A business presentation is a summary of important information related to your company’s products, practices, and services. It is a way for you to sell an idea to your internal or external audiences. Businesses and entrepreneurs rely on business presentations to secure investments, sell a product/service, and educate the target audience about their services/products.
You have to create effective and powerful business presentations for the success of your business. However, creating a successful business presentation isn’t easy. Sometimes it's due to a lack of creativity and other times due to the lack of knowledge about presentation tools and tricks.
While creating presentations is one part of the story, delivering a presentation requires an equal level of effort. 75% of adults are affected by the fear of public speaking, which is why it is essential for them to have proper guidance about presentations. It is the only way they can effectively deliver their message to their audience.
In this article today, we will walk you through what are the types of business presentations and how to create a powerful business presentation.
Let’s get started!
Types of Business Presentations:
Business presentations can be divided into different types depending on their purpose and content. The main types of business presentations are:
- Persuasive Presentations: These are mostly used when the presenter has to convince the audience of something. It can be anything from convincing them to buy a product to inspiring them to invest in a business.
- Informative Presentations: As their name suggests, the goal of informative presentations is to educate the audience. They can help you educate new hires about the company policy or to inform your investors about upcoming products.
- Problem-Solving Presentations: Companies use problem-solving presentations to suggest a solution to the problem the company or the customer is facing. The purpose of the presentation is to discuss problem-solving techniques with everyone and decide on the next course of action.
How to Create a Powerful Business Presentation?
A presentation can make it easier for your audience to understand a dataset, a situation, or a scenario. You have to pay attention to important aspects to create a powerful business presentation. Leverage tools, PowerPoint templates, and strategies that can make the overall process less time-consuming and more effective. Know your audience and prepare for them.
The first 30 seconds matter a lot!
Talk about the big picture within the first 30 seconds.
People will lose interest if you will talk about the nitty gritty things instead of the bigger picture. It’s great to avoid agendas or detailed introductions at the start as it makes the overall presentation boring.
Whereas the big picture grabs the audience’s attention in seconds, or I’d say in milliseconds.
And, here’s what Steve Jobs did,
Imagine if Steve chose to speak about the benefits of how Apple is going to have the most advanced features, how the new phone is going to bring a long list of benefits into people’s lives, or how it is going to transform knowledge sharing.
But he summarized all this in just a single precise sentence, “Apple reinvents the phone.”
Mentioning the big ideas drives curiosity. It's memorable, it's specific and it hooks the audience to what’s coming next.
The first 30 seconds in a presentation act the same as an elevator pitch, so make sure you mention the right things.
Tell a Story
Great presenters are often exceptional storytellers, and that’s what makes a presentation successful. With the help of storytelling, you can emphasize the status quo of the scenario and then show them a better way to deal with the situation.
Have you ever noticed that the majority of TED talks start with a personal story? That’s because the story is the number one thing people remember after a presentation. And that holds true for all kinds of presentations.
The art of storytelling is rooted in history. It has been passed down through the generations in human history and has now become a crucial part of business presentations. Science has proven that storytelling allows the brain cells of the audience to have the same emotions as that of the storyteller. As a result, it makes the overall presentation effective. That makes storytelling one of the critical elements of a powerful business presentation. So whether you want to speak about some successful cross-training in your team, your company’s background story, or anything else, include it in your presentation.
Design your presentation in a way that shows potential investors how successful your products can be. The presentation should also show the audience how they can be successful if they decide to join forces with you.
Here’s a list of the top things that make storytelling an important part of your presentation
- It makes the presentation memorable
- Grabs & maintains the audience’s attention
- Helps you connect with the audience at an emotional level
- It makes the presentation relatable
- Creates suspense
Add facts & figures
It’s great to start the presentation with storytelling elements, but it’s equally important to add facts, figures, and values that make the presentation credible. However, make sure not to overdo it.
It is important to remember that even if you begin by telling a story, your presentation must also include supporting materials. Whether it is statistics or survey data, research findings, or questionnaire responses, adding the material that will support the point you are making will make your presentations more effective.
Keep it Simple and Short
Too much information can overwhelm your audience, which would ultimately lead them to lose interest in your presentation completely. The same can be said for presentations that last longer than 10 minutes.
In order to keep your presentation simple and short, remember that:
- You don’t have to include everything in the presentation, only the strongest talking points,
- Statistics are only helpful in moderation because people are less likely to remember them afterward, and
- Adding only one idea per slide can make your presentation comprehensible to your audience.
If you are not certain whether your slides can be understood easily or not, run the Glance test. The test was created by Harvard Business Review to measure the comprehensibility of slides. If your slides can be understood within 3 seconds, then they pass the test and will help you engage your audience effectively.
Use Visual Elements
Visuals are important in everything from marketing to advertisements and sales to packaging. But how important visuals are to presentations? Well, if your presentations include visuals, they will be 43% more persuasive than presentations without visuals.
Visual aids automatically improve people’s ability to recall information. So, if you use visual elements in your presentations liberally, the information is likely to stay with your audience for a long time.
Nowadays, visual elements have so many categories that you will never run out of options to choose from. You can pick anything from images and GIFs to charts and tables to make your presentation stand out.
Visuals not only make your presentation look aesthetically pleasing, but they also help you support the idea you are presenting with the help of images. They also make it easier for you to present complex data in an interesting manner.
Choose the Right Layout
If you have the right data, text, and visuals, but you present them in a poorly designed layout, your presentation will fail to achieve its goals. On the other hand, if you choose the right layout, you can keep your audience engaged until the end.
A few things that can help you with choosing the right layout include the purpose of your presentation, the audience, and whether they will be joining in person or via their computers. Once you have gotten the answers to these questions, you can decide what kind of font, color palette, and design will fit your presentation.
Prepare for a Q&A Session
A powerful presentation should be interactive so you can keep your audience engaged throughout. But even after the presentation is complete, you should answer any questions your audience might have.
A Q&A session will give your audience the chance to discuss the information presented to them and help them clarify their concept about your projects. Your audience is also more likely to be satisfied with the presentation if they can get the answers to all of their questions.
Before you start your Q&A session make sure you have a strong call to action.
Bonus point: Believe in what you say because that changes the whole mindset about yourself, your business idea, and your level of confidence.
Conclusion
Powerful business presentations can help you develop strong connections with your partners, investors, and customers. But if your business presentations have been failing to achieve their purpose, then it is time to figure out what you are doing wrong. Follow the steps mentioned above and you will be able to successfully convey your message to your audience through business presentations.
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