Every presentation has a purpose. It must achieve something. The more successful your presentation is in achieving that purpose, the more value it gives you — whether that is getting new business, convincing an investor, or successfully sharing your expertise.
If your presentation is less successful, the results will be poorer, and a measurable cost is involved in compensating for this loss. Dave Paradi of “Think Outside The Slide” provides a handy calculation model allowing a company to assess the cost of a poor presentation, since extra time will be needed to do the work again.
How To Calculate The Cost of a Poor Presentation:
The costs of a poor presentation =
Number of presentations per week X 52 X % poor presentations X extra work required X hourly salary.
Whether you want to do this calculation or not, it illustrates how much your presentation matters for it to achieve its purpose.
Microsoft estimates that more than 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created daily. Based on this, Dave calculated that we waste $252 million a day with poor presentations, especially in the business world.
In my opinion, this is an optimistic calculation. Dave assumes that four people are present, the presentation lasts half an hour and that only ¼ of the time the presentation is poor.
It is fantastic how Dave illustrates the cost of poor presentations. Still, I think the cost of a non-professional PowerPoint presentation is much higher. I still experience many standard boring presentions in addition to successful presentations that are, fortunately, becoming more prevalent.
Where Does That Put You?
I challenge you to consider how you can increase the value of your presentation. What time and money will it take to make it better? In turn, how will your audience benefit from this investment? How would you like it if you ran into them months later, and they still recall your presentation and the value it has given them?
Sounds good? Then keep an eye open for my next blog where we will discuss exactly that. If you want to improve your presentations right away, you can purchase my book ‘Powerful Presentations’ which will provide you with valuable insight straight-away.
Until next time!
Frowa Schuitemaker from Powerful Presentations is an educationalist by heart. She and her daughter, Charlotte, wrote the book “Powerful Presentations – How to Easily Create and Use Impactful, Brain-Friendly Slide Presentations with the P-IQ Method.” She is the immediate president of the Dutch Speakers’ Association PSA NL. She is co-founder of VSAI, the Virtual Speakers Association International.
More information about her book can be found here:
https://castlemountmedia.mykajabi.com/powerfulpresentations
powerfulpresentations.nl/english | frowa@powerfulpresentations.nl