Make your financial presentations more engaging
Image by Miguel Henriques via Unsplash
Don’t put people to sleep with your financial presentations. If you aren’t engaging, they’ll check their phone and lose interest.
To have an impact, make people want to listen. The most impactful way to keep people engaged sounds simple - don’t say what’s written on the slide.
As soon as people notice you do, they quickly skim the slide and move on to focus on something else until you finally move to the next slide.
Show as little text as possible to make it easier. If the deck was sent as a pre-read with a lot of text, paraphrase it. Always add more information as a voice-over. That’s insights that are not on the slide at all.
Here are some examples for voice-overs:
1️⃣ Context, Action, Result
2️⃣ Drill-down to a more granular level of detail
3️⃣ Comparisons to a similar scenario or a previous version
4️⃣ Reservations, counter-arguments, and planned next steps
5️⃣ Preview of the next slide
The last point, previewing the next slide, can be pretty compelling and sets you apart from most presenters. When you are done with discussing the current slide, say “on the next slide, you’ll see that XYZ...”. You explain the key message before you show it.
There are two reasons for doing this:
a) You are making sure that your key message is heard. For example, when you show a slide with strong visuals, your audience will focus on that initially and typically doesn’t have their full attention on what you say. You avoid that with this technique.
b) You demonstrate that you are well prepared. You know what’s next and what you want to say without needing to see what’s on the slide.
In sum:
➣ Plan how you’ll keep people’s attention on what you say
➣ Never read what’s written on the slide
➣ Refer to the five tips above on what to say in addition to the content on the slide
➣ Experiment with previewing the next slide to increase engagement further
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