How to create presentations that retain clients and build business

Are you slide decks snoozers?
Tips for making your next presentation a grabber and a business-builder.

No one wants to sit through a PowerPoint. Yet everyone wants to be told a story. Keeping that premise in mind—along with an understanding of your audience, and your already-stellar grasp of your own material—it’s not hard to make your next presentation better than your last one.

How much better depends on you. While it’s possible to write an entire book about PowerPoint (in fact, Amazon lists nearly 8,000 of them!), you can use some of these basic best-practice pointers to clean up your act, keep your audience engaged, and most importantly, coming back for more:

Set proper expectations. You should know, in advance, how much time you’ll have to present; so will your audience. You’ll also know, in advance, all the material you’ll be covering; your audience won’t. It sounds like a no-brainer, but don’t forget the up-front outline/overview of your presentation. This way, the audience can quickly get a feel for what you’ll cover, and will secretly feel proud of themselves for knowing where they are at any given point in your presentation—and will subsequently avoid getting fidgety while trying to guess “how much is left.”

Some pointers:

• Use chapter breaks. A simple structure works best. You may have 20 things to cover, but don’t make 20 chapters. A basic five-part structure—such as “Overview of the problem/Research Conducted/Findings/Key Conclusions/Next Steps”—works well and is easy for your audience to grasp and be comfortable with. Dedicate a single full-screen slide to each new chapter, to remind your audience where they are in the deck. (Sometimes it helps to show the whole outline, dimmed, with the new chapter highlighted.)

• Be consistent. If your upfront outline calls Chapter 2 “Research Conducted,” don’t change it to “Study Undertaken” when you get to that point in the presentation. Ditto for colors and fonts. Whatever you establish in your upfront outline should be reflected in your chapter-break slides. Why invite confusion?

• Do your upfront outline last. This is the same rule that you should use for writing an executive summary of a larger report or outbrief. Just insert a placeholder for it at the top of the deck; you can add in the exact chapter titles you’ve created when the rest of the preso is finished.

Start in Word. If you’re a PowerPoint maven, or if you have a pre-existing slide deck you’d like to leverage, the temptation can be strong to start in PowerPoint. Don’t. There are simply too many distractions for you to try and “write in PowerPoint,” and you’ll lose the thread. Your ideas are more important than the slides! Get them down, even as rough notes, in your favorite word-processing or note-taking app. Then revise them as much as necessary. You can—and should—always translate the thoughts to actual laid-out slides later. Consider that 1) a slick-looking magazine gets written before it gets laid out into pretty pages, and your situation is similar; and 2) many busy consultants rely on outside PowerPoint professionals to make their decks look slick. You can, too. And polishing your work in Word first saves both time and costs.

For now, you can just type “[Next Slide]” for each slide break. Don’t even worry about numbering them, because you’d only get bogged down fixing the numbers each time you get a new idea.

Frame the narrative. The tacit message is that what you are about to reveal is going to save their day. If you step back and consider what you’re about to present in that light, it makes it easier to turn, say, basic research into a story. What’s the challenge? How daunting was it? Feel free to pose these exact questions up front; they’ll build healthy expectations and suspense and keep your audience enaged.

Remember what’s new to them. Don’t forget that each image you show is entirely new to your audience. Unlike you, they’re seeing it for the first time, and need time to absorb it. Let them enjoy an image while you explain the story of what’s happening.

Keep your slides terse. The more text you give them to read, the more they will read. And who should be the star of your show: your slides, or you? You may have a paragraph’s worth of material to describe for a given slide, but that slide should just be a headline and a few bullets. It’s cleaner. It looks nicer. It keeps the audience focused on you instead of the screen. And, importanly, it ensures that your live presentation adds value. Otherwise, you could simply e-mail in the PowerPoint deck, and your client could forward it to others on their team—as if you’d never existed. Keeping it terse keeps you in the client’s loop—where you need to be.

Don’t let them read ahead. If you’ve got a slide with, say, a headline and three important bullets, “build” the slide, so it starts with just the headline, and blank space beneath it to properly set expectations that more material will soon be appearing there. Then click to reveal the first bullet. Click to reveal the second bullet. And so on. Why let your slides steal your thunder? This is a common, tragic, and ridiculously easy-to-avoid blunder.

Use teasers and humor to your advantage. An oft-overlooked strength of the slide-deck format is its linearity. If you choose to halt the audience in its tracks with a provocative full-screen question (“How much did this one change affect revenue?”), you can. And should! The format lends itself to teasers and payoffs, and an occasional humorous break (“How not to do this!”), to keep the audience engaged and liking you.

Consider using FUD to open new opportunities. Read any academic research paper, and it will always conclude with “More research is needed.” They want more work, and so do you. So don’t be afraid to lay on some FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about what sill remains to be done even after your brilliant presentation has concluded. If you don’t pre-sell, you won’t pre-book.

Consider tapping a cost-effective outside resource. Following the above best-practice guidelines will maximize your odds of success. But they require specialized skills which may not overlap your strengths. Fortunately for you, we have the unique combination of consulting, marketing, and creative/story-telling skills which have let us help independent consultants just like you to maximize the value of their presentations for more than 15 years. Best of all, we’re fast, efficient, and surpisingly affordable, given the value we provide. Contact us right now and let’s talk about transforming your slide decks into a revenue stream. 

---