How to make perfect sales presentations

"Fire people's imaginations and they engage their brains"

Good presentations are about selling yourself as much as your product or service. How do you use your best asset and make a maximum impact in a short time?

How much is fluff?

Most people remember only two or three things from any presentation after two days. The rest is fluff. To make yours truly memorable you must take advantage of how people absorb information.

Remember the three golden rules. When preparing a presentation it's worth remembering the acronym VAK, which stands for:

Visual - seeing it
Auditory - hearing it
Kinaesthetic - feeling or touching it.

Everyone tends to use one of these senses more than the other two. So make sure you use a combination of all three senses to gain maximum impact.

Keep it simple

Because most people remember so little, keep things simple. Work out the clinching messages, three at most, that you want your audience to remember. These must be as close as possible to the audience's hot buttons - the things which really interest them. Concentrate your presentation around these.

Begin with a BANG

The very beginning is the moment to hit your audience straight between the eyes with your single, most important message. So make them sit right up and say "Wow" after your first sentence. Then, having got their interest, you can explain why and how you can make this possible.

Maximise involvement

The more you can engage people and give them a sense of feeling and doing, the better they'll remember you. You could start a dialogue and invite participation. You could ask individuals in the audience questions. At the very least, start by asking the audience a couple of relevant question about themselves and get a show of hands. This gets them involved and also tells you more about them. It is always better to qualify your audience this way before you start rather than find out afterwards that most were already experts.

Dramatise it

Drama, in its widest sense, is one of your most powerful tools. Fire people's imaginations and they engage their brains. That's when they start to feel your message with their emotions. Use humour, tell a story, drop in a metaphor or a simile and use colourful adjectives.

Bring your message to life

Make your message as graphic as if you were burning it permanently into people's brains with a branding iron. For example, if your presentation involves saving money (as many do) you could tear up some money with show saying: 'See this fiver? This is how much you waste every minute by not...' Better still, ask to borrow the fiver first from someone in the audience - but give them a whole one back at the end. (Don't worry, banks will replace torn up notes.)

Repeat, repeat, repeat

Almost everyone knows of Martin Luther King's famous speech: "I have a dream. My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream... I have a dream...". Repetition is powerful. Work out your key message and repeat it throughout the presentation, even if it's just a phrase, like "I have a dream".

End powerfully

The end is your last chance to make an impact. So dazzle your audience with a concise conclusion. You could simply reiterate the main points of your presentation in a way that fires their imagination. Then they'll go away buzzing. As you emphasise each point, ask yourself if you are strengthening your message or distracting from it. If each person were to go away with only one memory, decide what you want it to be.

Above all remember, it's not what you say that your audience will remember, but how you say it.