How to Present Data to Executives

Executives are short on time. Don’t waste it by starting your presentation with the boring details they could care less about. Start it with the action they need to sign off on.
In this excerpt from my full workshop “How to Present Data to Executives”, I demonstrate how to use the Now What-So What-What framework to successfully gain executive buy-in (rather than having them leave the room in frustration before you’re done).
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Does this sound familiar:
- You put together slide decks but your audience doesn’t react well to them?
- You’re great at researching, coding, and analyzing. But don’t know where to start with speaking up in meetings and giving presentations?
- You’ve been stuck in your career, unable to get the promotions you deserve, because your managers say you need to work on communication skills?
The truth is communication, presentation, and storytelling are not “soft skills”. They are extremely hard to master yet crucial for success in business and leadership.
I created this CZcams channel and my Hidden Speaker training programs to address exactly those challenges. This is not just any communication course. This is communication for tech professionals by a tech professional. If you're looking for self-paced content to overcome anxiety, speak with confidence, and know how to structure a killer presentation, you’ve come to the right place.
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Transcript:
Beginning: This is the slide deck we'll be using for our workshop. I want to set the scene here: imagine you're a manager of a data team and you work for this company called Ryde, a car service company. Previously its model is similar to taxis so you hail them from the street, or you call with your phone to set up an appointment. But you as the manager of your data team have come up with a revolutionary new idea. You say to yourself, "let's make this more like rideshare so people can take their smartphone and just book a trip right there and done." You need to present to the CEO and get their buy-in for this idea. You come to this workshop to see if this slide deck is up to par for executive presentation. So let's go through it. Let's check out what it looks like. Ryde 2.0 a revolutionary car service. You talk about the plans for your team, what your team is hoping to build. Geo-aware devices, one-click requests, pre-specify these locations with coordinates and you can book trips from your phone. You say, "we're going to use Rim OS - this new operating system - because according to this data, highest percentage of smartphone requests. It'll have three cool new features with Rim operating system, intelligent scheduling, route optimization, payment reputation and utilization tracking... Fantastic, and you say with forecasting we can improve pickup so instead of cars just roaming around aimlessly, instead we'll tell them exactly where: statistically optimized positions they should stay in so they can get their new ride quickly. I want to hear from all of you: imagine you are the CEO listening to this, seeing this slide. What is missing here that you as the CEO would need to know? Imagine a great CEO: what what would make you say thumbs up for this project or thumbs down? What is missing from this deck?
End: Stories are: "what, so what, now what." What's going on, why does it matter, what do we do about it? Building up momentum and then concluding. You flip the script for executive presentations. First it's what do you need to do about this? Then why does it matter, and finally the contextual detail. Imagine a newspaper headline at the top: short and punchy, exactly what the person needs to know. If they should continue reading then you go into some more background detail about it, and then more contextual detail if they're still there to read. Same approach for executive presentation. And after the triangle is complete, everything else is appendix. And that's what's impressive because if you can anticipate every single question the CEO will ask and you have data and statistics and slides to back it up they'll be like, "wow this person put a lot of thought into creating this... they know what they're talking about. I can trust them." And trust is the key to gaining buy-in and persuading your audience
#communication #publicspeaking #data