B2B Branding with PowerPoint

Branding is an imperative in business today if you intend to make your company stand out from the crowd. Many businesses (large or entrepreneurial) take this to mean a slick logo or a graphically pleasing website. These promotional/branding mechanisms are important and should be considered, however, one of my personal favorite means of branding a business and its offerings (primarily applicable for business-to-business organizations serving other businesses) is to leverage the PowerPoint medium. The ability it affords for you to develop and display graphical models/images that speak volumes about your business and the value your products and services provide, make this medium a true winner in my eyes.

Personally, through my many years of PR/Marketing/Branding experience, I have come to realize the true power of a company capabilities/sales presentation that tells prospects, investors, partners and even employees who the business is and why its products and services should be considered for purchase. I have developed countless capabilities presentations using PowerPoint and have come to rely on an eight slide format that works for any organization, regardless of size, marketplace, etc. The slides include:

1. Business challenge – Talk about the challenges your clients and prospects face that lead them to search for solutions like the ones you offer
2. Your value proposition – In business value (rather than product features) terms, describe how your solutions (product and services) solve the problems described in slide 1
3. Product/service description – Describe specifically how your customers use your offerings (for what business purposes, etc.)
4. About us – Talk about your company in terms that matter to your audience (include things like years in business, number of customers, locations, awards, financial stability and so on)
5. Why you? – List at least five reasons why your business is better than the rest (include key differentiators that describe values/benefits that matter to your audience)
6. Customer successes – Include at least two or three scenarios describing a client’s initial challenge, your solution and the value (return on investment) they realized using your offerings
7. Customers – Either list or include logos from past clients (if appropriate)
8. Contact us – List various ways your prospects can contact you (phone, email, website, physical addresses, etc.)

This format obviously leaves room for flexibility when necessary in terms of additional slides. This could be for a company with multiple product or service lines, for example.

Once you have a professionally developed capabilities presentation, it will serve you well to post it on your website, provide it to your sales staff (if you have one) and include printed out copies in your press kit.

In the presentations I develop for clients, I like to include what I call customer value models, or visual representations of the business value the solutions provide to customers. These images typically depict value in terms that words sometimes cannot. If you would like to see some examples of customer value models, you can visit the following web page: http://www.winningmessage.com/CustomerValueModel.html.

By Kevin B. Levi
www.winningmessage.com
www.powerproof.net