Consulting Slide Design Best Practices - Amazon S3 · Consulting Slide Design Best Practices ... • I had to create a deck to summarize the project for new practitioners joining

Consulting Slide Design Best PracticesHow to tell your story in the most impactful way

Best practices from Kenan-Flagler Resources

10 Tips from 2nd Years

Practice

Agenda



Practice

Agenda

• Outline of what you will communicate

• Includes recommendations and rationale

• Helps you clarify your own thinking

• Forces you to keep it simple

Before creating your slides, prepare a storyline

Source: CSF taught by John Durrett

Lucy to Shirley, version A


Lucy to Shirley, version B


Slide headers should tell the story one thought at a time


Stand-alone

• Meant to be circulated

• More text and visuals

• Can be understood without presenter

Presentation

• Meant to be delivered

• Less text and visuals

• Is a tool to help the presenter

There is a difference between a stand-alone deck and a

presentation deck

Source: Management Communications taught by Judy Tisdale

Bad Good

Avoid visual clichés…or in other words, make sure your

visuals have a purpose


You need to hit your revenue target this year!

$10M

$11M

$12M

2014 2016 2018

Use labels rather than keys


VS.

With color, less is usually more, so use it sparingly


Presentation decks should pass the “glance test” or

“billboard test”


For presentation decks, the 4 x 6 guideline can be helpful


• Maximum of 4 bullets per slide

• Maximum of 6 words per bullet

• Judy Tisdale recommends a minimum size 18 font

• Test presenting in the room beforehand if possible

• When in doubt, play it safe with a larger font

Make sure your text is readable

Sources: Management Communications taught by Judy Tisdale and CSF taught by John Durrett

And don’t forget to cite sources!



Practice

Agenda

Advice:

• Chances are your manager, EM, Associate, or analyst has presented this

type of info on a slide before... probably in a more convincing and

compelling fashion then whatever it is your about to design from scratch so

save your brain power for something meaningful and cheat.

Story:

• When possible, ask the client what they are looking for in terms of what they

want on their pages/slides. I built a model over the summer that had 36

sheets of info projecting nylon fiber demand across 3 different countries and

6 different sectors. It was a beast. Trying to figure out how to condense

that info onto a few pages in a few captivating slides was near

impossible. We asked the client what they wanted and they said take four

screenshots of the excel model and paste it in the appendix. Done. Saved

me hours of work.

#1: Never create anything from scratch

Advice:

• For example, I have the align center, align middle, object length, and object

width options as shortcuts, which made putting decks together way faster

this summer.

#2: Add custom shortcuts to PowerPoint based on what you

need to use the most

Advice:

• When flummoxed on a particular slide, it can sometimes help to step back,

consider the key message of that slide, and approach from a different

direction rather than constantly refining something that you're not happy with.

#3: Simple is sometimes, usually, and almost always better.

#4: Tell a story, and make sure the slide is not the story.

Advice:

• Sometimes people focus too much on the slide and not enough about the

verbal presentation and the overall storyline. The story should be told

verbally, and the slide should be a graphic way of supporting your points or

summarizing your important thoughts. If you build the slide before the story, it

gets very disjointed, so my advice is to build the story first and then support it

with slides.

– That said, if the deck is a leave-behind, then the slide should tell the

entire story.

Advice:

• Have a good story first, then build your slides. Slides are a support for a

good story..

Story:

• I had to create a deck to summarize the project for new practitioners joining

the project team. I did several versions of the deck, until the story reflected

the main points and decisions through the many project phases.

#5: Build a storyboard first

Advice:

• Never delete a slide while you’re building the deck; have a section at the end

(graveyard) where to you push slides you think you won’t be using. Example: you

have a slide, didn’t like it that much, decided to change a few things on it; before start

changing it, copy and paste that slide on the Graveyard section; then start making the

changes on the slide back on the “main” deck. This helped me so much!! At the end,

when you’re about to save the final version, just delete the entire Graveyard (it is not

an appendix; some of the Graveyard ones might end up on the appendix, of course,

but they are two different sections)

Story:

• First week I had to present something to the Partner in charge of my team’s work

stream. In Consulting, people/teams update each other in meetings through slides. I

did a slide that showed how I got to the conclusion, and left very little time/space for

the conclusion itself. The takeaway is: be answer first and have a clean slide with

message you want to convey and most important data point supporting it; leave the

analysis for the appendix. If the partner or client decides to dive deeper, you can just

go to the Appendix and show (you can use links within the deck to do that).

#6: Think of the key messages you want to convey before

you even start building the deck/slide (“storyboarding”)

Advice:

• This helps you conceptualize what you want to say and how you want to

structure it before getting mired in the “slidology” game of PowerPoint. I like

to have a couple sheets of paper, divided into 9 sections, for the overview

view of my presentation, and then draw out each “slide” by hand on

separate sheets of paper. But the important thing is to free yourself from the

constraints of PowerPoint first so that you can get clarity on the story.

Story:

• My example from my summer internship is related to my slide design tip. I

had to create several slides for part of the final deck that was going to be

presented to one of the top leaders in the firm, and they needed to convey

some complex, abstract ideas. If I hadn’t first drawn things out on paper, I

would have likely gone down some unproductive paths within the confines

of PowerPoint and made some poor design choices.

#7: Before you touch PowerPoint, get out plain paper and a

pencil and draw out the concept of the presentation by hand.

Advice:

• If someone needs to flip quickly through the presentation they can read all

the title slides and know what your presentation is about.

Story:

• That being said – my project this summer had a lot of data and graphs and

small font because that was just the nature of the project so sometimes you

can’t really help having a lot of info on a slide

#8: Your client should be able to tell what your slide says just

by reading the title

Advice:

• BUT have a back-up with an alternate way to present it when they realize

that their idea doesn’t really work

#9: Design it exactly how they ask you to

Advice:

• That’s it.

#10: Be concise.



Practice

Agenda

Background Info (not to include on slide): Your client is a large insurance

company and the project scope is how to leverage customer referrals for new

business (like Groupon and Dropbox), launching in 3 months on no IT budget

Content:

• Starting with a small pilot program is your recommendation

• This pilot program could be implemented in the short-term, so that in the

mid-term you can grow to an employee referral program, then finally in the

long-term a customer referral program

• Goals for pilot program: test new business referrals and incentives, discover

unanticipated consequences, spark employee engagement

• Metrics for success: participation rate, eNPS (employee net promoter score

– a Bain idea), conversion rate

• Employee and customer programs also have goals and key metrics

• Both the size of participants and the complexity would increase with each

expansion

You’re an intern, it’s time to prep the final deck, and you’re given the

following content to present on ONE slide…how would you do it?

284/21/2016

Full-scale customer NB

referral program

Full-scale Employee Referral Program

(ERP)

Small Pilot ERP

Long Term

Short

Term

Est. Size• Generate NB

• Increase customer

enthusiasm and

feedback

• Increase NPS

• Participation rate

• Quotes and binds

• Conversion rate

• NPS

• Develop NB referral

infrastructure

• Increase employee

engagement

• eNPS


• Conversion rate

• Error rates

• Test NB referrals and

incentives

• Discover unanticipated

consequences

• Spark employee

engagement


• eNPS

• Conversion rate

Goals Key Metrics

XX0-person

Pilot

~X.XM cust.

40k non-sales

employees

• Your firm will have its own style

• Your client will have unique preferences

• Your project will have specific needs

• Adjust to the situation

One last piece of advice is to be flexible

Documents

Consulting Slide Design Best Practices - Amazon S3 · Consulting Slide Design Best Practices ... • I had to create a deck to summarize the project for new practitioners joining