Tip: Rick Doesburg, CCLP, president of Thornton Landscape in Maineville, Ohio, believes that PowerPoint presentations can be used both as a powerful sales tool and as an excellent medium to exchange ideas about project details. 

Rick Doesburg, CCLP, has been putting on PowerPoint presentations for customers for several years now. Still, he is always looking for ways to make them more effective and meaningful.

In addition to having a standard PowerPoint presentation for new residential prospects, the Thornton Landscape president has developed a system for customizing presentations for larger commercial customers. Part of the approach has involved having most, if not all, of the company’s property photographs scanned. “We retained someone to come into our office to do the scanning,” Doesburg relates. “It took her maybe three or four days, but when she was finished, we had all of our important slides in a digital format.”

The digital format gives Doesburg the ability to further customize a presentation to include before, during, and after images from a wide variety of projects. A presentation can be used as a sales tool, but it can also be used as a medium to exchange ideas and help develop a consensus about a design. “From time to time, we will also scan preliminary drawings and include them in the presentation,” Doesburg adds.

A recently purchased multimedia projector, along with an existing pull-down screen set up in the conference room, adds muscle to the already powerful presentation format. The screen can be deployed for a traditional slide show, or it can be used with the computer for a PowerPoint presentation. It can also be used in a less formal setting where you may want to simply share design ideas with customers without having to pass prints, slides, or drawings around the table. The multimedia projector was affordable, notes Doesburg, costing only around $1,100. “You can spend upwards of $5,000 or more for a projector,” he quickly adds, but for his application, the less costly system has proved more than adequate.

Thanks to PowerPoint, scanning, and the power of computing, putting together a customized presentation for clients is no longer a daunting and time-consuming effort. To the contrary, Doesburg says his company can prepare a custom presentation in less than 30 minutes and project it on the “big screen” in the conference room or take it to a customer’s home. Either way, the package looks professional and is designed to meet the needs of a specific audience.

By Rick Doesburg, CCLP

Thornton Landscape, Inc.

Maineville, Ohio

rdoesburg@thorntonlandscape.com