Your Most Important PowerPoint Slide
When you are creating PowerPoint slides for your next presentation, remember that the most important slide is the second slide. The first slide is usually the title, but the second slide should be the takeaway slide. It is the slide that makes the single point you hope the audience will remember when the presentation is over.
Most people have a creative sensibility that hurts them when making a presentation. They like to lead up to the main point in a dramatic way, carefully laying each brick of the foundation in place and then springing the big idea on the audience. The problem is that it's very hard to get people in the audience to stay focused for more than a minute or so before their minds start wandering. Therefore, get to the main idea, the takeaway, within a minute or so. (The takeaway is the one thing you want people to remember about your presentation after you leave the room.)
The other value of making the second slide the takeaway slide is that it starts to drive the flow of the presentation in a focused way. Here’s an example. In my presentation workshop the second slide is about the importance of the speaker appearing confident. People are more likely to be on your side if your body language and words exude confidence. From that slide, I then show all of the techniques that confident speakers use and get into great detail about the key ones.
The main body of the workshop is about incorporating those techniques into the presentation.
Everything follows a straight line from the second slide through the rest of the presentation.
Coming out of the presentation I reiterate those key points and remind people that it isn’t important that they actually be confident, just that they look confident. And that’s something they can start doing immediately.
I’ve now started my presentation and ended it with the same theme. I used the middle of the presentation to demonstrate it.
