A presentation without a problem to solve, is a presentation without a purpose.

The world doesn’t need any more presentations, and it certainly doesn’t need any more pointless ones.

I was reading some research at the weekend which asked people what they found to be most challenging about presenting, and the results went something like this:

Creating quality slides – 9%

Presenting with confidence – 14%

Putting together a good message – 36%

All of the above – 41%

If we assume for a moment that “all of the above” would follow the same pattern if a choice were forced, the results are pretty clear on where the challenge actually lies.

Now, most people at this stage would nod and move on. It makes sense, nothing more to see here.

But something didn’t sit quite right. This wasn’t the first time I had seen these kinds of results. As I thought more about it (an uncontrolled impulse of a strategist with the why of Makes Sense!), three things stood out to me:

Firstly, we seem to have the focus all wrong. Where we spend our money and energies does not address the biggest problem. How much time is spent on design, building templates or fixing up slides? Or searching through endless image libraries to find beautiful images. And I’ve seen plenty of public speaking courses do the rounds, but PowerPoint storytelling? Not so much.

Secondly, no matter how beautifully designed the slides, every presentation needs to solve a problem. We’ve all been there when a great presenter steps up. They’re confident, articulate, with presence and grace – and yet within minutes you know it will be awful. The jargon flows; the story starts, stops and then flies off at a tangent. Stats fly at you faster than headlights across the harbour bridge on a foggy night. You are lost, confused, and frustrated at having to sit through this. But there is no way out now; that train has left the station. Without clearly defining the change that the presenter wants to communicate to the audience, there is no point in the presentation. Literally no point. Most of my work is with presentations designed to sell something: a product, a strategic solution, or an idea. All these things must be in response to a problem, explaining how X's solution will make Y's problem disappear. Deceptively simple – but remarkably absent in so many sales presentations.

Lastly, and not unrelated, there is never going to be a story to share, or a problem solved without a clearly defined offering. The pace at which businesses are evolving their proposition, creating new products & services, and acquiring and partnering can lead to confusion about what the core product actually is and does. The value to buyers gets lost in the push to get ‘stuff’ out into the market, the overachieving story is unclear, and the sum of the parts doesn’t create a meaningful projection of the overall proposition.

When this gets murky internally, it only gets amplified externally and that makes the job of crafting effective presentations even more challenging.

Why do I mention this? I regularly work with sales teams to create clearer, more concise and compelling presentations that sell strategic solutions. However, I increasingly see a need to step up to this broader challenge first. Without fixing this part, our slick presentations only attract more attention to our poorly packaged products.

Where does your challenge lie? And are you clear on the story you want to share or are you needing to raise the bar on presenting it or both?