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Creative Tips to Make Your Presentation Folder Stand Out

When it comes to perfecting your business materials, first impressions are vital, and nothing is truer when preparing presentation folders for meetings with customers or clients. Taking a creative look at how you present yourself in the boardroom could propel companies of all sizes to new heights and we have a few tips to ensure you and your brand stand out, even in very crowded marketplaces and sectors.

There are so many ways that you can make your business materials memorable and many printing and packaging companies provide laser cutting, embossing, foil stamping and other services to give you the edge you need to get ahead. Laser cutting is an excellent way to put a creative stamp on materials around the office and can often provide an exciting extra to give to prospective clients. Laser cutting machines are a complex piece of machinery, these can be used to cut creative shapes in a variety of materials as well as improve edge quality.

Thermography is another service provided by printers and packaging specialists, this method adds texture to printed designs and works in unison with embossing and lithography. Foil embossing is a popular technique used to jazz up presentation folders and customised ring binders. Utilising a specialist printing method, the material is raised creating a three dimensional effect that is simple yet unique.

Foil stamping is another favourable method and tends to stick in the mind of potential clients, making it a highly recommended addition to business materials. Stamping adds a powerful, creative touch to presentation folders, business cards and other materials and tends to command the attention businesses of all sizes are looking for. Die cutting can also be used to create a customised and unique shape or design, and is an affordable but impressive option.

As well applying different textures and effects to your presentation materials, why not consider making the folder itself an unusual shape or size? Generally folders are made to a standard size to accommodate standard sizes of paper but going a little larger or smaller can really make yours stand above the rest. The contents of folder is also important, many companies don’t really go into much depth when it comes to demonstrating their assets to their target audience so make your folder more than just a logo and slogan – go into great detail and describe your business ethos, introduce your team, provide customer testimonials and more to present a well-designed product with undeniable substance.

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You’re Halfway Through Your Presentation and You Realize “This is Not Working!”

You’ve prepared your presentation, you know your subject, and you know your audience. You have the presentation internalized. As you progress through it, you have this bad feeling that starts to grow. You’re halfway through, and you hear a little voice in your head that says, “This is not working!”

What do you do?

That was the exact question I got this week from one of my corporate coaching clients. His presentation is a “pitch” for a $150,000 per month contract. It’s extremely important to him and his company.

I took a minute to really think about it… and I remembered an amazing transformation that I experienced long ago during a comedy show.

Three of the best headliners were working a show together in Worcester, Massachusetts. There happened to be a function in the main room, so they had to move the comedy show. If you would’ve been there, you would have seen a room full of 115 people in a hotel basement. It was definitely not the best situation — low ceilings, a warm room, a pillar in the middle of the floor that obstructed the view for many of the audience members.

The first comedian was experienced and very talented. He took the stage and only received mild laughs. He continued to follow his routine and didn’t waver. The second comedian took the stage, and had almost exactly the same results. He, too, didn’t waiver from his original “planned” routine. The last comedian, Vinnie Favorito, took the stage, and started with his planned routine. He was about three minutes into it… and he stopped. He put the microphone down, pulled up a stool and said, “Guys, what’s the matter? What’s going on?” Vinnie changed gears, and abandoned the original plan that he always used – the plan that almost always worked for him.

He realized one crucial thing. The original plan will only work when you’re “connected” with the crowd. Sometimes a connection is easy to make. On occasions, like this, it’s not.

I was just amazed at how Vinnie stopped his flow and confidently changed directions. If he had kept going, he would have suffered the same mediocre laughs that the other comedians received.

If you find yourself in the middle of a presentation and it’s not working. Stop. Talk to them. Check-in. It’s perfectly legal to ask the audience where they are, and what’s wrong. It takes a true professional to do that.

By “checking in” I mean – literally – black the projector screen, step forward, and separate yourself emotionally and physically from what you were doing. It gets the audience’s attention and helps engage them right away. They feel the change, and they know it was not planned. You might instantly gain a connection. If you don’t gain that connection right away… I promise, “checking in” is taking a huge step forward to creating one!

How did it turn out? Amazing! He took a tough audience and completely turned them around. Will it work every time? It depends on many factors. However, if it is not working the way it is going, please change something!

We learn the most from the toughest presentations. Witnessing a master like Vinnie perform under difficult circumstances has taught me a great deal. What will you do the next time you notice it ain’t working?

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Product Managers Know That Pricing Is All About The Presentation

How to correctly price a product has always been a bit of a black art for most product managers. The goal is to not price a product so high that nobody is willing to buy it, while at the same time not pricing it so low that you end up leaving money on the table. It turns out that the correct way to price a product has to do with its parts, not with its cost…

What Do Your Customers Value?

Pricing for a product comes down to two things: what are your customers willing to pay for the product and how satisfied will they be with the amount that they ended up paying for it? In order to create a price that will meet both of these customer expectations, product managers need to find the best way to present their product’s benefits to their customers.

This is where the problems first show up. All too often product managers spend their time (often at the request of their senior management) focusing on the cost of their product when instead they should be worried about communicating the product’s benefits.

The correct way to go about pricing your product is to view it not as a complete product, but rather as a collection of components (product, accessories, support, configuration options, documentation, etc.). Each component does not have the same value to your customer. This means that product managers need to take the time to carefully price each component so that it closely matches the value that the customer places on that particular component.

What Customer Pricing Experiments Show

Researchers Dr. Rebecca Hamilton and Dr. Joydeep Srivastava have studied how customers value different components of a product. They used auto repairs as the product that was being offered and they identified three different components of this product: parts, labor, and shipping (of the parts).

In their studies, the researchers discovered that customers valued parts more than labor, and parts more than shipping. The take-away from this research was that customers assigned a higher price to those things that they viewed as providing them with a higher benefit.

An important lesson for product managers came from the second part of the researcher’s study. Here they dropped the price for labor to nothing. That made customers nervous – somewhat surprisingly they preferred to pay at least something for this component. Clearly, dropping the price of a product’s component below an accepted threshold doesn’t make the product more attractive – it actually makes it less attractive.

Three Guidelines

The end result of the studies were the creation of three guidelines for product managers who are getting ready to price their products:

It’s All About Needs: Product managers need to make sure that they fully understand their customer’s needs. If your car battery needs to be replaced, you will be willing to visit a store and pay full price for a new battery and a big discount on the motor oil that you’ll need later instead of visiting another store that can offer you a small discount on both.
Bundles Work: The researchers found that product managers who can combine both high-value and low value components together in packages do the best. They also caution that a product manager should only take the step of offering low-value components for free if that is what the current market will allow.
Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: If a product that you are responsible for has a benefit that you think that customers should be placing a greater value on, then it is the responsibility of the product manager to do something about it. Specifically, you need to find ways to clearly communicate the value of that component to your customer in order to boost its value.
What All Of This Means For You

In the end, what your customers are going to be willing to pay for your product is going to depend on how valuable they view it as being. Product managers need to understand that their customers don’t see their product as a blob, instead they see it as a collection of multiple components that they place different values on.

In order to price a product correctly, product managers need to break their product up into the components that their customers see. Then those components need to be matched to your customer’s goals – what do they really value? Finally, high and low benefit components can be grouped together in order to boost your customer’s willingness to pay for the product.

Nobody ever said that pricing a product correctly was going to be easy. However, taking the time to understand how your customer views your product and the value that they put on the different components of your product is the key to doing pricing correctly. Get this right, and you’ll have found the secret to being a successful product manager!

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