No, I’m not confessing to being bad at my job or criticizing my team. They produced clean, professional slide decks with accurate grammar and clean formatting that met brand standards. Yet, at least half of the presentations were, subjectively speaking, bad.Why? How? What could we have done to fix it?
At the time, our control over presentation development was limited to providing strategy input, building slide decks, editing content and coaching presenters. Our impact on the final product varied based on the quality of engagement with the team delivering the presentation. As much as we wanted to ensure everything was great every time, success relied on the people who stood in front of the client – how well they prepared, worked together and executed the presentation.
The moral is this: even the tightest, best looking slide deck is just nice wall paper if the presentation flow, content and delivery are off. Also, a really bad deck can ruin your presentation (we’ve all seen it), but the best-looking deck out there can’t save a presentation that is otherwise bad.
So, how do you ensure your presentations are compelling, effective and successful? For that matter, how do you know if they’re even any good?
