How To Prep for Your Next Business PowerPoint Presentation

All great business PowerPoint presentations start with solid preparation. What you do before you even open PowerPoint will significantly affect your chances for achieving your desired outcomes.

To help you lay a solid foundation for your next presentation, we’ve put together four simple preparatory steps you can take to ensure that your next one is your best one yet.

1. Reflect on the Past

First, take a browse through some of your business PowerPoint presentations from the past – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Ask yourself what worked, what didn’t and why. Which one gave you the biggest return? Make some notes and refer to them while you take the next steps.

2. Choose Your Key Points

Now it’s time to write down what you want to achieve with this presentation. Here are some questions to get you started. Your answers to these will help you compose your key points:

• What is the purpose of my presentation?
• What do I want my audience to remember?
• What value do I want to give them?
• What do I – the presenter – want to get out of this presentation?

There is no hard and fast rule on the number of key points you can have. It’s about getting the balance right. Too much information will put your audience off just as easily as not enough. It’s a balancing act and it’s down to intuition and experience.

3. Write Your Outline by Hand

Once you’ve got your key points down, you can write your outline. Write it on a whiteboard, pad of paper or on the back of a bar napkin, but not in PowerPoint. Not even in Word.

Instead, use some hand power and sketch out how you want your story to flow. Without the distraction of PowerPoint, you’ll be able to see the flow, step back from it, and rewrite as necessary – all before you start worrying about graphics, font size, color schemes, etc.

The temptation to start creating your actual business PowerPoint presentation before you are ready is hard to resist. Many of today’s thought leaders in presentation development equate creating a PowerPoint presentation before you’ve written your key points and outline to a movie director hiring actors and starting to film before he has a script.

We agree and it’s why we strongly advise that you get the flow of your presentation right before you dive into PowerPoint.

4. Flesh for the Presentation Bones

Now that you’ve got your outline down, you can start thinking about images, charts, infographics, media, etc. that you might like to use to support your key points. This is a good time to refer to your previous presentations and consider using similar elements that have performed strongly for you in the past.

Bear in mind that your presentation should help you make a connection with your audience. So whether you are showing off customer base growth or details of a hot new product line, you have to make it relevant and interesting to them.

Remember that an audience’s attention can be fickle, so don’t test them too hard. Make sure the detail and data you’re using will help keep their attention rather than turning them off.

Consider getting some expert input at this point. The professional PowerPoint design team at eSlide can make sure that your key points are supported with the right mix of graphic elements.

We’re ready to help you prepare the best business PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever delivered.