Three Ideas to Take Your Prospecting Presentations to the Next Level
By Dave Paradi, MBA, Co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint"

One of the most common prospecting techniques for financial advisors is a presentation to a group at a single organization or to a mixed group invited through invitations or advertisements. At these events, the quality of your presentation is a large factor is how many prospects in the audience will turn into fee paying customers. Most of the time you use PowerPoint to illustrate your ideas and convince people why they should work with you. What if you could improve the effectiveness of your presentation? What would that add to your income this year?

Here are three ideas to improve your presentations today.

Idea #1: Clean up those awful graphs
The default graphs in PowerPoint are cluttered with extra lines, colors and effects that do absolutely nothing to help illustrate the points you want to make. You need to use graphs to illustrate how investments grow over time, but get rid of all the clutter and bring out the key points instead. All that clutter on your graph confuses your audience and makes it harder for them to trust you and buy from you. The top things you need to get rid of from the default graphs are the gridlines, 3-D effects and extra numbers on the axes. To emphasize your key points, use callouts to circle or point out the trend or figure that is most important and add text to explain the point being illustrated. Clear graphs will help your audience understand your points and believe that you can help them.

Idea #2: Include video testimonials from existing clients
The hottest trend in PowerPoint presentations is to add video clips. Unfortunately most of the time video clips are incorporated that do not add to the point being made. You must carefully consider each clip and use a video clip only when it will illustrate a point better than you could by just speaking about the idea. One of the best uses of video is to show a testimonial from a client. You are probably already using client testimonials as quotes on slides, but you can make them even better by turning them into video clips. You don’t need any fancy equipment, a consumer digital video camcorder will work very well. Record the client saying great things about you and your firm and the results that you have helped them achieve. Then move that clip to your computer and integrate it into your presentation. Video clips reach the emotions of the audience and add even more credibility than a printed quotation does.

Idea #3: Ask the audience what they want to hear
The future of presentations is to have even more focus on the audience’s needs than you do today. The next wave that is coming is to create and deliver your presentation in a non-linear manner. In a non-linear presentation, you ask the audience, whether it is one person or a larger group, what they need to hear about in order to make a decision. Then you deliver those topics from a menu of possible topics. Each presentation is completely customized and meets the needs of each audience uniquely. This can be done with a flipbook presentation or one using PowerPoint projected on a screen. With a non-linear presentation, you don’t guess at what the prospect would like to hear about, you deliver exactly what they need to hear in order to go from being a prospect to a client.

In order to make a buying decision, the prospect needs to trust you and the information you have presented. The standard presentation you have been using for years is no longer going to give you the results you want. By using the ideas described above, you can improve your presentations to prospects and improve your conversion rates that will increase your income.

©MMVI Dave Paradi

Dave Paradi’s Think Outside the Slide™ approach helps presenters get results by showing them how to quickly create effective PowerPoint presentations. He is the co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint", part of the Prentice Hall Series in Advanced Business Communication. He offers a free PowerPoint e-course, newsletter and articles on his web site at www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com.