7 Reasons Why PowerPoint Is Bad For Sales (And What To Use Instead)
PowerPoint has been a standard presentation tool for many years now. It’s easily available, simple to use, and millions of people create presentations with it every day. But in today’s digital workspace, PowerPoint is showing its age because it lacks the ability to present information to an audience effectively and efficiently. Here are 7 reasons why PowerPoint is bad for sales and why you should use an alternative like Ingage.
1. PowerPoint Isn’t Interactive
We live in a world where billions of people use social media platforms every day as their sources of information. The reason they are so successful is that sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are interactive. Not only can you get the most current feeds from anywhere in the world, but you can also comment on, like and share that information. The more your audience can actively participate in your presentation, the more likely you are to engage them.
This is a major drawback of PowerPoint. People can’t interact with it, making it hard for you to hold their interest. They will likely tune you out and not buy your product or service because you aren’t allowing them to participate. Although a presenter can add interactive elements to a PowerPoint presentation, these elements are often staged at certain points, such as a question and answer slide. This means your customer is only allowed to participate when you say and only as long as you spend time on that section of the presentation. This isn’t nearly as engaging as allowing them to participate when they want to and for as long as they want to.
Ingage allows you to add elements to every page of your presentation. You can also go deep into a particular topic that your prospect is interested in at any time during the presentation. Ingage isn’t a linear process the way PowerPoint is. Adding interactivity into your sales process will give you better results.
2. PowerPoint is Time Consuming
Visual design is an important element of a presentation. Every choice you make, including text font, image size and colors can have a positive or negative impact on your audience. The average salesperson creating a presentation isn’t a graphic designer and can hurt their presentation in any number of ways visually, regardless of the content being presented. One bad or distracting font can cause a disconnect between your presentation and your prospective customer. What’s even more difficult is that a slide that works for one audience might not work for another, making it a challenge to create an effective presentation with PowerPoint.
Another issue with PowerPoint is the time involved in creating every slide of your presentation. If you need 20 or 30 slides for your hour-long presentation, you could spend hours making them all. Updating slides takes time and effort as well. You’re wasting valuable time with PowerPoint when a platform like Ingage gives you what you need every time you open it. It’s fresh and current and your sales team doesn’t have to waste time creating or looking for what they need. It’s all right there for them.
3. PowerPoint Presentations Can Hinder Your Salespeople
In many PowerPoint presentations, the salesperson is simply reading each slide, which is a great way to disengage the prospect. PowerPoint lacks the dynamic presenting ability of a platform like Ingage that allows you to deep dive into a specific area that the customer is interested in. You can tailor your presentation as needed to connect with your audience. With PowerPoint, you can lose a customer by elaborating on the information in the slide in an attempt to engage them. When you force your customer to either focus on what you’re saying or what they are seeing, your message has a good chance of getting lost in the mix. They might miss out on important information that can make the difference on whether they go with your product or not. To drive sales and be effective, you need to give them what they want to see when they want to see it. Ingage allows salespeople to focus on what’s important to each potential customer so they can truly personalize each sales experience..
4. PowerPoint Limits Your Teams’ Productivity
If you have more than one person on your team, one will have a different approach than the other to a presentation. They probably won’t agree on how to manage tasks, assign duties, or how to sell your product or service. PowerPoint doesn’t give them the ability to collaborate and find the best way to engage customers. Ingage gives you a platform where you can manage and control the content flow to your sales team. When your salespeople are all presenting the same content, in the same way, you don't have to worry about one of them using the wrong approach. You’ll have consistency in your sales team and your presentations will have the depth that your audience is looking for. Ingage can greatly improve collaboration and increase the team’s overall productivity.
5. PowerPoint Lacks Analytics
Creating good presentations is an ever-evolving process. If something isn’t working, you need to know what it is as soon as possible so you can improve it. Without analytics, it can be hard to gauge the effectiveness of a presentation and to see where it’s failing. You might not even know how much or how little of the content your salespeople are using. With PowerPoint, you can hand out surveys after a presentation, and you might get some back. Then you’ll have to read through them and manually compile the results to get an idea of how well the presentation went. This takes time and effort.
When using ingage analytics, you can see what your salespeople are doing and what is working or not. Ingage can drill down to see if the sales rep opened the presentation, how long they had it opened, which pages they spent the most time on and where the customer was most engaged. Not only does this help you see what’s working and what isn’t, but it also gives you an opportunity to train your sales team and improve performance.
6. PowerPoint Can Damage Your Brand Perception
How a presentation is delivered can influence the way an audience perceives your business. That perception can be good, bad or indifferent. Studies have shown that PowerPoint presentations can hurt brand perception. People see PowerPoint as old and outdated, and they’re right. They can and probably will judge you for using it. Companies that use a dynamic presentation platform like Ingage were perceived by audiences as more knowledgeable and professional. You can either stick with a presentation tool that has its appeal in today’s interactive world or use one that will attract and engage your audience.
7. PowerPoint Gives The Impression That You’re Teaching
Teaching isn’t a bad thing, and you want to teach your audience about what it is you’re selling. In a traditional PowerPoint presentation, the audience sits and takes in whatever you’re trying to sell them. It gives the feel of a classroom setting with you as the teacher. You don’t want your audience to feel like they’re in school listening to a boring lecture. That isn’t an effective way to engage them. Your goal is to excite your audience, thrill them with your message, invite them to interact with your presentation, and compel them to buy what you’re selling. Ingage has the power to take your audience out of the classroom and into an environment where they feel connected to what you’re presenting.
Ingage Is Here To Help
Although PowerPoint is still widely used to create presentations in many different environments, it isn’t your only choice. A number of other solutions, such as Ingage, are available that are better for you and more engaging for your audience. Not only are they easier to use than putting together a deck of slides, but they also come with excellent security and analytics tools, and give you collaboration and content management options that will set you up for the success you are looking for. If you’re ready to ditch PowerPoint for good, contact us today for a free demo!