Financial Presentation PowerPoint Tips

If you’re getting a financial presentation you’re probably used to having lots of numbers perhaps complex graphs in your PowerPoint perhaps others in your company help you put that together Investor Relations team and I understand you have to have a lot of that.

I just want to give you one suggestion on one thing to add four really important points.

Try to illustrate your key point with a photo a picture and in it you can still have all the other stuff in numbers but for the really important points drive it home with an image.

Back to my example of why.

Same store sales may have gone down for one quarter but it was not a normal thing.

Put a picture of your store.

Let’s say it’s an ice cream store with six feet of snow in the parking lot that will drive home this idea.

It was an unusual winter.

That’s what drove sales.

It wasn’t anything to do with people not liking our company or anything else wrong.

That image of the snow and the snow covering the sign of your dairy cleaner whatever type of store it is it would really be so much more memorable than simply a chart.

January sales down 10 percent and just the numbers.

The other thing I would stress is Beware complexity for slides that you are presenting.

If you’re emailing a PowerPoint presentation and I recommend that you do.

If you’re handing it out you can have financial charts with graphs that have 5 10 20 variables of different colored lines charting different variables someone can study it in silence for 10 minutes if they want.

But if you’re standing up speaking and changing the slides and they’re listening to you and trying to figure out a little squiggly lines the brain just doesn’t work like that.

That is not how people process information so it’s not enough for it to look good in your hands.

You’ve got to think about how does it look to people watching it.

So that’s one of the tests for everyone to your slides not how does it look on the computer screen where you and your staff are creating it they’re always great there.

The question is how does it look to an audience member who is in the middle of the room or the second half of the room.

Every single financial conference I’ve ever been to when I see people use PowerPoint I always go to the middle of the room and the back room and guess what.

You can’t first of all you can’t see the bottom half of the slide so you don’t know what the person’s talking about.

And for charts or graphs that have different color coded variables you can’t make it out it’s too small it’s too find It’s too blurry the colors are not distinguishable so if you want to do a true test on your PowerPoint slides you need to project it in the room that you’re going to be using for your speech and you need to go to the back of the room.

If you’re not willing to do that my recommendation don’t project the slides at all.

Simply email it to people give it as a handout email it to them after your presentation instead just speak to them.