Presentation skills – well, this skill can’t be emphasized enough in a client serving role.

In a typical business analytics engagement, our clients would wish to takeaway some important findings and recommendations.

For the project development team, it might be trendy to use all those fancy statistical & machine learning models with state-of-the art technologies (such as Cloud), programming and methodologies. At the end of the day, business users would only want to know the insights that we could show in a precise format for easier consumption and action.

Not all the business folks do comprehend the under-the-hood tools & programming. It is a responsibility for the project team to showcase the end results in the form of insights as part of presentations to the key stakeholders. More precisely, how does the solution might help the team in so many ways…

Brainstorming the storyline, preparing a skeleton out of the data & insights, adding relevant content, and reviewing internally multiple times before the actual presentation day is the usual practice.

On the presentation day, it is critical to better use of the stakeholders time and explain the key takeaways in your favorite presentation tool such as MS PowerPoint, Google Presentation Slides etc.

I came across these 5 interesting presentation hacks from Ivan Wanis Ruiz

1.Lazy Rule

Instead of writing down all the texts in a slide that explains the flow, make a slide that gives a gist out of it such that the audience could try to quickly skim through them and listen to you.

If your slide explains pretty much everything like a hand-out note, then there is no need of a presentation session! So, create a slide with only minimal words and complement that with your narrative.

2.Adding Visual Effects (Picture Superiority Effect)

A picture speaks a thousand words! Audiences do not have time to read & remember everything although they attempt to skim through them all to understand.

In order to make it easier, create your insights in the best visual format to quickly interpret and register in our memory. Our brains could process a visually appealing pictures better than a slide full of texts of different font and colors.

Understandably, it is also difficult for audience to listen and stare at the section of the slide as most often, they do not know which part of the slide you are narrating through the flow. This takes us to the next principle – magnification rule.

3.Magnification Rule

Explicitly, ask your audience to look at the section of the slide (you may also color code, accordingly) and begin your narration in a structured manner. This might sound simple but it would allow the audience to stay engaged with you.

4.Capitalize on ‘B’ and ‘W’

To make your presentation more engaging and personalized, you may ask a question, and explain your narrative with an experiment. During the presentation mode, press either ‘B’ or ‘W’ and start an illustrative example based on your context.

It could also be used when you want to write using a pen for a short illustration and then you may resume back to actual presentation by pressing the same key.

5.Repeating Agenda Strategy

Most often, your deck might be running on quite a many slides. It’s always a good practice to set an agenda, compartmentalize your slides accordingly, having a clear script written on what needs to be explained on a given slide.

The agenda, when repeating after each section, allows the audience to keep on track of which section has been completed/to be completed in the due course of the meeting. This also allows to shift sections in the interest of time and preferences.

For more information, please visit the author’s Udemy page.

Happy Presentations!