As a sales professional your Marketing department is regularly producing and making available new resources for you to use in your PowerPoint sales presentations. If you’ve recently been sent a link to the updated corporate website or a link to an online report or white paper, here are five ways you can incorporate it into a PowerPoint sales presentation whether it is delivered in person, virtually, or in a hybrid format where some people are in the room and some are virtual.
Default: Send the URL in an email after
The default approach that most sales professionals take is to mention the website or report during the presentation and send the URL to the prospect after the presentation so they can explore the website or report on their own.
If you want your sales presentations to stand out, you need to do better than the default that everyone else uses. Here are four ways to use the website or online report that go beyond the default method.
Show a screen capture of a key page
Make the website or report visual by including a screen capture from the browser. Use Edge to capture the screen as it scrolls so you can include all the key content. In PowerPoint use callouts or inking to highlight text to focus the prospect on the important text or visuals.
Tour the website or report live
Use a screen capture image of a key visual, like the report cover image or website home page on a slide and link to the URL from that image. During the presentation, activate the link and tour the website or report live during the presentation in a browser. Use the zoom feature of the browser to make content easier to see. Keep the image on the slide updated each time you present using the Change Picture feature in PowerPoint so you don’t have to add a new image and re-link it every time.
Drop the URL in the chat
Use the chat to invite the prospect to tour along with you. Drop the URL in the meeting chat and ask them to click on it. When they have the website or report on their screen in the browser tab, ask them to tour along with you as you point out key content. Ask them to let you know if there is any part of the site they want to know more about. This is a good way to discover more about their needs.
Drop screen captures of key messages into the meeting chat
The meeting chat can also be a way to share images of key content. Take a screen capture of a portion of the screen and drop it in the meeting chat. This makes the image easy for the prospect to share with others via Teams, Slack, texting, or email. Images are more engaging than just text so the prospect is more likely to share it with others.
Using a website or online report effectively in a presentation is a skill that sales professionals need to learn in order to keep clients and prospects engaged, especially in virtual or hybrid meetings. In this video sales leader Colleen Francis shared that sales professionals need to embrace virtual meetings because clients and prospects want them and virtual meetings allow sales professionals to be more productive.
The skills of virtual presenting and the new skills sales professionals will have to learn in order to manage hybrid meetings will continue to be important moving forward. If you want to improve your skills in virtual presenting, check out my articles at EffectiveVirtualPresentations.com and the videos on my YouTube channel. To learn some of the new skills needed for hybrid presentations, check out my articles at EffectiveHybridPresentations.com.
If you are a sales leader who wants their team to learn the skills to create and deliver effective virtual PowerPoint presentations, contact me so we can discuss a customized training course.
Dave Paradi has over twenty-two years of experience delivering customized training workshops to help business professionals improve their presentations. He has written ten books and over 600 articles on the topic of effective presentations and his ideas have appeared in publications around the world. His focus is on helping corporate professionals visually communicate the messages in their data so they don’t overwhelm and confuse executives. Dave is one of fewer than ten people in North America recognized by Microsoft with the Most Valuable Professional Award for his contributions to the Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams communities. His articles and videos on virtual presenting have been viewed over 4.8 million times and liked over 17,000 times on YouTube.