What’s the most important part of presenting your business to future partners? Is it the details of the partnership? The strength of your products and services? The customer base you have? Your resources? The promising potential of the business? If you ask any experienced businessman, all of these factors, and more, will be on their list. But they know that there’s something even more important that can make or break the deal.
They’d tell you that the way you present your pitch is the deciding factor on whether you win or lose the deal. Even the strongest business ideas will stand no chance if they’re poorly presented.
So if you’re looking for a way to win the hearts and minds of future partners, here are the 4 steps you should take to properly present your business.
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Prepare Your Business Pitch
Your first step starts with gathering the information that you want to add to your presentation. In this step, you don’t need to worry about organizing the words, coming up with creative pitches, or the way you’re going to present. All you need to focus on is preparing the pitch, which includes gathering and preparing certain points:
a.Goal
What’s the goal of this pitch? How do you want to finalize the deal? Are there certain actions you want the viewers to take as soon as you’re done? Do you want to inspire them?
b. Business Overview
In a brief overview, what exactly is your business about? What are your values, ethics, value proposition, mission, vision, and main services or products?
c. Your Business Strengths
What differentiates your business from its competitors? What is your competitive edge, and how does this show throughout your services and operations?
d. Threats and Opportunities
What are the threats that can slow down your progress or halt it altogether? What about the opportunities available in the market for your growth?
e. Mutual Benefits
How can this partnership benefit both you and your future partners?
2. Write Down the Pitch
Once you have your ideas laid out in front of you in extreme detail, it’s time to organize them into a pitch. Writing your pitch will go through a few stages:
a. Start with a Draft
You start with a draft, joining information together and making an outline as to how the presentation will flow. The draft includes a full transcript of what you say and how you say it.
b. Get Creative
It’s a suitable time for your creative juices to get flowing. Do you want to present a certain part in a creative way? Do you have an innovative approach you want to apply?
c. Finalize the Pitch
Finally, you’ll put everything together and finalize the pitch you’ll be presenting.
3. Prepare Your Presentation
So far, you’re done with the information you’ll provide and the way you’ll pitch it. You should by now start preparing your presentation.
a. Choosing Your Presentation Tool
Presenting your pitch needs a good presentation tool to do this critical job for you, and there are dozens of programs to do that. The first option that anyone would go for is using Microsoft PowerPoint, but many users run away from it.
There’s a bad reputation surrounding the program, which makes learning more about PowerPoint important, so you can understand that as a program, it has no issues; it’s all about learning how to use it. In fact, PowerPoint contains some of the most efficient and aesthetics tools for creating presentations, but it all comes down to your own experience with it.
d. Designing the Presentation
When designing your presentation, you need to have a good eye for detail, and a good taste for aesthetics. Make sure that the presentation and its motions are well-synced with your pitch. Take care of the color combination, placement of pictures, correct installing of videos, and the way you organize your slides. You should never cramp the slide with too many words. Try to use visual aids (like diagrams) to make it easier on the eyes.
4. Rehearse
Now that everything is ready, you have one more step to do. You can never rehearse enough. Rehearse the script you’ve written, and rehearse it again while playing the presentation. You’ll catch some mistakes and confusing parts, and you’ll come to memorize your pitch like your name. On the presentation day, you’ll be on fire.
A perfect presentation takes a lot of preparation. Start by laying out all of your ideas and then organize these ideas into a well-crafted script that inspires and encourages your audience. And most importantly, you should know that your presentation can never be complete without using the correct presentation tools and adequate design.
