-Notch Sales Presentations

Sales team members occupy a critical spot in your business, but they can’t do it alone. Not everybody can handle the spotlight when asked to talk off the cuff about products. A good presentation script, meant to be delivered by the sales rep during the demonstration, can help them stay on target.

Presentations are a reliable ally for sales representatives if they know how to wield them correctly.  Below are some techniques to make a presentation that truly sticks.

1. Focus on your client’s needs

Efficiency in presentations is crucial but often overlooked. Clients might humor you by letting you wax on about the company history, but like everyone else, they’d prefer if you cut to the chase. It’s always best to use the pre-demo to summarize your client’s problem, so they realize you’re aware of their needs.

2. Benefits, not Features

When discussing the product, don’t dwell on anything that you can find in your own company brochure. Discuss the product’s specific benefits to that user instead of talking shop.

3. Visualize the Numbers

When dealing with numbers, it’s better to build infographics or tables and charts. Clients should be able to see the numbers you raised without needing a mental calculator. Visual aids help clients retain information better.

4. Tell A Story

Don’t be mechanical. Instead, tell a story: explain how their problems are fixable, and that this product might be the one they’re waiting for. Guiding clients through the buyer’s journey makes them realize you invested time in understanding their situation.

5. Have the Client Visualize Themselves With The Product

This is essential. Unless clients are making a repeat purchase, they have yet to discover your product’s full effects. Use colorful descriptions to have them visualize using the product themselves. Once they understand how much convenience your product offers, orders are likely to follow. More orders means a better return on investment.

6. Attract Customers and Recruit Top Talent with Corporate Presentations

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Presentation software can also play a part in promoting your company to the outside world. A good company presentation can go a long way toward attracting customers, investors and even new employees. This is the reason why corporate branding and corporate identity are important factors in establishing a company image.

People should know what your company stands for with a single glance at your brand. Imagery evokes emotional reactions, and people will assume whether your company is, say, more paternal or motherly, intellectual or athletic, or formal or non-conformist.

The most recognizable corporate branding contains three key elements:

  1. Vision. Your vision, or what you would like to achieve, should be obvious. As well as your mission or the method by which you plan to fulfill your vision and the market in which the company positions itself.
  2. Logo elements. These are visual representations of the company. Apart from literally spelling out the company name, the logo might provide an easy shorthand symbol that your company strongly identifies with.
  3. Voice. A clear, strong personality and voice supports the vision, mission and positioning of the brand. Reflect your outward attitude and tone in your branding for customers to see from the get-go.

Creating Brand Presentations That Deliver Healthy Return on Investment

Brand presentations introduce your company to the world. A good presentation tells a story, combining the logo and design elements with the company’s vision, mission and positioning. It also tells the story through the personality and voice of the brand. On the practical side, corporate brand presentations will give an overview of the company’s strengths, structure and previous financial performances.

Creating a brand presentation is easy with the right presentation software. The software you choose should allow for dynamic elements to be integrated into every page. At the same time, the software’s features should be as dynamic as the elements you’re presenting.

Elements of a Brand Presentation

In order to fully present what the company is all about, the brand presentation should include consistently standard elements like color scheme, logo guidelines, typography, font and imaging style to help tell the company story. Defining rules for the use of the corporate brand ensures the preservation of brand elements in their final, approved form. As these elements are usually trademarked, the style guide serves as the final authority on how brand elements can be used.  Establishing a strong brand identity conveys how serious your company is in maintaining its image.

Delivering Your Company Presentation

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When delivering your brand presentation in front of audiences, note that the strength of your presentation will often indicate how your brand will be received. As such, delivering a weak performance will create an impression of a weak brand. In contrast, a strong presentation creates the idea that you are representing a strong brand.

Know Your Audience

Presentations should be customized for a definite audience in mind. Especially when it comes to presentations that introduce your company, make sure to scout the audience beforehand. Be sure you know their threshold in terms of presentation time. However, try to limit your presentation to no more than 20 minutes even if the client seems accommodating. Highlight parts of the presentation that resonate with your audience’s specific wants and needs. This helps give the impression that your two companies fit.

Create a Professional Presentation

Developing a presentation often requires pruning your content instead of growing it. With an exact duration already in mind, remove all unnecessary elements to keep it compact. Tucking in interactive elements that can display additional information can be helpful for inquisitive clients who want more after.

Present Like You Own The Company

Audiences are quick to notice if you are enthusiastic about the company you work for. It shows unconsciously in your tone and demeanor when presenting the company’s brand. If you want to create an engaged impression, make your enthusiasm infectious.

Provide Handouts

Finally, have handouts ready for distribution at the end of your presentation. The information in handouts is usually more extensive than the presentation, free from the constraints of space and duration. Handouts help supply missed or incomplete information from the presentation and reinforce earlier information. With software like Ingage, your handout could simply be a URL or QR code that links them to the full presentation online, saving paper and time for everyone.

Maximize Your Return on Investment with Ingage

The choice of presentation software can make or break your dealings with clients, investors, applicants and the general public. In the modern era where attention spans are short and engagement is highly desired, it makes sense to invest in highly interactive presentation software. It should be as dynamic as the company it represents. Ingage is one such solution that provides interactivity, collaboration and analytics in a single, cloud-based software.

Not only can Ingage create dynamic and highly interactive presentations, it also has features that promote collaboration among team members and across teams. At the same time, its rich analytics features get a snapshot of how audiences reacted to your sales and marketing materials.

Ingage has everything you need to incorporate dynamic elements into your presentations. This means that Ingage doesn’t just have to stay within the confines of the sales and marketing departments. HR, training and communications teams will also find the software very helpful.

Visit Ingage and see how a great presentation is just a software away. Or, contact us here to arrange a demo to get a view of the full features. See for yourself how the right presentation software can improve your return on investment!

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