Stuffing presentations with figures & numbers doesn’t work

People across the business-spectrum are always on the hunt to showcase their business-numbers. They try to insert every bit of information related to their businesses. Summary of various reports and analyses gets mention in presentations.

Growth of your industry, description of products or services, relationship with existing clients, access to prospective clients, fresh alliances as per your needs, operational optimization, detection of threats and grasp on underlying patterns and opportunities in the market for your business, you try to depict every important aspect of your business in a presentation. But overdoing it with copious data and information can defeat the purpose. A small reference of everything triggering audiences’ curiosity is the basic trick. Especially in this era of brief word-content, you have to be wary of not overloading your presentation with numbers and figures.

Numbers are important when it comes to competition. You want to show your lead in your segment in the market by comparing your products or services with that of others on the base of various numbers. You want to project every aspect of your revenue-generation and that creates a possibility that you may carry too far with inserting different statistics.

The other temptation you may carry to pack your presentation with different numbers is the general perception that numbers get lodged in human memory faster than facts and for a longer period. It is true that a presentation, especially a PPT must bear the minimal amount of words. The story must be told through effective images, videos, animations and in PPTs also through graphs, diagrams and charts. But presentations must not be heavily stuffed with numbers and statistics. You should not fall prey to telling your story in numbers only to make it more memorable for your audiences.

There must be a balance of all the ingredients in a presentation. Long-winded and complicated statistics and information become uninteresting. Their use must not be at the cost of a diminished engagement-quotient. Data and numbers remain dynamic and mnemonic in a presentation when used intelligently in a combination of its other facets.