Sony Professional Solutions Europe (Sony) combines technology and creativity to help businesses devise and deliver transformational customer services and solutions. The company, located in Basingstoke, England, is a leading provider of and innovator in AV and IT solutions across a broad range of sectors, including the sports, media, entertainment, healthcare, corporate and education markets.

Sony is committed to helping its customers “unleash the incredible power of images.” But its marketing and communications and sales teams struggled at times to demonstrate that commitment effectively and engage target audiences during presentations. They were constrained by rigid tools that not only failed to mirror Sony’s innovative spirit and focus on leading-edge technology, but also did not allow for a natural, two-way dialogue to unfold between the presenter and the audience.

The use of staid, linear PowerPoint presentations was also undermining Sonys ability to engage internal audiences. So, at the company’s annual kickoff meeting in 2019, Corinna Bergner, Head of Trade and Segment Marketing and Communications at Sony, decided that it was time for her team to shake things up.

We needed to present to 80 people and get them excited about the year ahead,” Bergner says. “I wanted to go beyond the normal style of presentation and communication, and I needed a different way to get my message across. After learning more about conversational presenting with Prezi, I could immediately see how it would help me be more engaging in my delivery.”

Focusing on the content that matters most to the audience

Bergner has worked at Sony for more than a decade, and she spends much of her time on the job communicating with various teams inside the business. “I need to do many high-stakes internal presentations,” Bergner says, adding that it is imperative she convey important information quickly, clearly, and in a way that engages her audience.

Carl Standertskjold, Sony’s European Corporate Segment Marketing Manager, was quick to recommend Prezi to Bergner when he learned that she wanted to take the audience experience to a new level at the annual kick-off meeting. Standertskjold had been using Prezi for the past few years to make his sales presentations more dynamic and engaging. 

“These days, customers want a two-way dialogue in sales meetings,” says Standertskjold. “Prezi helps me to be more conversational with customers because I can move easily around the content, depending on the direction the sales conversation takes.”

Bergner says she quickly saw the value of Prezi’s flexibility, too. “Prezi lets me make the presentation more engaging by not forcing me to click through slides one at a time in a linear journey,” she explains. “I can move around the content with the flow of conversation and zoom in for more detail. I can also seamlessly skip over sections that aren’t needed.”

Inviting more dynamic two-way conversations on the trade show floor

Following the successful use of conversational presenting at Sony’s annual kickoff meeting, Standertskjold says he saw a clear opportunity to use Prezi at one of the most important and high-profile events for the company: Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), the world’s largest exhibition for AV and systems integration.

“This is a critical annual event for us,” says Standertskjold. “We need to be super-flexible with what we show and how we talk to visitors at our booth. So, we decided this year to use a conversational-style Prezi presentation on one of our huge touchscreen displays that could be presented in multiple ways, depending on what the visitor wanted us to cover.”

According to Standertskjold, using Prezi at the 2019 ISE exhibition “proved to be a powerful way to share information with customers at the booth.”

Making conversational storytelling a best practice for all teams

With Prezi, Sony was able to transform the experience for two of its most significant events in 2019 — one internal, one external. And now, Standertskjold and Bergner are looking to expand their teams’ use of the Prezi solution and conversational presenting. 

“We’ve already started the process of taking the conversational presenting approach to our other sales presentations that we use to communicate value to our prospective and existing customers,” says Standertskjold, adding that the Prezi solution is a great visual communications tool.

Mastering conversational presenting takes practice — as well as a mindset change for presenters who are conditioned to using a linear, slide-by-slide approach to sharing information with audiences. But Bergner says Prezi is helping her team to “level up” their skills. “I’ve been very impressed with Prezi’s level of training and support for me and my team,” she says. 

According to Bergner, the marketing and communications team at Sony is already seeing positive results from using conversational presenting. More specifically, they are confident that their messages are having more impact on internal audiences. “We see people engaging more now that we’re using Prezi than they did during our old slide presentations,” Bergner says. “They are expressing more curiosity, and asking questions both during and after the presentation.”