Create a Self-Running PowerPoint Presentation

There has been an evolution in how sales professionals have been convincing consumers to do business with them. First there was a business card, then, an “I love me book” that was basically a scrapbook of your qualifications, and, next came the personal brochure that professionally packaged you like a commodity.

The latest in personal promotion is a multimedia presentation that combines color, graphics, animation, and sound to convince people to do business with you. The objective is to break down barriers of doubt and uncertainty and provide impressive information that will help them decide to do business with us.

The value of presentations has been determined and most of us don’t have to be convinced. 83% of what we have learned comes from sight. People retain four times as much from sight as they do from sound alone. And, color attracts attention.

There are graphic artists and design studios who specialize in creating multimedia presentations. The fees can range from $500 to $50,000 depending on what you want included. Script writing, professional talent, direction, music, studio time, intellectual property rights, and program development are all components that influence the cost.

Design, style, taste, and experience are part of why you are paying a professional to build your presentation. Microsoft PowerPoint, a do-it-yourself alternative, has some of that built into the product with design templates created by professionals with these qualities.

PowerPoint is packaged in some editions of MS Office or can be purchased separately. It is easy to operate and yet has special features that you would only expect from custom programming. There are other multimedia products on the market but more people use PowerPoint, which will give you the greatest opportunity to get help and share ideas.

It all begins with knowing what you want to say about yourself and the service that you offer. You should be able to easily verbalize why a person would want to do business with you rather than your competition. Remember that a multimedia presentation is like showing your vacation pictures: they are never as interesting to someone else as they are to you so keep them short.

Topics

• Personal Qualifications
• Company Qualifications
• Why list with a REALTOR®
• Help with financing
• Seller able to maintain their personal schedule
• Professional toprotect your interests –
• Marketing Plan
• Promotional Pieces
• Value of the Home
• Market preparation

Basic rules for building readable slides

• Limit amount of text on a page
• Support text with some kind of graphic
• Avoid cheap looking clip-art 20-24 point type is minimum suggested size
• Restrict overall time to 6-8 minutes
• Have your batteries charged on your notebook so you don’t have to plug your power cord into the wall
• Place the computer in front of the people seeing the presentation with you on the side to be able to control the page advancement
• Know how to blank the screen to make an effective point
• Pay attention to the consumer and quit when necessary

Once you have determined what you want to say on each page, it is time to support your message with quality graphics. PowerPoint comes with clipart that may look new to you but anyone who is familiar with the product will consider it tired, lifeless, and maybe even cheap. The largest investment most people make in their lifetime is in their home and in some cases, we are charging them more to sell it than the price they paid for the car they drive.

Graphics can include clipart but they can also include photos. Libraries of graphics are available at stores like CompUSA or on the Internet. One of my favorite sources is www.eyewire.com. You can purchase individual photos or collections on CD ROM for anywhere from $150 to $300.

The next step is to apply a design template that combines a graphic style, colors, and fonts to make an impressive statement. PowerPoint comes with quite a selection of different designs. You might consider avoiding the darker backgrounds because they are harder to read. If you can’t find exactly what you are looking for here, you can go to www.officeprinting.xerox.com/appnotes/officeresource or www.presentationpro.com or www.Presentation.com for additional resources.

Now, you are ready to apply animation to the text and the graphics. This will bring life to the page and help to focus attention to what you are trying to say. For instance, each item on a bullet list can be made to appear, fly-in, swirl, zoom flash, or any number of other effects. You can even attach a sound to the animation like applause, breaking glass, a cash register, or other things to strengthen the point being made.

A nice, professional touch would be to have some soft background music playing. Music like photos, and articles are considered intellectual property and cannot be used without permission. Consider purchasing royalty-free music on the Internet. There are lots of choices on the Web where you can listen to them before you buy. A typical piece of music for a presentation might cost $15.00.

Transitions are effects between slides. Like the choices you have with the text, the segue between slides can be blinds, checkerboards, or a variety of other things.

A presentation like this can be used with you narrating each slide like you would do in a listing presentation. If that is the way it is going to be used, then, you will want to manually advance each slide. The reason is so that you can take as little or as long on each point and allow for interaction with the consumer.

On the other hand, if you are going to make this presentation to be a continuous loop to show in an open house or to be placed on a CD to send to someone, you will want to rehearse the timing so that a normal person will have enough time to read and absorb what is on each slide without dragging out the presentation too long. In the rehearse menu, you have the option to save the timings if you like them. The auto-advance feature can be turned on and off depending whether you are showing it live or letting it run by itself.

Some agents want to be able to send this multimedia presentation to prospective buyers and sellers. Unless the person to whom you are sending it has a high-speed connection, e-mail will not be an option. You’ll need to put it on a CD because the size of it will almost certainly be in excess of the 1.44 MB limit of diskettes.

Another challenge to sending your exciting new presentation to someone is that they might not have PowerPoint in order to open the file. Microsoft allows you to attach a viewer to the presentation through an operation called Pack and Go for people without PowerPoint. Pack and Go does not install with a typical installation of PowerPoint and will have to be installed separately before you can use it; it will be found on your original installation CD.

A professional touch for your CD presentation is to have an autorun file that will start the presentation when the CD is placed in the computer. It is a simple task by taking notepad and writing the following: [autorun] open=ppview32.exe sample.ppt (replace sample.ppt with file name with ppt extension for whatever you called the PowerPoint presentation).

You’ll need a CD writer to copy the files to a CD ROM that can be given or mailed to the potential client. These have come down dramatically in price lately and you can expect to pay $125 to $200. You’ll find lots of uses for it besides this your regular backups.

The advantage of building a multimedia presentation yourself is that you can change it as often as you want without incurring development charges each time. You can duplicate them a few at a time instead of hundreds to get to a reasonable quantity discount. The overall savings can be substantial and you’ll get a real feeling of accomplishment by doing it your self.

Steps for a Self-Running PowerPoint Presentation

1. Make a PowerPoint presentation that explains why to do business with you
2. Use quality graphics to support the message
3. Apply design templateor create your own (Format, Apply Design Template)
4. Apply conservative animation to each slide (Slide Show, Custom Animation)
5. Select royalty-free music and insert sound from file on first slide (Insert, Movie and Sound, Sound from File). It should be number one on the animation order and it should start automatically at 00:00 seconds. Under multimedia settings, it should play using animation order; continue slide show while playing; stop playing after how ever many total slides are in show; and under “more options” should loop continuously.
6. Transitions (slide Show, Transitions)
7. Rehearse the timings (Slide Show, Rehearse Timings)
8. Create blank folder on hard drive(My Documents, New, Folder; name the folder; copy the music file into that folder
9. Pack and Go into that folder (File, Pack and Go)
10. Execute setup in that folder (after execution, there will be a lot of files you didn’t see before, most of them will have DLL extensions.)
11. Right click in Explorer and create a new text file.  Name it "autorun.inf"
12. Double click the file to open it.  Add an autorun command to the file so that the CD will start when placed in the computer’s CD ROM. The file should read:

[autorun]
open=ppview32.exe filenamewithpptextension (filenamewithpptextension is whatever you called the PowerPoint presentation)

13. Copy all files to a CD
14. Create label

Royalty free music sources
www.pbtlive.com 
www.royaltyfree.com
www.musicbakery.com
www.royaltyfreemusic.com
www.sound-effect.com
www.royaltyfree-music.com
www.avmedia.com.au/royaltyfree
www.iamusic.com