Want to lose your audience? Of course not. But when you put up spreadsheets and complex charts, that’s exactly what you’re likely to do. Audiences can’t uncover the story you want to tell by looking at a slide with 5, 10 or 50 data points.

In this episode of P3, we tackle one of our top 3 problems with practical tips on how to bring your data to life, and let it enlighten your audience, rather than lose them. Your data has a story to tell. Make sure it’s being heard!

Welcome to the Perfect Presentation Podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, your host, and co-owner of Perfect PlanIt. Since 2005 our company has created more than 7,000 presentations for conferences, tradeshows, road shows, sales meetings, board of director meetings… pretty much any presentations you can imagine, for use around the world.

I mentioned at the start of our first episode, we’ve been at this a long time, and along the way we’ve seen practically everything when it comes to how people create presentations, good and bad. Today I want to talk about one of “the bad” and how we turn it into “the good.” (I’m doing air quotes here, which isn’t very effective in a podcast).

I’ve had quite a few sales calls lately with prospective clients. Having done hundreds of these throughout the years, you start to hear the same things over and over. When I ask prospects what they struggle with most, here are the top three things we hear.

First, their presentations are poorly designed, and they don’t have good resources to help them improve. Second, they don’t feel like there is any consistency to how people in their company present. Everyone has their own favorite way, and often their own deck they use that might not look much like anyone else’s. And third, people put all of their content on a slide and simply read the slide.

That’s the one I want to focus on today. And I’m going to give it a bit more of a slant that will provide more of a focus. Because at this point everyone knows that they should put their content in the notes section and not read off a slide (even though they still do).

Our clients are exclusively business-to-business companies. And many are technology companies, but it doesn’t matter that much what they do, because ALL of our clients have one thing in common. They deal with a lot of data. We are awash in data in a way we’ve never been before. The rise of the infographic is an attempt to treat data in a way that makes it more understandable for a reader. We intuitively know that it’s hard to make sense of a huge spreadsheet, so what do we do? We try to make it more visual. Enter the pie chart. Or we go for comparisons. Enter the bar chart. And by the way, these are all infographics in their own right. They are all attempts to display data so a reader can make sense of it. And since we respond better to visuals than to raw numbers, we can process a chart or a graph more quickly.

The problem is, when you present, you’re always walking a tightrope and looking for this very fine balance of information conveyed on a screen, while not losing your audience’s attention from what you’re saying. And that’s hard! Think back to our golden rule of presenting. Listen or Read, your audience cannot do both. Not a seasoned executive, not a multitasking gen x-er. Your brain doesn’t operate that way. We prove this during our training sessions.  I put up a slide that says listen or read and explain the rule. I practically telegraph that I’m about to prove it. The next slide is content heavy about the importance of great content on each slide, and as soon as that slide comes up, I talk a bit about something off topic like baseball, then stop. Once everyone looks at me again, I ask what I was talking about. Blank stares. They have no idea because they were reading the slide. It’s a fun little experiment, but it underscores one of your biggest challenges.

So let’s operate under this assumption. When you present, you’ve got data you want to share. Could be a spreadsheet of statistics, or product attributes. Maybe it’s a financial report for the last quarter.  It doesn’t matter what, let’s just assume it likely has more numbers on it than can easily be read in a few seconds.  How do you keep your audience from getting lost?

They are lost, by the way. Because unless you stop, and literally tell them to take a few minutes to read, while you wait quietly, they can’t process it. You counter, but that’s why I’m there! Well, that IS why you’re there, to make sense of it all, to give it context. But the visuals should do that right along with you, not overwhelm your guidance.

So let’s talk through how to rethink your data to build a presentation that enlightens.

We have another saying. Data slide aren’t really about the data. They’re about the MEANING of the data. No one cares about a spreadsheet full of numbers, not even accountants. What they care about is the story those numbers tell. It might be about profitability, or performance, or targets. A spreadsheet can’t tell you what that story is. And if presented with a spreadsheet, 10 audience members might come away with 10 different takes on what it all means.

Your job is to bring those numbers to life.

I’m going to walk through a series of steps to create slides that support your story.

Step one: Determine what the story is. Think about your audience, and the purpose of you talking to that group. They’re there to hear something important. If you listened to our podcast on Creating the Big Idea, you know you’ve got to focus your discussion on a single idea that permeates the rest of the presentation. And that’s made up of what you want the audience to know, and why should they care? Let’s use a pretty typical example of showing a bar chart. It might have five or six, or maybe even more columns of data. Picture that for a moment. Six bars of data with a Y axis showing you what the height of each bar means. The idea of course is that you’re comparing a series of things. Thing A through thing F, let’s say. And hey, look here, column A is at 50%, and B is at 35% and C is at 70%, etc. So what? We can all see that. It’s right there. Your audience is looking and looking and they’re trying to fill in the blanks for themselves. It’s YOUR job to say hey, I want to talk about C, and why this 70% number is so critical. OK, just like that, your audience has instant context. You’re building your story around what that 70% number means to the group.

Step two: The security blanket. Change is hard. Not only for you, but possibly for your audience as well. We like to make it as easy as possible by thinking through all of the ways the audience might react to what they see. I’m going to start talking about how to reduce what you have onscreen, and lots of people have a very hard time doing it. It ALL seems important. Or they don’t want to get caught out by an executive who starts going deep on the data. If you’ve got your Big Idea, you can help keep things focused, but even then, it can be hard. So here’s the easy solution. Create a backup slide. This is the slide with EVERYTHING in it, not the one you’re going to show first. Put it in the appendix so you’ve got the backup ready if anyone asks for it. They shouldn’t if you keep your story on track, but it’s a nice security blanket so you don’t feel like you can get caught short.

Step three: Do you need to show a chart at all? If your goal is not to show data, but to give meaning to data, why not create a big, bold slide with one key data point you want your audience to know? Going back to our column C of data at 70%, maybe rather than a bar chart, that slide becomes a big, bold slide that says “Competitor C has increased market share by 70%, outpacing our growth by 20%.”  Think about the impact of that, versus looking at a bar chart. By focusing on the conclusion, you’re creating urgency and keeping the audience on point. You could even show the bar chart next if you need, but you’ll do your audience and yourself a huge service. You’ll also look completely buttoned down on your message, because you’ve focused on the conclusion…what the data is telling you.

Step four: Narrow the focus. Sometimes you do need to show everything. If it’s a series of competitors, it might be a mistake to leave any of them off. But lots of times, there’s data on there that’s simply extraneous. And it just clutters things up for your audience. So put your data through a litmus test. Ask yourself, what do I lose, if this single column isn’t included? If the answer, and truly, you have to be tough with yourself, if the answer is ‘nothing’ then delete that column. Now, you can’t do that with a pie chart that needs to equal 100%. Or can you? Pie chart data is challenging because there’s often a lot of small slices. Often, you can combine several small slices into an “other” category. Now, visually you’ve got a larger but cleaner slice, and you can simply tell the audience that the “other” category doesn’t matter for your purposes.

Step five: Improve the focus. One of the challenges to working with charts and graphs is it’s hard to differentiate the data in a way that’s easy to follow. PowerPoint especially loves to create a lot of theme colors, so every bar has its own. Everyone likes a rainbow, but it hampers your ability to create clarity for your audience. But color can work in your favor just as easily to help the audience identify the main point quickly. With our A through F example, we’ve got six columns, each a different color. We want the focus to be on C. So put color to work. Turn everything the same color, let’s say blue. And let’s make just column C red. You can probably picture in your mind what that will look like. There’s no way for your audience to focus on anything other than column C. And suddenly your job is so much easier.

Step six: Articulate conclusions. Too many presenters create generic titles on slides. This is deadly. Every word on a slide should serve to illuminate or support your topic. If you have a bar chart slide, or any data slide, don’t ever use a title that tells what that chart is about. Use a title that tells the audience what it MEANS. Don’t ever let your audience read a slide headline that read something generic like “Competitor sales growth in 2018.” How does that help you? Or your audience? You’re showing that data for a reason. You’re there to explain it. Your slide is there to help you do that. If you need a headline, it should be something illuminating like “Competitor C is pursuing aggressive growth, and it’s working.” Or maybe even focus it more. “Competitor C’s online campaign is driving huge growth gains.” Wow, think about that. You’ve done your audience a huge service. And the entire time you’re talking about it, they’ve got a reminder of it on screen. It’s much less likely someone in the room will take you off topic now.

Last tip: don’t operate in a vacuum. It’s very hard to self-evaluate with presentations. In addition to practice, you need the input of a colleague to make sure your presentation says what you think it says. You don’t have to physically give the presentation to someone, although that’s ideal. You can even just sit and run through the slides with them and what you want to articulate to the audience, and see if they agree that they’re taking away from it what you want.

So let’s summarize.  What’s your story? Think about what the data says, and what you want the audience to know about it. That’s data’s only job…to enlighten. It’s YOUR job to make sure that enlightenment happens. Don’t default to the same charts and graphs. Either get rid of them by showing only the data points that matter, or if you do show the charts and graphs, make sure your audience sees what you want them to see.

I hope that’s helpful. If you shift your focus from data, to thinking about what story the data tells, you’ll do yourself and your audience a huge favor, and you’ll find your presentations are more focused and more successful. That means your audience is more likely to adopt your ideas, your efforts are more likely to succeed, as so are you.

As always, I’m interested in what you think. Thanks for listening, and talk to you next time on the Perfect Presentations Podcast.