Original article published on Sales Initiative.

According to Business Insider, when we speak, we have about 60 seconds to capture our audience’s attention, establish credibility, and motivate them to listen. Those opening seconds are critical in holding the attention of your customers; therefore, your sales presentation needs to be compelling and relevant to each unique audience. While marketing has been trying to eliminate generic and boring presentations, salespeople tend to create content on their own, using inconsistent and often inaccurate corporate messaging. Frequently, this individual content doesn’t clearly differentiate their products/solutions correctly, making it difficult to create consistency within the brand. No matter what the industry, e.g. telecom, medical, scientific, industrial, etc., it is critical to deliver compelling presentations that tell your product story right the first time.

Here are the three essential ingredients necessary for creating a sales presentation that will engage prospects and win deals:

Personalised, interactive and engaging content

Interactive content is anything that requires a participant’s active engagement: in return for that engagement, participants receive real-time relevant information/results that pertain to their specific interests and business objectives. By allowing your prospects to get involved with the presentation and guide themselves through their own journey, they become more informed buyers. Your customers are looking for personalised content that solves their pains, answers their questions, and is tailored specifically to what drove them to the meeting or demonstration initially. Not only do interactive presentations add more value for your user by creating a two-way dialogue, enabling a personalised, user-focused experience from start to finish, but they also allow Sales to uncover what segment is most relevant to the customer throughout the presentation.

Uniform messaging and branding across the organisation

Creating uniform messaging and branding throughout your presentations allows your marketing departments, global sales teams, VARs, and channel partners to have a consistently positive experience regardless of location. By building a dynamic, interactive presentation with consistent messaging that you can access anywhere, your sales teams can deliver the same value-add regardless of the personalisation of the presentation. Not only does this build unity across the organisation, but it also standardises presentations between groups and geographies, reducing the amount of rework necessary, improving efficiency, and allowing applications and content generation teams to act as strategic assets to the company.

Optimised content for all mobile devices

Ever get to a sales meeting and all of a sudden you can’t get the presentation file to open on your laptop computer? You have a moment of panic because you know this meeting is crucial to hit your numbers for the quarter and you don’t want to let this sales opportunity slip through your fingers. Alas, you remember your presentation was designed and built for mobile devices. To avoid these unnecessary situations, it is imperative to create a sales presentation application that can be enabled and optimised for any mobile device, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops. This ensures that your sales demonstrations can be re-used across all devices, eliminating the need to migrate or recreate interactive demonstrations when moving from one operating system, device, or browser to another, better leveraging your initial investment in the presentation.

Use these 3 ingredients to engage prospects earlier, shorten the sales cycle, and increase win rates.

By Dana Drissel, Vice President at Kaon Interactive, virtual 3D Product Models (which look and behave just like the actual products). Their interactive storytelling applications help sales and marketing communicate the true ‘value’ and uniqueness of their products/solutions anywhere, anytime, on any device, empowering them to win deals.