Tips for Creating a Stunning Sales Deck

One of the most essential tools for selling is a sales deck. Even though you may put in a lot of work, you may find prospects aren’t responding to your slides. What if there was a way to ensure your sales deck generates new orders? This is the topic of today’s post. Here are some tips for creating a stunning sales deck that prospects can’t resist.

Sales Deck Guidelines

The sales deck must support the presentation. It offers a starting point and gives context to the discussion you’re having, rather than being a crutch you can use to move through generic pitches. Use graphics, images, charts, and white space. Giving your audience more words to read means they pay less attention to what you say because they’re busy reading. The meeting should be for the prospect and not for you. Allow them to move the conversation if they want to. You must be flexible and adapt to your prospect and their interests.

Tailor the presentation around the interests of a prospect. Make them feel like you customized it for them. Don’t let the focus be too broad and instead focus on what you know about the prospect and the things that matter to them.

Part 1: Structure

There’s a good chance that you send out your sales deck for the simple goal of convincing prospects that your solution works. You want them to feel that it would be the only solution they could ever need to overcome their problems. You want to show them why they need to buy your products. As such, the sales deck shouldn’t focus on you.

The prospect needs to know just one thing; can you give them the help they need?

As such, the sales deck should follow a structure:

Address the needs of prospects
Start out by mentioning the hopes, fears, and pain points of a prospect. Make sure they know you understand what problems they are dealing with.

Show them your solution can solve the problem
Follow through by showing them your offering and how it helps them overcome their problems or at the very least improves their situation.

Show them how your solution will fit with their situation
Now you need to explain how your solution gives them the results they want.

Back up your claims
The final thing to do is show them proof that what you’ve said is true. This could be case studies, statistics, or any other kind of data that proves the solution you offer has helped other people in similar situations.

Close with a great call to action
Don’t let your prospects be left wondering what they need to do next. Make sure you include a clear-cut call to action that tells them what they have to do to move forward with the transaction.

Part 2: Design

The content of a sales pitch deck builds the case for why people should take advantage of the products and services you offer. The design of the pitch is what makes a great impression though, convincing prospects to move through the deck. As well as including great content, make sure that the design of the deck is just as high quality.

The following are some tips on achieving this:

Ensure slides are consistent
The highlights of the presentation must be just that; highlighted. Most do this by changing the font or color scheme of a particular slide. However, you should ensure each slide feels like one part of the overall document to get the best effect; meaning that they should be consistent in typography, images, and colors.

Draw attention to important elements with empty spaces
A lot of people are afraid of having empty space in their design. They choose to clutter their slides with text and graphics and make everything look busy. The reality is that empty spaces can be used to highlight important areas. Clutter might distract your prospect from the important aspects of a slide. These elements stand out when you use empty space.

A Picture is worth a thousand words
Visual elements such as photos allow the audience to immediately grasp the meaning of a slide compared to text. More often than not, a relevant, powerful image will spread the message of a slide better than any text ever could.

Avoid animations
Animations make a sales deck seem childish. You could feel using a fancy transition gives your presentation some extra oomph, but it actually looks very silly and takes people away from the core message being spread. Ensure the presentation is simple and avoid using animations and transitions. Let the content of the presentation impress the client rather than special effects.

Slideson offers free professional PowerPoint templates for you to put together a great sales deck. View our template selection.

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