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AlexAnndra Ontra is changing the way the enterprise world thinks about its most undervalued asset — the presentation. As President and co-founder of Shufflr, AlexAnndra is blazing a trail in the emerging new discipline of presentation management. The technology she helped create is already powering the presentation strategies of hundreds of Fortune-level companies, helping them save millions of dollars by transforming humble PowerPoint slides into invaluable business assets.
Making of presentations a career
AlexAnndra’s journey started about 30 years ago in Advertising. And at that time as today, a big part of advertising is pitching, pitching new clients, campaigns, creative concepts, you are always selling. As time passed by and technology move on she started creating interactive presentations for clients with his partner and brother James. And as sales people are neither copywriters nor graphic designers but do need good presentations, some time later they started working as consultants. In time they were able to integrate changing technology with his work in order to make all the process much easier.
A simple process for creating a business presentation
There are two aspects to this: the individual that has to make the presentation or has to give the meeting, and the company that has to manage presentations.
For the individual
1. Close your slides and go through your pitch. Get the story inside your head and play it as a conversation with your customer.
2. Get an idea of what you want to say and how you want it to be said. What would you tell your client about your product or service? Once you have it, write down the main points of the conversation.
3. Give that conversation have structure: a beginning, middle and an end. With that framework now adjust your story or conversation to that framework.
4. Now you can open up PowerPoint and start to put your slides together, write it up and attach images where appropriate.
For the Company
The goal is to make resentations better for everyone in the company.
1 Create a Slide Library. Create a folder on a centralized drive, where all your slides and your corporate stories exist.
2. Create a Media Library is a great addition to this, a library where the re are formatted images that are brand-approved and also videos for using in presentations.
Give your people all the tools they need to make a presentation.
Templates and how they can help you
AlexAnndra also recommends a Templates Library as a good idea. Have ready for your team the pricing page, create the use cases, create the product description plate page or the technical architecture, flow chart, etc.
Actually create those slides for the team so they don’t have to start from scratch every time.
Presentations are the medium where your customers are actually making a buying decision. The presentation is the medium you use for getting that.
Newer features for enhancing presentations
One of the most important features that is becoming more popular in presentations today is Interactive Presentations, this is the ability to Switch and Go. It gives the ability that the presentation follows the conversation. In PowerPoint you can do interactive hot links to Pages here and there, also Prezi is all about an interactive presentation and on Shufflrr we have the interactive library that you can pull up anything.
The second important feature is Reporting and Metrics. This allows you to track what slides your team is using in their presentations and gives you first hand data that can help you decide what content is not being used and can be retired from the library. Also it can guide you about the kind of new content you can create.
Related: How to Master Compelling Storytelling
Favorite quotation
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you make them feel” — Maya Angelou
Recommended book
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Routine to Shine
Just be quiet or meditate. Do something only for yourself every day, give yourself 10 minutes. Take a few deep breaths and just be quiet. It’s hard to do because your mind is constantly racing, and that’s why it becomes ever more important.
Links
AlexAnndra at LinkedIn
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