Business Ideas
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August 1-15, 1996
Communicating with Customers
stop watch Time Is Money - 30 minutes with Microsoft PowerPoint® lets you set up powerful presentations!
Index
Setting the Stage
Stop repeating yourself - stop repeating all that work
Put your slide master to work

Doing more in less time is important to your small business. The challenge is that without the resources of larger companies, where can you find the time to get ahead?

Well, if you've got 30 minutes - and a desire to communicate with your customers more effectively - you can get ahead. Try these easy tricks for creating a "master presentation template" in Microsoft PowerPoint® , a powerful and easy-to-use presentation tool. By spending half an hour to set up this master template, you can set yourself up for success for more effective information sharing, whether you're making a sales presentation to one customer or a hundred or more.

Setting the stage

get ahead When you make a sales presentation (or any other type of presentation), you'll do a better job of getting your message across if you carefully set the stage. Using PowerPoint, you can design a master presentation with all of the basic material you may ever need in a sales talk. Then, use this master as the basis for future presentations that you tailor with updated information for the particular audience.

wizard screen shot

First, use the unique AutoContent Wizard in PowerPoint for Windows 95 to plan the basic structure of your presentation - you'll choose the type of presentation you want to make (selling a product, conducting training, or even communicating bad news), a slogan or tag-line for the title slide, the ideal amount of time you'd like to spend presenting, and the visual style of your slides and handouts.

Then, add any graphics that you want to display on every slide by opening up the presentation's master slide and pasting in your company logo or other graphics (there's a group of Clip Art images in PowerPoint you can use as well). You can also change the background color or pattern in the master slide, which affects all of the slides in your presentation.

Stop repeating yourself - stop repeating all that work

get your message across If you use this master presentation to add the text and other content that you tend to say in every sales presentation, you'll never again have to repeat this step whenever you create a new presentation. For example, if you know you need to present your pricing and inventory items to your clients each quarter, you can add in headlines, copy points, and charts and graphs that work in an engaging presentation time and time again. Because Microsoft PowerPoint is part of an integrated suite of applications, Microsoft Office, you can insert Microsoft Word documents or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or charts right into your PowerPoint Master Presentation from the toolbar for more visual effect.

Now, you can add any additional slides to the basic structure supplied by the PowerPoint AutoContent Wizard - just click the New Slide button to add your additional information.

Put your slide master to work

ppt screen shot Finally, polish your master presentation by looking at it in Slide Sorter view. If you can't "get" the main message you're trying to communicate from seeing these mini pictures of your slides, chances are someone sitting at the back of a meeting room or looking at your laptop screen in an office, won't get the message either. Remember, keeping it succinct, simple and with sizzle at the close is what sticks in your audience's mind.

keep it succinct You'll also use Slide Sorter view when you want to adapt your master set of slides for subsequent presentations. With the Slide Sorter it's easy to add, remove, or shuffle the order of the slides by selecting the slide and dragging and dropping it where you want it. Then, double click on each slide to tweak your text and add new graphics with updated information.

You can also practice your slides from the Slide Sorter view by clicking on the "rehearse timings" button on the toolbar. This feature allows you to practice your presentation anywhere while timing it, and gives you an idea of how long it would take to communicate these slides. This gives you the ability to edit your master presentation to the length you need or you can choose the "hide slide" button to reserve those slides as backup if you need them during your presentation.

With everything you manage it's tough to prepare multiple presentations that communicate a consistent message each time. But if you use this 30-minute exercise to create a compelling set of master slides using Microsoft PowerPoint, you'll have a handy tool that will help you look great to any customer audience.