Essential slides in the corporate presentation

The corporate presentation is an important asset in the marketing collateral set. It is the presentation that would be used by every client-facing professional. This is also the first important collateral that the prospect consumes before deciding to award a project or contract to you. Hence, a marketer needs to give due importance and enough time in building a good corporate presentation.

In this blog, I am going to discuss the high-level slides that should be there in your corporate presentation. You can choose to have a few more than this however, these are the minimum that you should have.

While corporate presentation should carry as much as information possible, it should also be lightweight so that it is easier to share it across over email.

Here is the list of some of the important slides that should be there in your corporate presentation. It will create a skeleton for your corporate presentation.

• Title slide - This slide should carry the company logo in the bold, title of the presentation which would be either ‘corporate presentation', ‘about company', ‘company overview' etc. You have to ensure that the title talks about the slides being discussed in this presentation post this one. You may choose to include other elements, depending on your objective and need, such as the mention of your parent organization, corporate punchline, date and time, etc.
• Welcome slide (optional) - This is a warm-up slide. You can hook your audience and prepare them for what's coming next. You should have a very minimal text on this slide which can then be used to pivot your story in any direction.
• Agenda slide (optional) - If your corporate presentation is longer then it is better to have this slide with TOC so that the audience can decide which slide they want to skip or spend more time on. This way the presenter would be able to maneuver the discussions during the presentation in a better way.
• Vision and mission - You can have the vision and mission slide as early as possible. In my experience, for some people, it is the most important slide in your corporate deck and for some, it is the most useless slide after ‘thank you' as all the companies appear too good to be true on this slide. However, if you can have a supporting story for arriving at your vision and mission statements then it helps to create a lasting impression on the audience. It is the purpose of your being and all the other slides should be just the manifestation of the philosophy or path discussed on this slide.
• Culture slide (optional) - If you really have a meaty story of how your culture has come to life and if it is really your distinguishing factor then you should include it on this slide.
• Journey slide - You can highlight how you have come to the being and how you have grown to the current state. It should have a balance of text and graphics. Only text will make it look boring and only graphics will not narrate the growth story. You may choose to have a separate milestone slide if they are really worthy of a dedicated slide. Else, you can simply include your milestones on this slide.
• Team slide - It's a good idea to showcase your team in the corporate presentation. Depending on your audience you can have different versions of the team slide. If you are pitching to investors then you would like to highlight the founders and the top leadership. If you are pitching to prospects then it would make more sense to highlight the people who would eventually become the part of the client project. You can prepare team slides for founders, top leadership, executive board, department heads, key people slide for each line of businesses separately, territory, etc.
• Products or Services (high-level) slide - On this slide, you should generally present your products or services through some graphics with minimal text, just long enough to explain what the product does or the exact nature of the services.
• Products or Services (detailed) slide - You should have a detailed slide for each product or service. Depending on the product portfolio and service depth you may want to dedicate a set of 2 or 3 slides for each product or service. Just remember to ensure consistency across the products or services slide. What I mean by consistency is that you should try to avoid a situation where there's only 1 slide for a product X and 3 slides for product Y. In this case, if the product Y is very important then have a dedicated presentation ready and send or show it to your audience separately.
• Client testimonials slide - You can highlight the praises made by the clients on a dedicated slide. Just ensure that all such testimonials are highlighting the different aspects of your offerings. The testimonials should be projected as a part of a bigger story. They should not come as an unnecessary add-on in the corporate presentation. If you are doubtful about having testimonials on a dedicated slide then you can choose to have one testimonial per detailed slide of product or service.
• SWOT (optional) slide - Few companies chose to showcase their SWOT (strength - weakness - opportunity - threat matrix) in their corporate profile. By highlighting your weaknesses to your audience you gain their trust. However, you need to be cautious about which areas of your offering you want to move to the ‘weakness' quadrant.
• Partnership slide - This slide gives the confidence to the audience at two levels - (a) You have good contacts in place and a solid network to fallback in difficult situations (b) You know how to co-create and manage things jointly. You can highlight your technical and business partnerships on the same or different slides depending on the number of partnerships you have.
• Awards and accolades - This slide talks about your achievements beyond the routine or project work. For better impact, highlight the awards given by autonomous and reputed bodies. If the body is not so known then mention why you have received the award and the significance of the organization giving you the award. That helps build credibility for the award.
• Location map (optional) slide - If the company is located in the different parts of the world or its offices are spread across then it makes sense to highlight them over a map. The region of the map should be chosen to highlight the spread and not just to pinpoint the location for the audience. For example, if the company has offices in India, Singapore, Sri Lanka then it is better to have the SEA map rather than the world map.
• Contact slide - If you have included the location map then you can highlight the different locations where you are present in detail on this slide. Additionally, you can include email, working timings, contact person (if that's necessary), phone numbers mentioned for each location.
• Conclusion slide - Rather than just mentioning ‘thank you' on this slide it is better to have some call to action. Depending on whether you are sharing this presentation over email or delivering it in person you may want to choose an appropriate call to action. Some of the samples are: for more information click here, if you want to see how we build the best solutions for you then head to our youtube channel, you can ask questions to me if I have not already addressed them earlier in my presentation, etc.

Once the corporate presentation is prepared, ensure that it is made available to all client-facing people in a view-only mode at a central repository. The marketing team should be the custodian of this corporate presentation and should own the responsibility to update it from time to time. It makes it much simpler to maintain one version of the corporate profile across the company.