Business presentations are an absolute must in every organization. In fact, almost every professional ends up creating or working on a business presentation during their time with their respective organization. However, a lot of planning and preparation must be done before actually creating such presentations. One has to decide on what information must be included, figure out how to structure each slide, choose the different elements that will make it visually appealing, and finally, remember to practice their presentation pitch. It’s definitely a challenge to come up with a way to make your business presentation stand out. Not to forget that it needs to be engaging, concise, and persuasive so that your audience doesn’t look elsewhere. Therefore, you must remember and stick to the 10-20-30 rule when creating your presentation.
It simply requires you, the presenter, to ensure that you cover your pitch in not more than 10 slides. Don’t spend more than 20 minutes on each slide when putting your points across. Finally, ensure that the font size on your slides doesn’t exceed more than 30 point.
Keeping this rule in mind, here are 10 slides that are absolute must-haves in any business presentation.
Every presentation must have a title slide. This slide is your introduction slide which gives your audience a concise overview of what your presentation will be about. Important details in this slide are your topic, company name, logo, date of presentation, presenter name, and designation. Additionally, depending on your topic, for example, a product launch, you may include images and information about the same in this title slide. It doesn’t need to be fancy. Just simple information in a basic, clear font, with an appropriately contrasting background, will do.
A business presentation is usually created with the objective of offering a solution to a problem. In this slide, you can outline the problem with the intention of explaining what its impact on the business is and how to solve it. Get the audience involved by asking them how they would solve this problem. Ensure that you don’t go beyond the 20 minutes or your business presentation will lose effect and momentum. Your points should be clear, and concise, and not overwhelm your audience entirely.
Every business has goals. Therefore, it’s always necessary to include a goal slide in your PowerPoint presentation. In all probability, you will have a set of goals that you must achieve. Use this particular slide to list them out and show them in stages, with a timeline by which they must be met. Goals give your business a real purpose. If you have a product to sell, you need to have a proper plan on how to make it available to your target customers. Put out the information based on the stages, keep it brief but understandable, and use design elements and animation effects to keep the audience engaged.
By now, you’ve introduced your business and product, explained the problems you are facing, and even shown that you have goals to meet when it comes to staying ahead in business. Obviously, you now need to show how you are going to overcome the problems. That’s what the Solution slide is for. Use it to explain your strategy for solving the problem. Give it an impressive title and emphasize important content with a good-sized font. Highlight the benefits of the solution you’re providing using and make sure it grabs the audience’s attention. For this, ensure that you use icons and other visually appealing design elements available in PowerPoint.
Your competitor analysis, market analysis, and SWOT are other important components of your business presentation. Use the data you have at hand to present the analysis to your audience carefully. An analysis slide helps corroborate your strategy to your target customers. Ensure that you present the data with charts, graphs, and tables. You can also use text effects and other animations.
How do you measure the success of your business strategy? The answer is quite simple. You include a financial plan/ revenue projection slide in your PowerPoint presentation to show your target audience just how you plan to proceed. You need to present the different business stages like research, development, execution, marketing, etc. Use this slide to present a brief overview of how each stage will proceed along with the budget earmarked for the same. Make use of charts and tables to break up each stage carefully.
You can’t have a business PowerPoint presentation without data. This data must support whatever strategy you have planned as well as all the analysis you’ve done. After all, it will help your target audience gain a better understanding of where your business stands. This is another slide where you can place graphs, charts, and tables to present your data effortlessly.
When it comes to meeting business goals, your plan must have a timeline. In this slide, you can establish the direction, and priorities, and create a roadmap for achieving these goals. Your timeline slide can also include previous milestones and successes you have achieved. The easiest way to create such a slide is to make it visual. Use icons, animations, and a timeline chart, easily available in Powerpoint, to showcase how far the company has progressed.
It’s always good to let your clients know whom they are working with. This is why it's an excellent idea to add a ‘Meet the Team’ slide in your business PowerPoint presentation. Depending on your organization’s size, you can either introduce the whole team or just the key players. This slide is a must-have in case you’re doing a sales pitch. You can use lots of text effects and icons to introduce your team. Perhaps, you can also include pictures of them and a short bio describing each one’s designation and role as well.
Every presentation needs an end slide. It basically recaps the main points of your pitch and ideally should leave a lasting impression on your target audience. Another good reason to include an end slide is to use it as part of a Q&A session with the audience. You can put down a set of previously thought-of questions or FAQs that may be helpful to the audience. Alternatively, you may use this slide to leave the audience with some final thoughts on the product or project.
As you’ve seen, these 10 slides can make your presentation a great success when they are included with the right amount of information. If you need consistently excellent business presentations to present to your clients, write to us, simply give us a call at 1800 121 5955 (India), or even WhatsApp, to speak to someone from the team. To get a look at what we do, you can also visit our website.