Use the photos you already have on your web site

I was doing a slide makeover today for slides from a large corporation. It is part of some work I am doing with a presentation skills expert and we are trying to show her client that their slides could be much better than they are today. The slide I chose was a typical five bullet point slide with some icons used as graphics below the bullet points.

The five points are the top five features that the company wants salespeople to focus on with customers in a retail environment. The problem is that they did not use pictures to illustrate the five features. On the company's web site, they list these five features (along with others). For each of the five, they have a professionally shot photo showing someone using that feature of the product. I copied the photos from the web site onto the slide and instantly had a much more visually appealing slide. It also allowed me to carry the selected photo on to a detailed slide about each feature.

When you are looking for photos to use in your own presentations and you work for a company that has a professionally done web site, start with the images that have been selected for the web site. The photos are easily accessible, easy to copy and will be consistent with what your audience has seen when they went to your web site. In today's situation, many of the retail customers will have already been to the company's web site and by training the sales people with the same images, they will be able to provide consistency of brand throughout the entire sales process.

Don't feel that you have to spend hours searching for the right stock photography or spend thousands of dollars on a photo shoot. Leverage what your company has already created and provide visual consistency for your customers across all points of contact.