How To Deliver a Winning Pitch Presentation

This article has been contributed by Arianna Lupi.

Pitch presentations are a major part of securing new clients. A great presentation can help you win a client from the first pitch, while a bad presentation may mean you never hear from that prospect again.

Pitching new clients depends on a number of factors, but a presentation is the primary pillar of a sales pitch. Let’s look at the components of a pitch presentation and explore top ideas to pitch new clients and win.

Ingredients of a Pitch Presentation

There are three pillars of a pitch presentation – content, design and delivery.

Content

Your content shows what you do, like what products you sell or what services you offer to your clients. More than anything, the content of your presentation needs to communicate how you will achieve the client’s objectives – and how you’ll do it better than anyone else.

Design

Your presentation’s design involves all the visual elements that the prospective client will see. These will help to subconsciously form a picture of your brand in the client’s mind, so they need to represent you accurately. These elements are usually in the form of slide design, images, infographics and small videos.

Delivery

The last important ingredient is the delivery of the presentation. How you sit or stand, how you project your voice, what you say in the context of your slides and how you communicate with the audience all have a major impact on how the prospective client will perceive you and your brand.

Just like a recipe, if any of your ingredients are lacking, the end product will be less than optimal. On the flipside, if you use nothing but high-quality ingredients, the recipe stands a much better chance of success. Our 7 tips for pitch presentation success will help you nail all your ingredients and win your new client!

7 Presentation Tips for Pitching New Clients

1. Perform Thorough Research

Most clients or consumers expect suppliers to personalize their products or services as per their requirements. This means that you need to know the needs of your prospective client – but this is just a foundation.

You need to perform deeper research about your client before presenting your proposal. Beyond just their basic requirements, you need to find out the following:

• What is your client’s major problem?
• How do they prefer to receive information?
• What are their short term and long-term objectives?
• What works for them and what doesn’t? How have they achieved success in the past?

There are not only questions, but you need to think of all the possible scenarios that can affect a client’s decision to accept your proposal.

2. Use Stories

Marketers have been using storytelling to sell their products and services for centuries. You can do the same in your presentation. Try to share a story like how your product or service helped an existing client and what they gained from it. You can insert other stories related to your services that you want to pitch to your potential clients.

Stories create engagement, and if you add an element of suspense, it can be a game-changer to your presentation. Stories are memorable, and people remember pitches that leave a long-lasting impression.

3. Emphasize Benefits, Not Specifications

The decision-makers in any business usually belong to different departments in the company. Each of them may have different requirements or preferences for a project. But they will all ask the same question when making a decision: How will your product or service benefit me?

Detailing the features and specifications of your product/service are not the right way to answer this common question. Focus on the benefits they will get if they buy from your business. When the first iPhone was launched in 2007, Steve Jobs mentioned some phone specifications, but he primarily focused on how it will benefit the users.

Job’s presentation was so effective that it created huge demand and sold 1 million iPhones in the first 74 days. The presentation style of Steve Jobs is taught in the world’s top business schools.

4. Use Presentation Templates

Many people use old PowerPoint templates that look outdated and reduce the overall impact that you have on your potential clients. However, there are plenty of other presentation software options available, offering plenty of visually appealing templates.

Try to find a template that accurately portrays your brand, and customize it to convey information in the clearest and most engaging way possible. Using effective templates will not only help to grab your audience’s attention, but can also help you keep them engrossed throughout the presentation.

Image source: Creazilla

5. Use Slides to Highlight

Slides can make a presentation engaging and help you to highlight important points. Make use of slides to highlight crucial points in front of your clients.

But be careful not to use them as a crutch. We’ve all seen presenters who just read text directly from their slides and don’t add any more value to what the audience can already see. Or presenters who show slide after slide after slide, while we ask ourselves when the presentation will end.

Don’t use too many slides and don’t include too much text. Use bullet points sparingly as they can make slides look cluttered. The font size of the text should also be comfortable to read. Using a large font size, that’s not too large, will make the text appealing to read and better convey information to your audience.

6. Don’t Overuse Images

Research shows that audiences remember more information in the form of images than plain text. You should always use high-quality images in your presentations so that your audience can remember them.

However, it’s important to strike a balance. The overuse of images can make it difficult to remember important information and make it difficult for viewers to make a buying decision. If your potential clients cannot remember the meaning that you conveyed in the images, they may not buy your services. Use images only where necessary to communicate a worthwhile message.

7. Include Testimonials

Research shows that 72 percent of customers will do business with an organization that shows them social proof in the form of testimonials and feedback from previous clients.

Also, testimonials develop a sense of FOMO among your potential clients when they see their competitors using your product or service. This will help progress them along the sales funnel towards a buying decision.

Conclusion

A great business presentation is comprised of high-quality content, design and delivery. When you nail these three components using templates, infographics and stories, you have a strong chance of winning your pitch.

The key to making any presentation effective is to make it as engaging as possible and offering a solution to your client’s problem. Following the tips in this post will help you deliver effective pitch presentations that will convert your audience into clients.

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About the author: Arianna Lupi is passionate about everything search and digital marketing. In her free time, she contributes guest posts and works for Outreach Humans.

The post How To Deliver a Winning Pitch Presentation first appeared on JUST™ Creative.