How to create Storylines for Business Presentations (Consulting and PowerPoint skills)

Recently someone asked me what the most important element of a business slide presentation is. And after thinking about it for a bit it was very clear to me that action titles are actually the most important elements. So if by now you're not really sure what an action title is or how to come up with a very very strong action title, welcome to another video here on my channel Firm Learning. My name is Heinrich, I'm a former McKinsey consultant and on my channel I talk a lot about topics such as career success and also consulting skills. And surely as a consultant one thing that you really need to do well is to create slide presentations in PowerPoint or any of these other programs. So in today's video I want to sharpen your understanding why action titles are so important and also give you some very very tangible tips including an exercise to help you come up with the best possible action titles that you can write for your slides. Let's start by looking into why action titles are so important. And the key point here to understand is that your presentations should have a storyline and it is the action titles that bring this story to life. The main idea is that if you read your titles of your presentation from start to end, so every single slide just read the titles, the key idea is that by just doing that you will be able to understand all the key messages of the presentation just by reading these action titles. So why is this even necessary? Why is this important? Well try to put yourself into the shoes of a C-level manager, you are a CEO, CFO, any other business unit head, any other senior guy in an organization. Likely especially these large blue chip companies that often these consulting firms work for. These C-level people every single day, every single week they will get several big documents, 50 pages, 100 pages or even more of other projects that are going on, project updates, progress reports, deliverables like that. This is far too much to read. People like this cannot just read every single slide of documents like that. So what they will expect you to deliver is a document where they can just skim through, just read the action titles and just by reading the action titles be able to understand all the key messages. And this is the so-called horizontal logic, the storyline of the presentation. This needs to come to life via the action titles. And then the idea is of course that if they read something in the action title that is really interesting, where they want to learn more about, then they stop and then they read the page, they read the full slide. This then is the vertical logic and here of course you already understand one key thing when writing strong action titles and this is that of course an action title should summarize the contents of a slide in a clear and concise way. So this is the intuition. But now you might ask yourself, well what exactly is an action title? So I try to put down here in definition, this is coming from myself, so no fancy source, just my best way of putting it in writing. And I would define an action title by being a header of a slide presentation that summarizes the content of this slide by formulating a complete sentence. So if you wanted something like here the header also here on top of this slide saying action titles help to create the storyline within a presentation, this would be the action title of that slide. This is what you want to try to achieve. But what do you write in such a title? What are the contents supposed to be? And here I think the best test that you can do is the test of the so-called so what. The question of the so what. And I once created a full video just about the concept of asking this question so what. I will link it somewhere above here if you're interested to learn more about this, feel free to check it out. But in a nutshell, the so what is a question that you as a project lead might ask to an associate or consultant to prepare the slide or maybe a partner asks to you. And this person looks at your slide and asks him or herself the question, so what? So what? Why is this irrelevant? What is the implication of what I see here? Because maybe the information on the slide is interesting, it's data, it's nice. But what does this mean for the problem at hand, for the thing that I need to solve? So when putting together the document, you should ask yourself, what is this so what of the slide? If you really struggle to come up with a so what, then this often is a sign that this slide maybe isn't that important, right? If it does not have a clear so what, maybe it's something that rather belongs in the appendix, but maybe not in the main deck, or maybe take it out completely. But once you know the so what, make sure that the so what is clearly stated in the action title. And then of course, when you're presenting the slide, then the so what is also what you should be communicating in your presentation. Now let's look into a couple of best practices that you should apply whenever you write an action title. And here we'll always have an example and then an insight that I want to draw out from that. The first example is managing risk is important for this project's success. And here my answer is try to avoid statements like that. Try to avoid writing general truths that are pretty much always correct. So of course, managing risks is pretty much always important for this project's success, right? So for almost every project that will be relevant. So try to avoid writing things that are obvious, really draw out more insightful things than that. Next, something like all divisions have found to not be following best practices. What's often dangerous is to write action titles with really hard absolute statements. Always never in every case, this is like this or like that. So these very hard statements often are traps, because there are often some weird edge cases, maybe there's this like very little division somewhere who does something that you are not aware of. Just my personal learning that often then especially if you're presented, maybe there's like one board member sitting in the audience who will tell you, no, but this is not correct. This is wrong, because, you know, it's just enough to have one example that contradicts this. And then pretty much you're there need to admit that yes, your message was wrong. What you put on the slide was wrong. It's not the case that this is true for all divisions. Next one, company has potential to significantly improve profit. So here my learning from that is try to whenever possible to quantify the action titles, include numbers in the action titles. So if you make a slide about profit of a company, usually you should always be able to also put a number. So what is the profit improvement potential? What is the potential for the profit that you see in the company? Next one, when conducting data analysis and interviews, we learned a lot about the business. So this would be an action title which very much focuses on the process. So what you did, you analyzed data, conducted interviews, you learned a lot. This is often not so relevant. People don't really care to whom you talk, to what analysis you conducted. What people are interested in are the results. This is one of the key fundamental principles of top-down communication. Again, I don't want to go too deep into this in this video, but I will link another video that I did about top-down communication above here. Check it out, really one of the most fundamental concepts for communication as a consultant, but also in general, in any professional environment. Last example here, results indicate significant potential to look into further improvement measures for the business with the goal to increase profits by 50% until end of this financial year for the company. So frankly, I don't even know what exactly this means. The point that I wanted to make here is write action titles in a concise way. Don't use more words than necessary. Yes, usually there will be a full sentence, but don't just write for the sake of writing. The rule is that usually in the title you should not have more than two lines of title. So two lines are fine, but not write more than two. Now let's put your action title writing abilities to test. You see here a standard slide, it's from a mock-up presentation, of course, not any actual client engagement. But what you see here is a slide where the action title is missing. And I want now you to come up with an action title. And now to help a little bit out here, we'll just like briefly explain what you see here. So here you see the sizing of a growth potential and average potential for this company that could choose to enter these markets. So the North America market or the Asia Pacific market. And then you see different numbers, you see the market size, you see how much of the market is covered by competitors, the current market share, and other considerations like this. And in the end, also an average potential that the company could receive from entering these markets. Now I would encourage you to maybe even pause the video for a moment and think about for yourself, what would be a strong action title for such a slide, if you want even write it down. So let's look at a couple examples of what you could have written. So the first is derived potentials for an expansion. And again, feel free to always pause and think about this for yourself, whether you consider that this is a strong action title or not. Because indeed, I would argue this is not even an action title. This does not even meet the definition of an action title. This is a title in the style that I know many people like to do it, but just not what I would recommend you to do. And this is for instance, if you have a page that describes the risks of a certain strategy, then just writing risks in the title, right? So it's a title, but it's not an action title in the sense that it doesn't summarize the key message of a slide in a full sentence. Next one. Expanding to new geographies creates a positive EBIT potential. EBIT, by the way, for the uninitiated stands for Earnings Before Interest and Tax. It pretty much is one metric of profit, right? So what is the profit, the profit potential of the company? So what do you think about this action title? And here, I would argue that yes, it meets the definition. I mean, it is an action title following the definition, but I would argue it's not the best action title that you could write. Because indeed, this seems far too generic. You could be much more tangible, much more concrete But let's look into a couple of other examples. Expansion to North America and Asia Pacific creates a positive EBIT potential. I mean, yes, I like it. It's a bit more rich of information. You're not just talking about geographies, but are really mentioning the geographies you're interested in. But here, quantify if possible. We just looked at these best practices. Whenever possible, especially whenever you have numbers available at your disposal, put them in the action Next one. Expansion to North America and Asia Pacific creates a positive EBIT potential of 22 Euro Million. So yes, here, I would argue it's fine. It's already a very strong and solid action title. Though here, you could argue that this is still a little bit too wordy. You could write this in a bit more concise way. Usually, the fewer words you use, the better. So here, one example. Expansion to North America and Asia Pacific with 22 Euro Million EBIT potential. And I would argue that yes, this is a good and solid action title. Here, what's also important to understand is that when you write these action titles, you do not need to write them like you would write proper full sentences in a book. It's completely fine to take out certain words. Often, you take out articles, any other filler words, which are not absolutely necessary to understand the key messages. Obviously, you would probably not write something like this as a full sentence in a book. But here, as a concise action title, this is absolutely fine. So I hope this makes sense to you. So I know that in the FromLearning community, there are many other people who are also quite experienced with action titles. So if you have any tips or insights or other comments on this video, please leave a comment below in the comment section. I trust that we would all very much appreciate that. Maybe you've already noticed that this is a remake of a video that I did as one of my very first videos on this channel. I just felt like the video back then was not really up to the level of the quality that I do the videos today. And the topic is just so important that I just wanted to do an update on that. Hope you still found interesting. Also, if you've already watched this quite old video, and if you've watched it, thank you for watching FromLearning for that long. I would never have thought that I grow to the point that I do right now when I started in January 2020. Thank you for being here.