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SmartDraw.com Lists Top Ten Presentations Tips

San Diego, CA.—March 28, 2008 - SmartDraw.com, makers of SmartDraw, the first program to automate the process of creating business graphics, today released its list of "Top Ten Sales and Marketing Presentation Tips." SmartDraw, the world's most popular business graphics software, is downloaded by more than 2 million people every year and is widely used to create compelling, professional-looking graphics and charts for sales and marketing presentations.

  1. Less is More.
    When designing your presentation materials, remember that as a visual medium, less is more. Avoid cluttering the slide or handout with lots of text and bullet points. Have a few main points highlighted, and let your verbal presentation fill in the blanks.

  2. People Like Pictures.
    Use charts and graphics instead of tables. SmartDraw includes dozens of sales and marketing graphics that you can easily edit with your own specific data.

  3. Focus on Benefits.
    When preparing your presentation, steer away from getting into too many details of the product or service you are selling. Instead, focus on the benefits it will provide your audience.

  4. Keep it Short.
    This will leave time for questions from your audience, and it shows them you appreciate how valuable their time is.

  5. Leave a Little Something.
    Leave your audience something to remember you by. This goes beyond business cards and could include bound copies of your presentation or handouts with the pertinent information highlighted. It could even include pens or stationery with your company's information.

  6. Attention on You.
    When using presentation slides, try blacking out the screen when you want attention directly focused on what you are saying. Leaving up old slides while you are trying to make your point can distract your audience.

  7. Bland PowerPoint®.
    Steer away from traditional PowerPoint® slides. Create unique graphics that will capture the attention of your audience. SmartDraw includes dozens of great-looking sales & marketing templates that you can easily edit and import into PowerPoint® with one click of the mouse.

  8. Tell a Story.
    Before getting to the cold, hard facts of your presentation, help your audience warm up to you by telling a personal story. It could be related to the product or service you are selling or it could simply be a general story about a shared life experience. Whatever the story, making it personal and relatable will help to engage your audience.

  9. Humor is good.
    Catch your audience off guard by starting with a humorously off-topic slide or a funny story. This will help loosen up the audience and hopefully open them up to what you have to say. Humor is subjective, so keep clear of any subjects remotely questionable.

  10. Enthusiasm is great!
    If you like what you are selling, your audience is more likely to too!

SmartDraw, which offers a free trial on its website, offers hundreds of sales and marketing charts and templates that users can modify to quickly create the graphic they need. This includes sales territory maps, marketing matrixes, interrelationship diagrams, step charts, affinity diagrams, flowcharts, bar charts, and much more.

SmartDraw also includes ImageCharts, which are lively, eye-catching charts that use pictures and images to display data instead of standard bars, lines and circles. In addition, SmartDraw's new LiveMaps feature captures live data from the Internet to allow users to incorporate roads, regions, counties, zip codes, countries and even satellite images from across the globe into their illustrations. Finally, SmartDraw includes built-in photo software making it a snap to incorporate photos into business graphics. SmartDraw captures images from cameras, lets users crop and scale them, adjust color and brightness levels, and drop them directly into organization charts, and other illustrations.

SmartDraw features built-in-themes with professionally-designed colors, schemes, and effects for polished results anytime, as well as one-click copy to MS® documents such as Word® and PowerPoint®, as well as PDF.

Unlike other graphics programs that provide you with a blank screen and expect you to draw, like Visio®, with SmartDraw you start with a template that is specifically designed to create the type of illustration you need. You enter the information and SmartDraw does the rest: building the graphic automatically using built-in rules and professional design themes to guarantee polished, presentation-quality results in just a few minutes. It draws for you! And, in the rare case that users need extra help, SmartDraw offers free customer support to all users.

Readers can check out a complete list of new features in SmartDraw 2008 at: http://www.smartdraw.com/product/upgrade/index.htm. In addition, users can download a free trial of SmartDraw from the company's website (www.smartdraw.com), and may also purchase online. Individual licenses start at $297. The company also provides variety of options for multiple-seat licenses, including an annual subscription agreement for company-wide usage starting at $2,995.

About SmartDraw.com
SmartDraw.com is the creator of SmartDraw, the world's most popular business graphics software and the first program that makes it possible for ordinary computer users to create presentation-quality business graphics in minutes. Each year more than two million people install and use SmartDraw and the company counts more than half of the members of the Fortune 500 as loyal customers.

Founded in 1994, SmartDraw.com is privately-held and based in San Diego, CA. In addition to SmartDraw 2008 for general business and home use, the company also offers SmartDraw Healthcare and SmartDraw Legal editions which include graphics and applications unique to their respective fields. For more information on the company or to download a free trial of SmartDraw, please visit www.smartdraw.com.



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