Overview of the PowerPoint Presentation Effectiveness System

I work with sales teams who struggle with the quality of their sales presentations and the productivity of the sales reps in creating the presentations. Sales executives would like their sales reps to easily create presentations and deliver a customized and consistent message every time. My research based PowerPoint Presentation Effectiveness System helps my clients achieve greater sales rep productivity and deliver presentations that close more sales.

A single training session, book or set of standard slides will not by itself solve the issues of effectiveness and efficiency that you struggle with. These elements, along with others, need to be integrated in order to give you and your staff the maximum benefit. My approach is to work with you through a series of steps that help identify the issues and provide solutions that bring lasting benefits in the future.

Step 1: Identify common ideas communicated about products, services or operations 
Whether you are communicating externally to different clients or internally in different reporting periods, there are a set of common ideas that you will be communicating. If you start from scratch each time, you are wasting the opportunity to build commonality. In this step, I help you structure the ideas in preparation for the next step. 

Step 2: Create a standard set of slides to visually communicate the common ideas
Once the common ideas are identified, I help you create a set of slides to use as a base to build presentations from. The slides will be visual, including graphs, diagrams, photos and multimedia elements. This set of slides is not intended to be every slide anyone would ever need. It forms the core of the presentations ensuring consistency in presentation of key ideas and productivity in creating presentations. 

Step 3: Identify how a professional will use the slides in the standard set to create a customized presentation
Each presentation needs to be customized – the idea of a “canned” presentation is no longer sufficient. I work with you to identify how a professional will use the standard slides, along with additional slides that they need to customize the information. This step addresses both the customization of the standard slides as well as adding new slides in a consistent manner. 

Step 4: Assess the professionals on their use of best practices and skills for creating and delivering effective PowerPoint presentations
Before any training can be designed, each professional uses my proprietary PowerPoint Effectiveness Assessment tool to perform a self-assessment of how often they use best practices and whether they know the skills needed to create and deliver the slides in the best possible manner. I compile the results to give us a baseline and as a key input to the next step. 

Step 5: Create and deliver a customized training session
With the inputs from the previous steps, I create and deliver a training session to address the specific items that this group needs. It includes showing the professionals how to use the standard set of slides to create a customized client presentation along with the skills to create new slides for new situations. I can also cover any specific situations that have been identified as unique to this group. 

Step 6: Provide reference materials
In order to reinforce the concepts in the training session, I provide each participant with reference materials that serve as guides to the material that was covered and extends it further. With these materials, professionals have quick access to the ideas and techniques that were covered in the training session. The materials can be a combination of printed, electronic or multimedia. 

Step 7: Follow-up Evaluation
Three months after the training session, I analyze presentations that the professionals are now creating to determine the improvement and identify any issues that have arisen. Additional training or reference materials may be needed and can be delivered via the web if the professionals are geographically dispersed.