Presentations are a critical part of successful selling, but they have to communicate to the customer’s mindset.

In sales, there is a lot of emphasis put on a salesperson’s PowerPoint prowess. Sales managers and those departments and individuals who are responsible for helping sales reps to be as successful as possible, often voice the need to “improve presentation skills” as a top priority. But this emphasis leads to a lot of pressure put on salespeople to be expert presenters, and often gives a false impression that a knock ‘em dead presentation is a rep’s key to success.

What ’s Missing? The Solution Roadmap

The Keys to Building and Presenting Winning Presentations
• Base the presentation on the prospect’s needs and the best solution to meet those needs.
• Build trust to gain in-depth information.
• Confirm information with a letter of understanding before any presentations are made.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

An approach to presentation design that is simple, visual, and “ultimately more meaningful” should be significantly recommended. Prepare in analog, cut the noise, avoid bullet points, and picture superiority. Follow these keys, I have to agree that most professional designs are set on paper in hands, but slide software really helps in progress. if you need to complete the presentation sometimes. The proficiency of using slide software may not improve your creative ability, while it definitely improves the output if you’ve already had the inspiration.

We wouldn’t rip off the such “PowerPoint culture” as Garr Reynolds described, because making the visual approach still needs the technology. Similarly, should we give up computer as it influences the traditional computing way? The suggestion on the slide software manufacturer such as Microsoft is, connecting the cold-bloody software with designers’ mind, for example, SmartArt in Office 2007 is nice one.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Here I just introduce WikiHow’s Presentation Software category, which provides how-to steps for performing several tasks and using some important features in Microsoft PowerPoint. You know, usually I contribute some terms in those articles, where you may find my name on the author list.

19 PowerPoint 2003 Tutorials:

- Add Music to Powerpoint

- Add a Template to the Autocontent Wizard in PowerPoint

- Change the Background on Powerpoint Slides

- Convert PowerPoint to Flash Using Open Source Tools

- Convert PowerPoint to Flash Using Wondershare

- Convert a PowerPoint Presentation to Screensaver

- Create a Flowchart

- Embed Music in a PowerPoint Presentation

- Embed and Insert a Chart in a Powerpoint Presentation

- Fill out a PDF Form With PowerPoint

- Make Animations With Microsoft Powerpoint

- Make
a PowerPoint Presentation with Lots of Bitmap Images and Small File Size

- Make an Awesome Rpg on Powerpoint

- Publish a PowerPoint Presentation Online

- Put a Hyperlink in Microsoft PowerPoint

- Save a Powerpoint Presentation on a Thumbdrive

- Show the Slide Number and Total Number of Slides on Every Powerpoint Slide

- Use Microsoft Office PowerPoint

- Use WonderShare PP2DVD to Burn PowerPoint to DVD

2 PowerPoint 2007 Tutorials:

- Add a Sound to a Presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007

- Insert Flash Into PowerPoint 2007

Certainly it’s recommended to add your words on some specified topics in WikiHow you’re really good at; learning is the process of sharing knowledges, that is, helping everyone is helping yourself in philosophy.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

However, Adobe’s Open Screen Project is really favorable. The project is is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. Also, it is supported by technology leaders. I think, most IT guys will be interested in the details, just visit http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

As we expected the feature of YouTube videos in Google Presentation long long time ago, Google finally simplify the adding YouTube in Presentation way with its adopted YouTube. About the traditional methods to add YouTube Flash videos in PowerPoint presentation, please read my complete guide.

Videos can help you make a point, command the attention of your audience, or even add humor to your presentation. Now in presentations, you can insert one or more YouTube videos onto your slides and play the videos while you’re presenting.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Beyond the common sense of popular AJAX Web mail, AOL plans on new gadget for old Web mail service, which offers industry-leading performance, unique skinning options and rich media content capabilities. Generally, the spotlight upon those boring slogans is the Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 technology in called convenience of the Web and the performance of a desktop application together.

AOL demonstrated the new RIA Mail at Microsoft’s MIX08 conference. The demo highlighted a version of RIA created specifically for fans of the video game Halo, featuring a Halo mail “skin” as well as Halo-specific content and advertising to create a dynamic online experience.

According to my ever experiences on Flash-based or AJAX-based Web mail services, Google’s Gmail’s still my favorite as its really Internet-friendly technology. However, AOL’s RIA Mail seems shinning and nice. If the high-appreciated future mail service can be launched to beat up Yahoo or Earthlink’s Web mail, I think Microsoft’s Silverlight should be the best weapon to arm to tooth. Also, I guess the new AOL mail may promote Silverlight as its engaging case study.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

After authorSTREAM continuously sent the e-newsletter “PowerPoint on iPod and YouTube” to me and all others, I had a glimpse of its new campaign upon popular elements. It got me thinking about the current Web presentation services on Web 2.0. It might be easy to find that most palyers on the stage build their Web presentation system on Flash platform, and promote the idea as community like YouTube. Whatever how many sites follow the fad to provide Web presentation services, most of them don’t catch the real feeling of Web 2.0. Here I just express my initial thinking to the well-done Flash projects on the Web presentation stage. Anyway, feel free to think through some of your own in the comments.

. Google Docs by Google. Firstly, to be fair, Google always offers various Web freebies as most peoples preferred, so I cannot judge a Web search engine provider with any presentation related critics. But under its well-known brand and Web technologies, Google Docs could be really great alternative to Microsoft Office Suite, especially with its better documents compatibility recently. Meanwhile, the defects are obvious: animation effects, crashed scripts and limited features. For most exsiting Google users, the ability within one universal Google account is certainly easy to use.

. authorSTREAM by authorGEN. Before its athorSTREAM promoted to me, I have knew its producer authorGEN as its leading in multimedia presentation solution. The company of authorGEN has produced authorPOINT, which creates professional presentation for business and e-learning from PowerPoint. Upon the stable technology of PowerPoint presentations to online Flash shows, authorSTREAM made a rapid growth on the Web presentation stage. The promotion idea with popular elements blogs, iPod and YouTube included also sounds great. Actually its presentation technologies are really advanced, that is, the animated slids and embedded audio would be the fair point as so far.

. SlideShare by SlideShare. It launched the service early, and the community is generally popular upon the well-done construction and promotion these years. As the king of Web presentation service, its entire community system including slideshow sharing, rating and additional features does no wrose than how YouTube works. Moreover, its affiliation on Facebook as one integrated online application (http://apps.facebook.com/slideshare) leads better attractions. However, unfortunately it didn’t provide plentiful office features like Google Docs, or enhanced presentation abilities like authorSTREAM. But really like YouTube community, it cannot stop its popularity on the stage.

Well, that’s the quick review I came up with. Like most users, I’m not sure there’s a real toplist there, but it doesn’t mean I can’t make some nice opinions. By the way, you may have a look at Google’s presentation in Flash about Q1 2008 Quarterly Earnings Summary on SlideShare’s Slideshow of the Day.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Adobe officially unveiled long-waiting Adobe Media Player and Adobe TV last week.

Adobe Media Player is a cross-platform Adobe AIR application that offers content discovery and interaction. Companies that are offering content for the player include CBS, MTV Networks, Universal Music Group, PBS, CondéNet, and Scripps Networks. The official support of streaming Flash video in FLV format for Adobe Media Player could be a nice point to end-users, however, Adobe targets on the high definition media playback in 1080p, 720p or 480i resolutions. It’s really great as a combination of Web and traditional media.

Adobe TV is just a network in Adobe Media Player and offers “expert instruction and original series programming” about Adobe products. Its four channels targets at Photographers, Designers, Video Professionals, and Developers. By the way, the streaming is very smooth and in high quality.

I’m satisfied with the newbies from Adobe, and Adobe Media Player is the best AIR application I ever seen.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Digital signage is the system that is used to convey your message, information or advertisements to your customers, students or colleagues. In simplistic terms, digital signage can be a PowerPoint presentation or you may wish to use a professional digital signage software package. Your message can then be displayed on large format LCD monitors, large plasma screens, multiple monitors, video walls, or through a projector onto a projection screen, a suspended acrylic rear projection screen or onto glass window film which may be touchscreen.

To reduce the time and effort needed to develop high-end presentations and graphics from any type of digital signage application, existing clip art galleries, imported images in any format, and link slide elements to real-time data sources to create stunning visual displays with continuously updated content could be combined with live video inputs, a real-time crawling ticker, video clip playback, and multiple animated logos and clocks, and you have everything you need to produce a full digital signage production just within Microsoft PowerPoint.

You may never know your PowerPoint application could be so powerful. Actually it is, and the unprecedented ease of use coupled with the highest quality output means users can create professional
and compeling digital signage in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.

You may find more about this solution by yourself on Google:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=powerpoint+digital+signage

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran