The quarter is done, and here comes the day-long sales results presentation. Excel is pasted into PowerPoint, creating huge decks through which senior management has to sit through. Sales organizes by channel: small restaurants sales, growth; large restaurants sales, growth, supermarkets sales, growth. Marketing presents by brands: brand 1 sales, growth, brand 2 sales, growth.
If you are a marketing manager, looking at the Q3 sales and growth figures of a particular brand is really interesting. All the numbers of the previous quarters are more or less in your head. For the production manager though, going through these pages is mental torture, as she does not have the historical context readily available. (Read more about the Curse of Knowledge here)
The solution is the opposite of what I preach for bullet point charts: instead of breaking up slides into multiple pages, condense lots of data in 1 chart, but make it comparable. Put the quarter growth rates of all brands on a page and compare them. List the historical brand growth rates of the past 8 quarters on one page and see what is going on. There is no problem showing a massive amount of data on 1 slide, as long as it is about the same variable that is compared across different dimensions.
4 comments
It might be unrealistic to expect to go into the level of detail that each group will want when presenting to the overall population. I see no harm in stakeholder-specific slides in an appendix, or even better give them well-designed interactive dashboards to explore after the event.
As you say, comparisons, sorting etc will all aid in the story.
Less is more.
Thanks for the Post, Jan!
Very few presenters of this kind of data "set the scene". I'm a big believer in presenting an empty table first and quickly explaining what's going to be in it and why it's relevant.