Presenting Data
What do baseball and economics have in common?
DATA!
Baseball has its WAR, whiff rate, OPS, slugging percentage, barrel rate, hard hit velocity, KvBB rate, and more.
Not to be outdone, economics has CPI, wholesale price index, inventory rates, GDP, order fulfillment ratio, trade deficit, consumer spending, and the list goes on.
And what do these fields and their data have to do with great communication?
Data have become a mainstay of most business presentations. Whether presenting employee retention rates, client churn, operational efficiency, EBITDA, NPS scores, or revenue under contract, data are foundational to many presentations.
But is it enough to simply present the data? Are the data being remembered, retained, and driving the action you intend? Or are your audiences “firehosed” with data and left to do the heavy lifting on their own?
We have four tips to help your data drive the results you intend:
Data Takeaways
You should look at all your data and think about the two, three, or four most important conclusions you want your audience to take away. If you don’t take a step back and determine the “so what” beyond the data, you’re presenting data for data’s sake and that’s never ideal. Data should play a supporting role, they aren’t the story in-and-of themselves.
Roadmap Your Takeaways
Once you know your takeaways you need to put them front and center in your presentation. This is best done by including a ‘presentation roadmap’ that introduces your main ideas to the audience so that the data have context from the very beginning.
For example, imagine you’re presenting a quarterly business review. Instead of just diving straight into the data, include the following roadmap near the beginning of the presentation:
“When considering last quarter, we won with existing customers, held serve with our employees, but fell behind in operational efficiency. Let’s take a look…”
This organizational sentence helps your audience see the bigger picture from the outset and minimizes the chance they will get lost in the data.
Bring The Focus To Data-Rich Slides
When you must display a data-rich slide, don’t immediately dive in and start rolling through the data. Instead ‘bring the focus’ to that slide by doing three things:
First, tell your audience what they’re looking at. For example,
“These are the data from our new software onboarding process.”
Letting your audience know the big picture helps them contextualize the data.
Second, tell your audience why they are looking at this slide–what are the main ideas? For example,
“The onboarding has been cumbersome in Q1 and Q2, but in Q3 you will see improvement.”
Finally, tell your audience where, physically, to look on the slide. Top left? Lower third? Highlight the number in a different color, box it, or add a prominent arrow? Whatever works best for you, but tell your audience exactly where to look.
“You will see in the second row, middle column, the number we worry most about when it comes to onboarding.”
Don’t assume they can follow where you are. Be deliberate about telling them where to look.
Tell Strategic Stories
Implant strategic stories to bring your data to life. For each important data point, include a story that brings it to life. For example,
“Imagine Terry, one of our onboarding specialists. If Terry can’t immediately look at his screen before jumping on a call with a customer and see if they’re an iOS vs Windows shop, he’s already behind the 8-ball. At best, Terry can ask at the beginning of the call and take a bit of a credibility hit, and, at worst, he dives into his onboarding process for the wrong platform and wastes everyone’s time. That’s one of the reasons our onboarding score is 12 points below target.”
Telling a short, strategic story helps your audience ‘see’ the real problem behind the data.
Whether you are presenting high level data on a new marketing plan or presenting baseball metrics to your podcast audience, these four tips will ensure your presentation is a home run.