Timebomb Presentations: When You Only Have Hours & Not Days
You know what it's like. You just get the RFP at O' dark thirty and in a mad dash you need it to look like the savior! Well making new business presentations is a fine art. Done well by many and mastered by none. The rules of the game change so frequently that boilerplate PPT templates look like what they are – dated. What can you do to soak your pitch in gas and give the potential client the lighter? Visuals. And the ability to pitch but that's not important right now ;)
But I need to pitch this by EOD tomorrow!
Here's a quick way to cut a capabilities reel in short order. I've used an application called "Prezi." Don't let the silly name fool you it's really a nice browser-based presentation application. There's a desktop application for development as well built in Adobe Air (I think). Now the short comings of Prezi is the look is a bit of a one-trick-pony. Mind you for pitches it's fast and elegant and you'll get more time to polish everything if you get 'short-rounded' at a later date.
Here's a interactive reel I assembled in about a day:
There's a couple of tricks to know about what you just saw:
- Build the animation out fully as a static linear transition.
- The key to the animations is to grab your screen shots with an application like Snapz Pro to show the navigation and any robust animations or features.
- Then in a video edit application like Final Cut Pro, adjust speeds, layer music and drop in the above mentioned animations of the screengrabs.
- If you're a MAC user I always recommend using Keynote over PowerPoint as I feel it handles video much cleaner and without prejudice.
- Now export and add it to your presentation for maximum impact.
Hope this helps your bag the big one, or at least keep you in the fight!
