What makes a successful sales deck?
It isn’t only the content you choose to present, but also the way in which you present it. Thoughtful design and flexible templates that complement descriptive text and persuasive statistics can mean the difference between earned business and lost opportunity. Today on Cliff Notes, we’re covering the preparation steps needed before you hand off to your designer as well as a few of the most important steps in the design process.
PLANNING
Setting Your Designer Up for Success
Before you hand a deck off to your designer, consider the following. These three points are the most important preparation pieces for you to think through to ensure that your content is ready for design and effective in its messaging!
1. Determine Your Target Audience
Perhaps this is an obvious point, but it’s one we feel necessary to discuss. Preparing content with your target audience in mind is the best way to ensure your pitch deck is compelling and useful. Sometimes we can get caught up in the idea of what we want to sell and how much we want to sell instead of who we want to sell it to and how excited we want them to be to buy it. Determining your target audience and making sure your messaging resonates with them, or learning more about who you know you’re presenting to is the best way to earn and keep business.
2. Plan Your Content and Narrative
Once you have your target audience in mind, prepare your content in a way that sells best to them. One of the best ways to do this is to create a narrative through-line that your deck will cover. With this, you’d start by introducing your audience to your company, follow that with the problem your clients need to solve, the solution that you can provide for them, and finish with why your solution is the best.
Another narrative idea is persuasive storytelling, which is a repeating structure that takes your audience from “what is” to “what could be” several times with specific examples that are easy to digest and retain. Ending with a call to action that inspires your audience to get to the “what could be” with your brand’s solutions.
Ultimately, brevity is key, you don’t want to overwhelm your audience with big blocks of text. Keep your text limited to the most necessary and compelling, this leads to a better experience for your audience and more freedom for your designer to create something beautiful!
3. Consider Multiple Versions
Building on the previous two points, another way to ensure you have the most effective sales deck is to create multiple versions that tweak messaging slightly. This is most necessary if you’ve determined you have several audiences you’d like to target, even if they only vary slightly. Creating variants of your deck that have smaller, specialized pieces will mean that you have a solid library to pull from when the opportunity arises; without the stress of scrambling to prepare new content.
CREATING
Elevating Your Sales Deck with Design
After you have prepared your content, your designer will take that and impart their expertise onto the visuals. The four points that follow are the biggest parts we take into account when designing your deck, they apply to any type of deck and when we combine them with project-specific ideas we determine when working directly with you, you’ll get an elevated sales deck sure to garner success.
1. Guide with Your Visual Identity
You want your deck to be an extension of your brand’s visual identity, when we design a deck we create master slide templates that use your established visual identity molded to complement your content. We also endeavor to provide you with an elastic design by creating branded graphics that can easily be built on directly in your presentation program if you have additions that need to be stylized without your designer’s help.
2. Choose Instances of Text or Graphic
When your content is well prepared, we can help you determine what should be shown as text and what should be converted to a graphic for the most impact. A graphic is most effective when displaying numbers or statistics, emphasizing numbers with icons or converting statistical data into a chart hits home a point more effectively than keeping those numbers in pure text format.
3. Add Transitions and Animations
Making use of your presentation program’s built-in slide transition and animation options is a great way to enhance your deck, and your designer can help you tread the fine line you want to be on between too little and too much. Too little will look like a mistake or an afterthought and too much will be overwhelming and distracting. The right amount will boost your slide visuals and keep your audience engaged by drawing their attention to key points.
4. Ensure a Wide Selection of Master Slide Templates
In an ideal world, the deck you and your designer create will have the perfect amount of information styled for your presentation purposes but unfortunately, an ideal world isn’t realistic. Therefore, your sales deck will need to have the flexibility for last-minute additions when you don’t have your designer available, and having a wide selection of master slide templates will help to make sure these last-minute additions don’t throw off the visual style of your deck. These master slide templates should be varied enough that they can complement a variety of different types of content additions, whether they be client testimonial slides, additional section dividers, or emphasized information slides. Your designer can help you determine what master slides you might need based on the project and your target audience.
Don’t settle for a boring and ineffective sales deck.
Take our tips to prepare the best version of content possible and when it’s ready, reach out to TCS where we’ll combine our own design tips with project-specific expertise.
