Competitions are an integral part of B-School life. Not only do they arrive with some amazing opportunities and prizes up for grabs but refine a lot of your presentation skills! You also get to identify the individuals in the process of building a perfect team. Who wouldn’t like their presentation deck for the competition to be the perfect blend of analysis, presentation and creative, feasible solutions?
Here is a 5 Step-approach that will help you ace your deck in the upcoming competitions.
Presentations are an integral part of competitions. So let those slides genuinely enthral the audience with its content and presentation!
- Go out in the field & talk to Individuals from the industry: they could be someone in your own circle of friends or family; someone from your alumni community; or stakeholders from the concerned organisation itself such as their dealer, retailer, customer, supplier. This will help to eliminate the gap between your understanding of the business and the business on ground.
- List out the assumptions: Quite frequently, you would engage in discussions with your teammates with a very different point of set of assumptions in your mind which may not have been said out loud for the other person to understand.
- Create a Story: What makes a deck stand out from a pool of equally good decks filled with similar points is a human-approach to understanding the problem and solutions. At the heart of the business and organisation, individuals are involved in various capacity, add characters, story-lines that mimic individuals specific to the case problem. It makes it easier to recall for the audience, engaging to make them want to listen to you, and presents your point in a much simpler yet better-understood way!
- Respect the Slide Limit, But Utilise every space to the fullest: It should be crisp yet comprehensive enough to eliminate space for ambiguity. Too many spaces in the slide and too much of (unrelated, complex to understand) content, both are usually a warning sign that you may be a little off the track. In those limited slides, you and your team must pour out your minds, (a little bit of passion from the bottom of your heart never hurts!) For instance, you proposed a social media digital strategy for Facebook & Instagram. Just outlining the platform or the target group is not enough. Provide specifics as to the ad campaign brief, expenditure, key metrics, collaboration or partnerships recommendations, seed audience source, duration etc. That is the provide solutions which could have been carried out and help the business manager who’s reading your content.
- Start Putting Ideas on the Slides ASAP, Don't Wait for the Deadline: As much as we all would like a little more time to give it the best shot, extensions for competitions are usually quite more of an exception than a reality. Also, the ideas brainstormed in a previous session may get lost after new discussion that follows ahead on diverse topics related to the case. You may want to make sure that the points your team has discussed are meticulously written down in some nook and corner of that whiteboard in the room, or that diary of yours, which you can quickly refer to while making the slides.
So now that you know the secret sauce to a wonderful winning deck, I do hope that you have registered for the competitions that are arriving your way! They will definitely teach you a lot about the industry and your own style of working in a team: are you an ideator, or the one who connects the dots together or the one who has a knack for creative presentations?