Why It Pays to Invest in a Professional Presentation
Why would you need to pay a professional presentation designer to create your next presentation? Everyone knows PowerPoint, right? Well they may, but do they know it well enough, and do they know what makes a winning presentation? Emma Bannister explains why hiring the right presentation agency will be an investment your business will not regret.
Think of the last presentation you put together. Did you debate over whether to outsource it to a professional or keep it in-house? Did it seem easier, more cost-effective and quicker to do the latter?
Whatever way you look at it, presentations cost time and money. But the real investment is in your brand and business.
One bad presentation can cost you clients, customers and sometimes, even, careers.
Here’s why it pays to pull in a professional to help with your next presentation.
Clarity of vision
A clear message and vision is what sets you apart from your competitors or colleagues. As a leader, you need the ability to articulate this in a way that is clear, powerful and makes you stand out (for a good reason, not bad).
Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, presentations are rushed together at the last minute, with multiple colleagues piling in their conflicting opinions. Sometimes, it even means digging up something that’s been used time and time again, so the message is anything but clear and compelling.
Presentations are a chance for us to step back and think: it’s more than just deciding what to put on the slides
For leaders, in all industries, it is an opportunity to plan how to communicate vision and generate value for customers and buy-in with stakeholders that could influence a make or break situation.
Opportunity cost
I’ve seen billion-dollar companies damage their brand and reputation overnight through dire presentations.
The fall out of this often involves losing out to a competitor, not to mention losing customers and clients. It takes a long time to win back the kind of trust and long-term loyalty you’ve built up to that point.
Plus, presentations last pretty much forever on the internet (not to mention in our minds), so leaving it to the office junior to ‘pretty up’ your slides or update your latest results could cost you more than it’s worth. In a nutshell, if you are not proud of your presentation then it’s doing more harm than good.
Competitive advantage
If you’re not going to invest in your presentation, how can you be sure your competitors will?
It’s easy to get ahead of the competition with just one powerful presentation. And that means it’s equally as easy to lose out because of one poor presentation too.
There’s also a big difference between using a dedicated presentation agency to help you versus those design agencies who do a bit of everything, or even hiring a freelancer you found online. Using freelancers on an ad-hoc basis means they don’t have the understanding of your brand or the inclination to ensure you win big pitches time and time again (not to mention availability dramas at time of need). Mainstream agencies don’t love presentations, I promise, and their designers do not embrace the challenge creatively or technically. Your work will likely be handed down to an intern or freelancer who won’t work collaboratively with a team of experts.
Presentations follow a unique style of communication. It’s not mainstream. Bid teams responsible for multi-billion-dollar bids go to the experts for a reason. Niche presentation agencies have large full-time teams who can pool together resources, experience and industry knowledge, to collaborate with you and help at times of need. They know how to write with persuasion and their teams of creatives work together to ensure the slides visually support your story and messages with consistency and power.
Secure solutions and confidence counts when it comes to presentations.
So ask yourself: is it worth the risk?
Sustainable growth
OK, so you might not have the budget to outsource absolutely every presentation, but you can find sustainable solutions that match your needs.
The right agencies can help train your entire team to write, design and deliver powerful presentations. (Disclaimer: I run one of these.) They can also help you set up templates and libraries of slides that you can reuse over and over again, as well as develop frameworks that will help you map out your ideas so you save time and wasted expense.
Of course, it’s easy for me to say this is a great option, seeing as my agency runs this kind of training in partnership with global agency Duarte. But that is because I truly understand the value of your investment when it comes to a professional presentation.
The question is, do you?
Emma Bannister
Latest posts by Emma Bannister (see all)
- How to Foster a Culture of Creativity in Your Team - 15th November 2018
- Why It’s Important to Do Your Homework Before You Present Overseas - 21st August 2018
- Hostility in the Presentation Design Industry - 10th July 2018
- What is Visual Tone in your Presentation? - 15th May 2018
- Why It Pays to Invest in a Professional Presentation - 17th April 2018
