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Written by
Marou H.
Studying great examples is the first step. Applying their principles to your own work is what moves the needle. Here are the five principles that separate consulting-grade presentations from everything else.
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1
Invest in the storyline before touching a slide
Storyline is the overall narrative and flow of the deck which sections to include, in what order, and how individual slides connect. Without a clear storyline, your main points will be unclear or completely lost. Sketch the structure on paper first. Read through only the slide titles before building anything. If the titles alone don't tell a coherent story, the deck isn't ready.
2
Use action titles, not descriptive ones
Action titles state the main conclusion of each slide, not just the topic. "World economy has recovered since 2020" beats "World economy overview" every single time. Action titles are a core component of great consulting slides. They guide your audience to the takeaway, support your overall narrative, and allow you to steer the direction of the presentation throughout. This single change to how you write slide titles will immediately raise the quality of every deck you produce.
3
Don't reinvent the wheel
The open secret of good consulting presentations is that consultants don't build from scratch. At McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, the first step on any new case is searching an internal database of past presentations for similar work. The new deck is built on that skeleton. You can apply the same principle by studying real decks like the ones in this article, and by using professional templates that encode the structures top consultants return to again and again.
4
Be obsessive about consistent formatting
Simple, restrained color schemes. Consistent font sizes. Slide titles at the same position on every slide. No-fly-zones honored on every page. These details seem small but they signal rigor. When your audience notices that every slide is perfectly aligned, they unconsciously assume the same precision was applied to the underlying analysis. Formatting is a quality stamp. Treat it like one.
5
Be ruthless, cut everything that isn't essential
Every few weeks, review your deck and remove any slide that isn't strictly necessary. Move everything else to an appendix. A tight 10-page deck can be 100x more effective than a 115-page report. Great presentations are built to convince, not to showcase hours worked. The best consulting partners in the world are known not for what they put in but for what they leave out.
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