Best Practices for Using Product Photos in Sales Presentations

When making a sales presentation, you know that product photos are vital to give the prospect a visual connection with the product.  How can you make the photos have the greatest impact and help close the sale?  By following these best practices.

Focus on what you want them to see
Standard product photos are good, but not as good as a photo showing the product in use.  If you can show the prospect that the product is being used by others in a similar situation, you go a long way to convincing them that the product will solve their problem as well.  With any photo, but especially with photos of products being used in a real situation, you will want to remove background elements that can distract the prospect from what you want them to focus on.  Use the sizing and cropping tools in your presentation software to a) proportionally enlarge the photo so that the area you want to emphasize is large on the slide, and b) crop the outside of the photo eliminating the parts that are not important to your point.  The one limitation on enlarging a photo is that it may get grainy if you are starting with a low resolution image (like from a web site).  Stretching it too large will cause it to be a grainy image that looks worse.  Get a high resolution photo or keep it smaller so it still looks clear (choose clarity over size if you are forced to choose).

Get rid of pixels you don’t need
Using a high resolution photo allows you to zoom in on details easily, but it can also have a downside.  Most presentation software packages store every pixel of the high resolution photo, even the pixels that it doesn’t need to show the photo clearly.  This causes your presentation file to become very large and may prevent you from e-mailing it to the prospect.  There are two approaches to dealing with this issue.  First, you can do the resizing in a photo management program that also allows you to resample the photo (resampling is the technical term for taking out the extra pixels).  This will give you a smaller but still clear picture before you insert it on your slide.  The second approach is to use the feature of many presentation software packages that allows you to remove extra pixels that are not being used after the photo is inserted on a slide.  Either way, you end up with good clear photos and a file that is small enough to e-mail.

Draw their attention to the important spot
Just showing the photo is not enough.  If the prospect doesn’t know what part of the photo you want them to pay attention to, they may not understand your point or even misinterpret what you are saying.  The solution is not to use a laser pointer or walk up to the screen and try to point at the spot.  Both of these approaches are distracting and don’t really work because a laser pointer is hard to hold steady and walking to the screen blocks the rest of the slide.  The best approach is to add a callout to the photo.  A callout consists of two parts: a graphic highlight, like an arrow or circle, to direct attention to a certain spot, and the callout text that explains why this spot is important.  By using a callout, your prospect is clear why this photo is important and gives it weight in their buying decision.

Find a photo when you don’t have one
You’ve been busy and haven’t quite made the time to prepare that upcoming presentation.  It’s now the weekend before and you’ve got a few hours to get the slides done.  It would be great to have a picture of that certain part of the product that the prospect is most interested in, but you don’t have that photo file.  Oh sure, marketing has it because it’s in the brochure, but you need it right now.  Here’s a trick to get a photo from a brochure into your presentation without scanning or waiting until someone can make the time to send it to you.  Open up the PDF version of the brochure either saved on your laptop or from your web site.  Zoom the page until the photo you want fills the screen.  Then, use the Snapshot tool in Acrobat to draw a rectangle around the picture.  This puts it on your Windows clipboard and allows you to easily paste it in to your slide.  This trick also works for getting a company logo.  Find a PDF document like an annual report or press release and it will usually contain the logo you want.  This technique works because PDF documents save graphics in high resolution, allowing a zoomed in photo to still look clear when it is pasted on your slide.

Product photos are essential in sales presentations because they show the product and the benefits to the prospect in a visual way that is better than just words.  Use these best practices to make your product photos look great and work harder to help you close the sale.

Dave Paradi teaches professionals and executives from Fortune 500 corporations to non-profit agencies how to transform the overloaded text slides they currently use into persuasive visuals that sell ideas, products and services effectively to decision makers.  He is the author of "The Visual Slide Revolution" and co-author of two "Guide to PowerPoint" books from Prentice Hall.  His ideas have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, BusinessWorld India and many other publications around the world.  Learn more at www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com.

©MMIIX Dave Paradi