5 ways to power up your PowerPoint

Whether a sales presentation works or flops is usually in the hands of the writer. In other words, crafting an effective PowerPoint is less about the content and more about the content strategy.

What does this mean for writers? When you’re building a PowerPoint presentation for your sales team, what can you do to make sure they’ll come out on top?

To help answer that question, here are some tips for writing a powerful PowerPoint:

1. Know your speaker.

Especially when you’re creating a PowerPoint for someone else to use, a clear understanding of how they work is crucial. There must be a clear understanding between the writer and the presenter, both in terms of the content on the slides and in terms of the way those slides will work. Make sure the speaker knows to use the slides as a springboard, not a script; he or she will want to use the PowerPoint to amplify the speech, not make it. In many cases, it’s helpful to write a separate script for the speaker to use, one detailing what to say and outlining the main ideas to communicate.