To realize their potential, numbers need to be put into perspective in your presentations and meetings.

Consider the numbers for the NCAA Basketball Championship games as reported by Nielsen[1]:

Business professionals tasked with important presentations can script a ‘perfect’ presentation, practice it flawlessly, but then stiffen up when presenting to the Board, an important client, or the company. They revert to recitation, their sentences are choppy, their tone is flat, and the presentation no longer feels like a conversation. We call this toggling into ‘presentation mode,’ and it can be a communication liability.

Here are five tips to help you avoid toggling into ‘presentation mode.’

Presenting Data

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.

We have four tips to help your data drive the results you intend.