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Month: January 2016

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Manage Stress Before a Big Pitch

Posted on by Rick E

We’ve all had those days where stress pushed us to the edge, and we all know it’s not good to be around someone who loses their cool.

You won’t leave a good first impression if you keep a strained demeanor. Manage stress before it takes over your body and turns you into an angry presenter.

Stress by itself is a normal reaction that doesn’t go away until the perceived threat is gone, but delivering a pitch isn’t a real threat. Remind your body that you’re not in any danger. Relaxation will help calm you down and assure you that everything’s going to be alright. Here’s why you should regulate your stress and how to do it:

Likeability

When things keep going wrong, it’s important to know that there’s still tomorrow to look forward to. Stress skews our perspective towards fear and negativity, which makes it hard to even consider that things are going to get better. In addition to feeling terrified, our expressions project the anxiety we feel in response to internal pressure.

Stressing out before a pitch can lead to failure because the presenter may already be anticipating that something will go wrong. The audience can pick up on your emotions and will definitely sense if something’s not right. You’ll lose your credibility as a speaker if people sense you’re too stiff. Confidence in what you’re saying is needed for other people to trust in you, too.

Stress Management

Stress buildup can be mitigated in the first place by placing security checks. Identify what makes you feel threatened. Is it the fear of being judged or being in front of a large crowd?

Once you’ve identified them, step back and realize that none of them can really harm you. The audience is just there to hear what you’re going to present; none of them pose a real threat. Your body will start to calm down once it realizes that you don’t need to fear for your life, and you’ll have nothing to fear once you regain your focus.

Monitor Stress Levels

Some things are truly out of our control, but it doesn’t mean that we should lose our cool. Even if we’re not the best presenter, we should strive to give our best effort.

Doing some relaxation exercises can help release some of that pent-up stress. It will help empty your mind and introduce calming imagery in place of stressful thoughts. Also remember to breathe. Breathing helps relax muscles that become tense when you’re stressed. Pacing around and doing some stretches helps you unwind and prepares you to move your focus elsewhere.

Concentration

Conduct everything you do professionally, and you’ll get the respect you deserve. Don’t let stress get in the way of your ability to make a great pitch. After all, a stressed presenter doesn’t look good. It makes you look hostile, distancing you from your audience. Relaxation should come easily once you’ve identified and let go of what stresses you out.

Manage stress. Don’t let stress manage you.

Reference

“Stress Management.” Mayo Clinic. April 8, 2014. www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/basics/stress-basics/hlv-20049495

Featured Image: “StartupStockPhotos” on pixabay.com

On the Other Slide: 3 Powerpoint Hacks to Improve Your Deck

Posted on by Rick E

PowerPoint may be a user-friendly tool, but its functions go beyond templated slide designs and bullet-point lists. You don’t have to stick to plain slides and clunky graphics. Instead, why not improve your deck and create a design that’s suited for your pitch?

Here are some PowerPoint hacks to help you do just that:

1. Be Creative with Your Images

powerpoint hacks

It’s no secret that the leading cause of Death by PowerPoint, or complete audience boredom, is a slide overloaded with too much information.

Replace blocks of text with images or keywords you can expound on. This leaves you free to talk more and keeps the audience’s attention fixed on you. However, some presenters use this as an excuse to insert random images in their slides in an uninspired layout.

Make your deck more interesting by being creative with your use of images. Instead of copy-pasting a stock image to the middle of your deck, why not crop and edit it first? Crop images to your desired size by dragging the crop handles that will appear around your picture once you format it. Creatively incorporating and tweaking images to perfectly fit your deck lets you illustrate the essence of your core message without boring your audience.

2. Enhance Design with Animation

powerpoint animation

Depending on how you use them, animation and transition can make or break your pitch.

Some presenters have been criticized for their excessive use of slide transitions and animations. For example, business pitches may require no more than a simple wipe. Overdoing it with a dramatic transition like Fracture or Dissolve may lessen your professional credibility.

Fortunately, Microsoft’s presented a solution to that problem and released one of PowerPoint’s latest features, Morph. The add-in allows users to create seamless and impressive animations that can also be used as a slide transition.The Morph option can be found under Transitions, and it lets you animate your desired slide element, which can be in the form of objects, text, or images.

Unlike the previous animation options for PowerPoint, this transition type requires you to draw out a work path for the object you want to animate. You can just drag the slide element in the direction you want it to go. When you view your pitch, the object will move on its own without needing a prompt, like a mouse click. This frees your hands and lets you further use body language to emphasize key points and connect with the audience instead of having to focus on operating a clicker.

3. Have Your Pitch in Mind

powerpoint hacks

Everything on your deck should contribute to your pitch.

That said, the greatest PowerPoint hack is to always keep your pitch in mind when you’re crafting your slides. Extraneous elements will only distract the audience from your main point. Before adding anything, think about why you’re putting it there and whether it will enhance your spiel.

Keep an outline of your content to remind you of your slide order. Highlight key terms you want to emphasize in your visual aid so you’ll know what to include and what can be saved for verbal elaboration.

Decide whether you should plug in your data as text or whether you can improve on it by presenting it creatively. For example, diagrams, charts, and other visual representations may make hard information more palatable to your audience.

Content, delivery, and visuals should all go hand-in-hand, so don’t leave out one for the other. Make sure you develop each of these elements equally for an overall winning pitch.

The Takeaway: Take Advantage of PowerPoint’s Features

Ideas

PowerPoint is a constantly growing software, rich with new features. Improvements in the presentation tool make it possible to improve your deck without too much hassle. To summarize:

  1. Be creative with your deck design and experiment with image layout and position. Crop and edit pictures before putting them on your slides so that they can work together with your overall design to get your message across.
  2. Make use of PowerPoint’s latest features, particularly Morph for animation, to make your deck more attractive and interactive.
  3. At the same time, always align your deck with your pitch. Good design used inappropriately can still lead to a confusing pitch.

Craft a winning deck with these PowerPoint hacks, or contact our pitchdeck.com experts today for a free quote!

References:

“PowerPoint 2013: Formatting Pictures.” GCF Learn Free. www.gcflearnfree.org/powerpoint2013/17
“Using the Morph Transition in PowerPoint 2016.” Office Blogs. www.support.office.com/en-us/article/Using-the-Morph-transition-in-PowerPoint-2016-8dd1c7b2-b935-44f5-a74c-741d8d9244ea

Match Made: Romancing the Audience for a Better Sales Pitch

Posted on by Rick E

Business pitch decks aren’t confined to stiff and stuffy deliveries. You can find inspiration outside the boardroom, especially if you’re up for a sales pitch.

To outdo the competition and close your sales, you need to be creative enough when selling your product. One way to do this is to call up your inner Cupid to establish personal engagement that results in investment and loyalty.

Just like a great romance, your relationship with the customer should be a lasting passion. Don’t settle for shallow enthusiasm. Get your audience to love you.

Courtship

All romances and sales pitches start with the courtship stage.

Look up your prospects and align your marketing strategy to your client’s wants and needs. Your competition could be bigger, more experienced, and more influential. In this case, don’t try to beat them at their own game.

Try to create your own playing field.

In the book Brand Romance, brand experts Yasushi Kusume and Neil Gridley discuss high design principles that ensure customer loyalty. According to these principles, a recognizable brand identity is one way to effectively bring your product to the audience.

Introduce yourself during your pitch and build a narrative around your journey. After that, you can present a value proposition to show solutions unique to your services.

Have your visuals reflect your brand’s distinct character, whether by incorporating your logo or by using your company colors into the deck.

Passion

Think of your pitch as a first date with the audience. Sometimes, their attentiveness dies halfway through your speech because your offer might not be too impressive. People have a limited attention span, so make the most out of your pitch.

A bit of humor lightens the mood and disperses any lingering tension. However, make sure that all these seemingly unrelated points still lead back to you.

You can only entertain your listeners with interesting anecdotes for so long.

Delivering a dragging and winding speech not only distracts prospects from your major ideas but also dampens their interest.

Commitment

Don’t let the connection with your listeners go cold. Letting them walk away without convincing them of your importance will ruin your chances at making a sale.

Cover as many blind spots as you can, and avoid making common pitch deck mistakes that alienate the audience. Do away with fillers, but don’t force yourself to be perfect either. Act natural and be confident.

People feel more at ease with someone who uses the conversational tone while establishing their authority on stage. Take notes from your previous sales pitches to see which tactics worked to attract people and which ones failed.

Keep the Flame Alive

Be intimate with the audience, and court their interests by building upon your identity. Having a distinguishable personality sets you apart from the competition. Keep their attention by delivering engaging stories that eventually point back to your main pitch.

Finally, commit to maintaining their interest by constantly improving your public speaking skills. As in any relationship, the connection you make during your sales pitch should ideally lead to a long-term commitment for your business.

Need help with your pitch deck? Consult with our pitchdeck.com experts today for a free quote!

Featured Image: “A Taste of Romance.” by Esther Spektor on flickr.com

Sliding the Deck: 3 Uses of a Scrolling Web Pitch

Posted on by Rick E

Technological advancement has become a major game changer in people’s lives. It transformed the way we interact with and perceive our surroundings, affecting the trends’ direction in recent years.

The onset of technology, particularly the Internet, has altered the way businesses do pitch decks. Gone are the days when a simple pitch is enough to satisfy an audience. Now, companies can reach out to prospects through various mediums.

The creation of a Web site or page has become a requirement for a business to be available to its target market, and even in that area, things are constantly changing. The scrolling Web pitch is an innovation that eliminates separate Web pages and allows any site visitor to scroll through your company’s features and journey seamlessly.

To seal the deal with an investor, use a scrolling Web pitch to warm them up and draw them in before your actual pitch.

Here are three reasons why:

Easy to Edit and Monitor

Do you want to edit text or images on your pitch? The scrolling Web pitch simplifies the process and offers better efficiency. Its design makes the scrolling Web pitch easier to monitor. You don’t have to go to individual pages to keep your content consistent since you can see everything in one place. Uploading your pitch online also gives you some insight on who else is interested in your product or services.

Other than investors, interested parties you might have overlooked can access you anytime, anywhere. Monitoring your page analytics and views lets you know whether your deck effectively attracts people. It’s a way of getting feedback without directly asking for it.

Emotional and Aesthetic Appeal

In his article for Digital Telepathy, UX/UI designer Nathan Weller expounds on the benefits of pageless Web design. Aside from its technical functions, Weller highlights the scrolling Web pitch’s strong visual appeal. Its clean design not only brings together a combination of image and text that makes use of current graphic design trends but also communicates your story. Like an old-fashioned pitch deck, page-less pitches still depend on narratives to connect with its audience.

Unlike earlier versions of Web sites, your viewers are free to experience this narrative without the hassle of moving from one link to another. People can even interact with the page through various elements you can leave for your site visitors to enjoy.

Among these are simple animations like images that move or buttons that emit sound when someone hovers their mouse over them. The easy navigation it provides make scrolling Web pitches more understandable and palatable. It compresses information and data without compromising quality, saving both you and your client’s time.

Higher Lead Conversion

The end goal of any pitch is to increase sales leads and volume. Scrolling Web pitches achieve that by being attractive avenues for your prospects to interact with your business. The nature of its layout improves your prospect’s perspective on your product and leaves a better, more lasting impression on them.

Another advantage is how shareable your content becomes. Sharing articles, images, and even whole Web sites online is the new word of mouth in the age of the Internet. Because the page-less pitch is available at the click of a link, anyone can view and share it. This increases other people’s awareness of your product and expands your network of customers. With the scrolling Web pitch, the client goes to you.

Conclusion

There are many benefits to using a scrolling Web pitch. It’s easier to edit and is more visually appealing than page-by-page Web sites. It also effortlessly draws attention to your business, increasing lead conversion and expanding your connections.

While the page-less pitch doesn’t act as an exact replacement for an investor pitch deck, it’s still a good warm up before your actual speech. It may seem difficult to create, but with the help of a pitch deck guru, you can upload your own scrolling Web pitch in no time.

Contact our pitchdeck.com experts today for a free quote!

References:

Weller, Nathan B. “8 Reasons Why Pageless Design is the Future of the Web.” Digital Telepathy. June 5, 2013. www.dtelepathy.com/blog/design/8-reasons-why-pageless-design-is-the-future-of-the-web

Featured Image: “Electronic Library” by Emilio Labrador on flickr.com

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