You’ve been chasing an important client and you’ve been doing your best to nail a meeting with them. You know how big that deal is going to be and you’re already imagining the raise coming your way.

Suddenly, the universe aligns in your favor and you have your meeting lined up. Wahoo! The hook is there and all you have to do now is reel them in. Easy, right? You’ve done this before.

But then, a sudden chest pain reminds you of a very big problem. A problem that might cost you all the effort you’ve put in so far to get that client to sit down with you.

You don’t have a presentation ready!

Now is the time when you remember that old set of slides you’ve already shown to so many clients and their faces of disappointment come back in a horrifying flashback of lost deals.

Yep, that’s a tough moment. Sucks to be you, right?

Well, hang on because the day you’re reading this article is your luckiest day! Relatively…

The first instant impact on your work will be the reduced time you spend on figuring out what to put in your presentation and how to build slides that will help you sell. Knowing the tool will be an immense time-saver that will let you focus on finding the right content to add, instead of poking around the toolbar wondering how to do basic tasks.

Like any other design tool, PowerPoint has a learning curve and once you understand the basic & advanced techniques for using it, your presentations will start rolling out faster than ever.

Learn how to fly through PowerPoint and you will never have a moment of despair when a meeting is coming or your boss tells you he’ll need a presentation for tomorrow.

When time is on your side you can focus on the content that matters the most to making the sale and winning your audience. There are specific rules and strategies for mapping out your content and main sales points throughout your presentation to create a layout that gives your audience the right message at exactly the right time.

You don’t need to be a designer to build presentations that hit the mark. You only need to learn the basics of slide design so you can easily build slides that don’t overload the viewer with information but nail down on the specific benefits they will experience if they work with you.

Clean up your slides and you’ll figure out that simple often works best when you need to introduce people to a certain amount of information they need to make a decision.

A presentation is a primarily visual experience for your audience. You should embrace the “a picture tells 1,000 words” mentality and find out how to explain and clarify your point with more visual aids, instead of written content and bullet points.

Based on the type of presentation you’re designing, you’re going to need a specific text-to-image ratio to follow when building your slides. In a nutshell, there are 3 major cases:

• • Live presentations where you’re talking to a large number of people require more images, motion, and visual content. This is the case where your speech fills in the gaps between the slides and use them to support your big idea.

• • In-person presentations where you’re in a direct conversation with a client or upper management require a good balance between text, data, and visual aids. In this case, your viewer is consuming the presentation while you’re there to help clarify key points.

• Online presentations where you need to design your presentation in a way that spreads out your text and images into more slides than the usual type of presentation you show clients.

Once you get a good grasp of how to use images & text in PowerPoint, you’ll be ready to overcome any deadline and difficult meeting that needs an effective presentation.

It’s absolutely vital to be able to repurpose your presentations to be flexible and always be one step ahead when you need to personalize a set of slides for a specific person, meeting, or event. When you get to know how to build customizable slides, it means you’re becoming a PowerPoint pro and each new presentation will be consistent and done much faster.

After you get comfortable with using PowerPoint to its full potential, you can turn each next presentation into a personalized experience for new clients and meetings.

This means that each time a conversation with a client requires a specific focus on certain parts of your product or service, you’ll be ready to quickly adapt your presentation to close the deal.

Designing presentations faster happens much easier when you organize your files and process a little bit. You’ll be able to quickly locate all the images, icons, visuals, and content, you need to finish the presentation fast without losing time searching for resources.

The next best thing is that PowerPoint is extremely customizable and you can personalize it for your own workflow and productivity style. Once you got that down, it’s one more huge speed boost for designing your slides lightning fast.

You’ve surely come across the moment when you’re thinking “this would be so awesome to do in this presentation” but you simply didn’t know how to achieve it. Well, that stops when you know how to configure PowerPoint to fit your style.

But to achieve great presentations, you need to learn the tools first. PowerPoint does come with a lot of design flexibility and functionality, and powerful software usually requires a bit of learning for you to extract the maximum out of it. If business communication is a big part of your role, then PowerPoint is one of the tools where you need to have full proficiency.