Marketing, sales and presentations have always been inextricably linked - and yet, in many cases, internal company processes could not be more inefficient. It is therefore high time to effectively link these important areas. This is exactly the opinion of the Linz-based agency Impact Marketing, which, as our new strong partner, has specialized in the implementation of (corporate) presentations with our software. Time for a talk with presentation pro and marketing expert Peter Gattinger, who not only reveals his very personal presentation tricks to us, but also tells us how he himself already tinkered with a kind of "presono" almost 20 years ago.
Peter, at Impact Marketing you now also cover the implementation of presentations in addition to classic marketing. Why this portfolio expansion?
In today's working world, professional presentations are an important prerequisite for successfully standing out from the crowd in marketing and sales. We see great potential in this area and would like to expand our competencies even further. For this reason, we have started to train and expand our graphics department.
You yourself can look back on a long career in the presentation sector. What does an optimal presentation to customers or interested parties look like to you?
An optimal presentation is pure emotion. It is essential to recognize where and how you can best pick up your counterpart. I can prepare myself for a presentation, but I may only recognize what makes a new conversation partner tick during the greeting or small talk. Consequently, I need to have a good sense of which topics are important so that I can inspire them right from the start. From my point of view, there is therefore no secret recipe for a presentation flow. Rather, I need a tool that is extremely flexible and allows for spontaneity - no matter what kind of presentation it is.
Your personal presentation no-go?
For me, there's nothing worse than rattling off a 40-page PowerPoint presentation littered with bullet points and boring company photos. Above all, I also find the unprofessional skipping of "less interesting" slides extremely debilitating.
You use presono for your agency and client presentations. How did you discover our tool?
We discovered presono through our mutual client Wertpräsent, for whom we developed a company presentation. In the process, we realized that while companies are familiar with using traditional tools like PowerPoint, presono brings some revolutionary concepts to study. In the everyday stress of work, there are often hardly any resources for this and so employees fall back on the old familiar. Getting to grips with complex software like presono takes time. Companies that are not willing to invest this time are in the right place. We make it easier for them to get started using the software and help them create their first professional company presentation. Adding individual additional slides is then child's play for the companies.
Professional company presentations are an important basis for all marketing and sales activities: For Wertpräsent, Impact Marketing created an optimal presentation deck with presono.
What motivated you to use our tool and what fascinates you about presono?
In my career so far, everything has revolved around the topic of presentations. After my marketing studies in Linz, I worked for a presentation technology company for eleven years. That was still at a time when LCD displays were placed on an overhead projector to project a computer image - only later did beamers & co. follow. But even then we managed to equip great presentation rooms in Linz.
Subsequently, I took over an industrial company with 250 employees as operations manager and consequently as managing director. At our first K trade fair in 2003, we were faced as a team with the great challenge of presenting all the same content in the same way. Due to a lack of options, I finally became inventive and used TYPO3 (note: free content management system for websites) to build an interactive presentation with multimedia content such as videos, which I could maintain and service centrally. To go with it, I built my own standing tables with integrated screens. Basically, 19 years ago I was already missing in PowerPoint what presono solves today. When I discovered presono while working with our current customer Wertpräsent, my heart was of course won immediately.
In the meantime, did you continue working with your own solution or did you go back to conventional solutions?
No, that was a one-time thing. Developing this own site was incredibly time-consuming and I'm not an IT professional after all. Just getting the server for TYPO3 up and running took months of hard work. But it worked fantastically for the trade show. The whole team had access to the same content and information and everything ran like clockwork. Just like presono makes it possible today - that's why I'm on fire for this solution.
There are currently some live trade fairs in the pipeline - what opportunities do you see here, both online and offline?
What is already possible online is ingenious - but it does not replace personal contact. A few senses that people have relied on for thousands of years are switched off as a result, and communication is different. That's why, in my view, online and live trade shows are not comparable, and I'm sure that live trade shows and live meetings will continue to exist - if perhaps somewhat less so - in the future. Above all, personal contact, which goes beyond trade fairs and meetings and often takes place over a meal in a restaurant, will continue to be crucial.
How do you still manage to integrate the restaurant feeling into a presentation situation?
In my opinion, this works by conveying one's own emotional connection to the presentation topic with personal stories. This automatically builds trust with the other person and creates a feeling of "he reveals a lot about himself, so I can also reveal a lot about myself". Despite everything, this works better in face-to-face meetings than in online meetings.
Which presono features do you think are particularly helpful for your customers or for optimal (marketing-) presentations?
Once a presentation concept is created, the numerous interactive templates make it very easy to quickly implement it and fill it with your own content. The already integrated effects ensure that emotions can easily be created and take the audience's breath away.
In addition to the great design possibilities, however, the maintenance options are also an enormous advantage. As a former managing director of a company with four locations worldwide, the thought of the version chaos of countless PowerPoint presentations still sends shivers down my spine. The fact that presono allows you to select and individually compile content like in a playlist, while ensuring in the background that this content is always up to date, is fantastic.
How can one imagine working with you in terms of presentation implementation?
Our goal is to remove the first big hurdle in dealing with presono and to create a first (company-) presentation together with our customers. For this purpose, after a briefing, the concept creation as well as the filling of the presentation will take place. In the future, we would also like to offer training courses and webinars to enable our customers even better themselves. Especially for organizations with many branches, we see great potential here. As an agency, we would of course like to offer all existing and future customers to use presono in order to achieve an optimal overall result in terms of communication and marketing.
Marketing expert Peter Gattinger from Impact Marketing works his magic for his clients with presono to create optimal (company) presentations, always asking the most important questions.
What do you think your clients can achieve with professionally designed presentations? What added value do they gain by working with you and presono?
It finally puts marketing departments back in charge of how presentations should look. Sales staff presenting with old logos or prices and sales information from three years ago can no longer happen with presono. These central maintenance issues concern virtually all organizations - especially those that operate internationally. In short: companies can provide better information much more efficiently and sales staff can finally focus on the customer again. The time and cost savings this generates are an enormous advantage.
Are there any software features that you would still like to see in presono?
Personally, I am completely satisfied at the moment. True to the motto "keep it simple", I am a friend of simplicity. Anything that is too complex and rarely used will be forgotten.
What are you most looking forward to in the future when working with presono?
I'm actually most looking forward to implementing trade show booths and trade show kiosk projects. I'm a big advocate of the trade fair and because presono creates the best conditions for this, I can't wait to get active here for our customers.
Looking to the future: How do you think the topic of presentations will develop over the next few years and what status will it have in terms of marketing?
With more and more meetings and presentations taking place online, it is becoming increasingly important that all information is available quickly, interactively and flexibly. Especially in the virtual world, people don't have the patience to watch as people search for information. In my view, it will therefore be even more important to bundle all content centrally in such a way that you can pull out everything that is important and in demand in a given situation with a snap of your fingers. After all, there is nothing worse for conversation partners than to be presented with a predefined program that may have no relevance whatsoever for them.