Five PowerPoint Sales Tools Every Consultant Should Know About

Despite the slew of alternate products that have cropped up to replace it, MS PowerPoint still holds fort as indispensible presentation software for consultants. The fact that its limitations can now be enhanced with interesting and effective plugins makes it all the more useful. Here is a list of 5 sales tools that will help consultants to further leverage the use of PowerPoint.
1.    authorSTREAM
A stand-alone PowerPoint presentation cannot be shared easily with an audience around the globe. There are a number of PowerPoint to video converters that enable you to do this, but have checked out authorSTREAM?

• It helps you share your PowerPoint presentations on the Web as a unique link (URL) to send via e-mail, or embed them in your blogs or websites.
• You can download your presentations as video, and share them on YouTube or via iPods, or watch them on your DVD player.
• It allows you to seamlessly integrate authorSTREAM’s Services with your own website, using an API key.
• The Present Live feature lets you share a PowerPoint link with your contacts. All Your contacts can then watch and discuss the presentation, with you being in control. You can click through the slides and take them through the presentation. You can text chat with your attendees or call them using the telephone/VoIP application

With these and a whole lot of other features such as a premium paid service with additional benefits, live video narration to PowerPoint presentations from several sources, the ability to share on iPod, etc. will add great value to the way you can share your PowerPoint presentation with your customers.
2.    Accent Librarian PowerPoint
Consultants struggle with their computer files every day. It is so important to organize your presentations, documents and media files because you never know when you have to reuse something so that you can save tons of time. Accent Librarian PowerPoint® library management software is a tool that provides streamlined access and assembly of critical business documents and media files. In other words,

• It is optimized to provide sales and marketing teams with fast web-based access to PowerPoint presentations, critical business documents, rich media files and other relevant information.
• It saves valuable time spent gathering and assembling PowerPoint and sales documents using the old approach. Accent Librarian, the top PPT library management software on the market, gives sales and marketing teams optimum control over the materials presented to clients.
• Sales and marketing departments can easily access PowerPoint presentation archives for just-in-time customization that allows sales professionals to react more quickly to customize PPT presentations for each opportunity.

3.    PowerPoint Twitter Tools
How cool is it to add Web 2.0 to your presentation and have live tweets, twitter polls and feedback slides? Well, it’s possible now with SAP’s PowerPoint Twitter Tools.
What do you think of their auto-tweeting functionality that turns your PowerPoint slideshow into a dynamic Twitter interface? You can automatically update your Twitter account in the middle of your presentation, when you touch a particular slide. All you have to do is pre-program your slide by adding your status in between special tags – [twitter] and [/twitter] – in the note pages of your presentation. When you reach that slide, the status message will be automatically tweeted live!
This is a great way to engage your audience spread over the world, while making your presentation truly interactive. There are currently eight tools that you can easily cut and paste into your own PowerPoint decks:

• PowerPoint Twitter feedback slides
• PowerPoint AutoTweet
• PowerPoint Twitter voting — bar charts and pie chart
• PowerPoint Twitter ticker bar
• PowerPoint Mood meter
• PowerPoint Crowd meter
• PowerPoint Zoom text
• PowerPoint Twitter update bar

You can download the PowerPoint Twitter Tools here.
4.    KinetiCast is a presentation hosting service that lets you know exactly what happens when a prospect views your presentation. But before you send the presentation link, you can customize your presentation. Just create your presentation using PowerPoint, and then upload it to KinetiCast. You can personalize any and all slides with images, audio and/or video recordings. Then find out your prospect’s level of interest, and be ready to act. When your presentation is ready, you then send your prospect a download link through an email (that you can also customize with Kineticast, and use their advanced mail merge feature to send it to your prospects). The advanced analytics serwhich KinetiCast then tracks if the prospect actually visits and what they look at as well as how long they spend. They also let you download your presentation as a video. This is the information you get from Kineticast
Presentation recipient

• How many times it was viewed
• Date and time it was sent
• Geo information of recipient (to determine if it was forwarded)
• Views over the past 30 days
• Slides viewed
• Average time spent on each slide
• Percentage of time spent on a slide compared to all other slides
• Download and link buttons clicked
• Videos viewed

Based on the information you receive, you can customize follow-up emails or meetings with your prospects
5.    Proclaim Messenger

Anyone with even a few months experience in sales will agree that personal contact with prospects is more effective than a general email or sales letter. With Proclaim Messenger you can ensure this happens without actually having a face to face meeting with your prospects. This software enables you to easily combine pre-recorded or live video with PowerPoint presentations to produce video email campaigns (with full analytics that gives you instant feedback), one-off video sales emails, or hold live one-to-one or small group video chats. It is worth checking out this company’s other sales and marketing sales aids too.
If you have been using a unique PowerPoint sales tool to leverage your consultancy efforts, or if you have a product that works with PowerPoint to aid sales, do let us know about it.