Introduction
Financial presentations are all about data and numbers. How you present this information is critical to attracting your audience. The information presented should resonate with your audience and by the end of the presentation, you should know what the numbers and data mean. While financial presentations can often be complex, is a good idea to keep them relevant as this keeps your audience engaged. When creating your next financial presentation, you need to consider these attributes in order for it to be a success.
Clarify The Goals
Why are you are presenting this data and why is important? This is the most important goal that you should explain early and clearly. If the presentation shows quarterly sales and revenue figures, then the goal might be to see what achieved his Targets and where it failed.
What Is The Story?
Discover what the data says instead of just presenting it. Here tells the story behind the dates and what they mean. They can follow a three-part structure: beginning, middle and end. It begins by describing where things used to and how they changed quantitatively. Then review the qualitative results on the reasons for the changes.
Go beyond charts and graphs
Good presentation design helps make a topic easier to understand. Most people are visual learners, so avoid filling your slides with text and numbers. Charts and graphs help you get much more information in less time. Use a good data visualization to better interpret what numbers and dates mean.
Stimulate conversation
Invite your audience to engage by encouraging interaction and conversation. Ask questions in different parts of the presentation to keep them interested and give them an opportunity to participate and respond. Don’t turn your presentation into a monologue. How you communicate data affects how your audience perceives it. Discussion of financial information can be unpredictable, particularly when presenting complex numbers and data, which is why one must present the details in an identifiable manner. Financial presentations are meant to get the numbers across, and not all audiences will be numbers people, so it’s best to keep the information more digestible.
Get your message across
Think about how to get your message across in a way that everyone can understand and relate to. Stories help provide context, and people are hardwired to want to hear everything. Take the example of an airline CFO (Chief Financial Officer) giving employees an update on the company’s performance. In this case, the moderator could rattle off a string of revenue, expense, and profit numbers totaling billions of dollars. We can imagine an amount like $1. For example, 2 billion. A much more accessible context in this case is the dollar bill. You may suggest using this image on a PowerPoint slide to break down the return per dollar a customer pays the company for the privilege of flying on the airline. For example, if 22% of the dollar goes into payroll costs, a graph could show that 22% of the dollar bill disappears. “Seventeen cents are spent on fuel and so on,” you’ll explain. you’ll take that cost bit by bit and start reducing that dollar until there’s only a small fraction left that represents the 11 cents that we can keep as profit.” This helps everyone understand what is continuous from a revenue perspective and provides a better understanding of the organization than simply saying.