How to Win More Business: 5 Pitching & Presentation Tips for 2024

When it comes to enhancing your business, pitching and presentations can play a big part. Connecting with your audience is important, and easier than you might think.

Good presentation design is key to selling the right idea or story to your customers, and could be the difference between landing a new client—or satisfying existing ones—and putting off potential customers.

So how do you deliver a good presentation? Don’t fret, these pitching and presentation tips for 2024 will help win more business and do some of the leg work for you.

1. Level Up Your Presentation Design

It’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of presentation design trends. Trends are key to keeping your business relevant and connecting with your audience. Minimalist design has become a popular choice for many brands in their marketing and advertising. Presentation design trends have followed suit, with many adopting a more simplistic approach to pitching.

This presentation style is a show of confidence for any business, proving that less is more. It’s perfect for guiding an audience's attention while delivering a clear and concise message.

Similarly, simple and muted pastels have moved to the forefront of design. Pastels are diluted primary and secondary colors that have an understated yet powerful effect. The calming and soothing tones relax the viewer, declutter, and keep designs fresh. Incorporating pastels will leave your audience feeling warm and fuzzy, and establish a better emotional connection.

If you really want a design that catches your audience’s eye, why not consider 3D design in your presentation? This design trend can really bring your ideas to life. Rendering 3D images sounds more complicated than it is—Envato Elements has plenty of free tools available to build show-stopping 3D images and text!

2. Think About Data Visualization

Put simply—data visualization is the visual representation of data. It works by providing clients with accessible and engaging information, quickly. Most of us are familiar with charts; bar charts, pie charts, line graphs, and venn diagrams to name a few. These are all effective ways of representing information and figures visually.

Never underestimate just how impressive they can look on your screen. Data visualization is a powerful tool at any pitch or presenter's disposal—considering that, statistically, people process visual information much faster and are more likely to trust numerical figures.

As a data-driven society, there are a plethora of ways to represent your information aesthetically. Choosing the right one really depends on the data and your audience. Column, bar, and line charts will visualize the distribution of information, showcasing outliers and range.

If you need to compare values — pie, column or mekko charts are a strong choice. Bubble charts or scatter plots are great for showing value between data, and how the variables affect one another. Whichever you choose, the goal is to clarify complicated information and make it easily digestible for your audience.

The humble pie chart will never go out of fashion, but there is always room for more creative ways to display data—without overdoing it of course. Basic data visualization designs are trending, with simple infographics and charts the preferred choice.

Video infographics are also becoming a popular way to display data, as they’re fun, quick and captivating. Plus a recent study found 67 percent of people preferred learning new information this way. There’s no doubt about it—condensing your data into concise and compact visuals is key to creating an impactful pitch.

3. Tell a Story

Incredible presentation design can only take you so far—you also need a great story to tell. Using visual elements like animation can help immerse viewers and bring your presentation to life on the screen.

As a narrator, it’s also important to know when to pause or direct attention to what is being shown on the screen. Aligning your visual cues with verbal ones is essential for crafting an engaging sales presentation.

Consider what kind of story you're going to tell. Figuring out a structure is common practice in good presentation and pitching. Will it be a hero's journey? A story about overcoming obstacles to gain knowledge?

Demonstrating the success of a product and establishing credibility? No matter what story you tell, it’s vital to offer viable solutions to a problem, and leave the audience feeling empowered with a sense of urgency.

Deciding which story fits comes down to each individual audience and pitch. The best powerpoint presentation tips are straight forward: keep it simple, genuine and succinct. Don’t shy away from emotion—if you believe in your presentation enough, the audience will follow suit.

4. Get to the Point (Quickly)

Your pitch should work like an ergonomic office chair—it should be comfortable and purpose built. Your presentation needs to hook your audience from the onset, then keep them there.

Getting to the point quickly definitely helps to keep your audience's attention. Your pitch should have a clear beginning, middle and end; staying on track reduces the risk of hiccups, a bored audience and pre-pitch nerves.

A great tip is to follow a checklist for your presentation. Clearly map out time, pitch points and slide transitions. This will help you to organize your ideas and engage your audience. Make sure to include your goals, the audience you are speaking to, as well as each speaking point.

Leave time for consideration and don’t over-word your slides or cue cards—keep them short and pithy. If you start to lose your point, remember to take a breath. Delivering a good presentation takes practice, and knowing your pitch back to front is key.

For more presentation tips visit Effective Sales Presentations: 11 Tips to Win Deals + Templates, and get pitching like a pro.

5. Use Tools and Templates

Long gone are the days where PowerPoint 3.0 was the only resource available to create presentations. In fact, with the help of presentation templates, you no longer even have to even create them from scratch!

Keynote, Google Slides and PowerPoint all offer easy-to-use templates—it really just depends on your budget, style and operating system.

PowerPoint is the original presentation software, and has years of user support to go with it. It’s easy to navigate and integrated with Microsoft Office Suite online, plus it has traditionally offline capabilities. Its online integration is still behind other software, so collaboration and saving presentations in real time isn’t seamless yet.

Keynote is designed for and by Apple, so it’s great if you are already using that particular operating system. It works on Mac, iPads and iPods, can sync to iCloud, and be shared across multiple devices at once. The design is sleek and easy to use, and it can be exported as a PowerPoint presentation. The downside is that it’s designed strictly for Mac—no PCs allowed.

Google Slides are an innovative and integrated presentation software system. It’s all operated online, so files are saved and shared in real time. It’s a seamless experience for users and built for ease of use. Collaboration is made easy through Google Slides, plus—it’s free! The catch is that users have to sign up with a Gmail account.

When sending presentations to your investors, you can spice things up with an interactive kick. Interactive PDF documents can be far more engaging when you, the presenter, are not around.

Whichever system you choose, remember to apply these top 5 tips of 2024 to build business and lift your presentation game. Don’t panic, you'll do great!

Need some help crafting a killer sales presentation? These examples will show you how it's done.

About the Author

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