5 Ideas For Interactive Presentations
Maintaining the attention of your audience during a sales presentation is one of the greatest challenges you will face as a salesperson. If your prospects are distracted or bored, the information you are presenting won’t be understood and a sale will be almost impossible to achieve.
One of the best strategies for maintaining a prospect’s attention is to add interactive elements to your presentation. Interaction compels the prospect to be mentally engaged in what you are saying and doing, as they have a larger role to play during the presentation.
In this post, we’ll share the benefits of incorporating more interactivity into presentations and highlight several great ways for doing so.
The benefits of interactive sales presentations
Audience engagement
The main reason for adding interactivity is that it forces audience engagement. When you ask an audience member to participate in some way, they will automatically shift their focus to the task on hand, be that participating in a Q&A or using a product prototype.
Makes your presentation novel
If a prospect views multiple sales presentations each week, they are probably slightly jaded about the prospect of sitting through yet another powerpoint presentation. Incorporating interactivity will help to differentiate your presentation and makes it more memorable for the viewer.
Better information retention
Your audience will find it much easier to absorb the information you are presenting if it is delivered in an interactive way. This means that once the presentation is over, they will remember what you were selling and why they should buy it.
Five ideas for interactivity sales presentations
#1 – Make your presentation conversational
The simplest way to incorporate interactivity into a presentation is use a conversational approach. Instead of launching into a long-winded presentation, start off by asking a couple of questions of your prospect which relate to your offer. Take their responses and create a conversation which organically leads the group towards your presentation content.
As the presentation continues, regularly ask additional questions of the prospect to continue the discussion. Using this approach will keep the prospect engaged and will also help you uncover useful information about the prospect’s product requirements, goals, and concerns.
#2 “Gamify” your presentation
Gamification is the application of the typical elements of game playing to other situations. These elements include competition, point scoring, collecting rewards, team play, and so on. It is an interesting approach that can engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.
Gamification works by triggering a dopamine response in the audience. As they play the game, make progress, and receive rewards, dopamine is released by the brain. Essentially, the brain is telling the body that something good is about to happen. You would have experienced it many times before when unwrapping a birthday present or smelling bacon first thing in the morning.
As dopamine floods the brain, your prospects will be fully engaged in the presentation and the activity they are performing. Some ways to gamify your presentation include:
- Running live quizzes
- Polling the audience
- Running icebreakers or challenges
- Game-like mobile apps for prospects to download which share information on your offer
- Offering prizes for the most right answers to your poll/quiz/challenge
#3 – Have a Q&A session in your presentation
Q&A sections give attendees plenty of opportunities to ask questions and dramatically increase the level of interactivity in your presentation. An additional benefit of having Q&As is that some of the questions might be of strong interest to other attendees, helping you deal with any concerns or points of interest. The ensuing discussion might be of more value to your prospects than the presentation itself.
#4 – Run hands-on product demonstrations
Hands-on product demonstrations are the ultimate form of interactive selling. If you are selling a physical object, let the prospect use it. If you are selling software, have a hands-on demonstration where the audience gets a chance to use the product. As they work with the product, they will become fully engaged in the presentation.
#5 – Supercharge your presentations with new software
Presentation software has become much more powerful in recent years. Long gone are the days where presenting PowerPoint slides of bullet points was acceptable. The audience now expects much more sophisticated and entertaining presentations with videos, animations, music, advanced templates and so on. If you are stuck in a rut with your current presentation software, try a new package with more options for interactivity.