Business Presentation Tips

They say that even the greatest writers, including Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Fitzgerald, were all known to suffer great periods of angst when staring at a blank page. That initial step of “getting started” can be downright painful – whether you’re writing the next Great American Novel or putting together a slick slide presentation for that management conference in Atlanta next week.

That first empty slide is much more than just the beginning of your presentation. And, in fact, it could in reality be the very worst place you could choose to start work. But how can that be? Won’t the flow of your messaging fall apart without having a blockbuster intro slide in place at the outset? Not at all!

While it may initially sound like a strange concept, one of the best ways to successfully get to the end of a journey is to know from the beginning exactly where you need to be at the end. When building a new presentation from the ground up, ask yourself what you want that last slide, with its all-important Call To Action, to look like. Should it be asking your audience to visit a Web site? E-mail a contact person? Register for an event? Call an 800 number for more information?

By nailing down the true objective of that last slide first, you’ve taken an important step toward building an intuitive roadmap to develop the rest of your slides and deliver your audience to the right place, armed with the right information. Once you have determined the ultimate goal of that final slide, think about what your audience needs to know in order to take action on it. Now you can build the preceding slides based upon specific criteria or to answer specific questions, such as what they’re taking action on, why they want to take action now, what’s in it for them, how much it costs, or when it will be available.

Everything in your deck, beginning with Slide 1, should work toward getting your audience ready to spring into action when they see that final slide. Building your presentation by starting from the end instead of the beginning will ensure that your presentations are more targeted toward your objective, and will get you the strongest possible results!