When you’ve been “volunteered” by your supervisor to give a presentation, what’s your first thought? I’m betting that it’s not excitement or anticipation. We all know the classic statistic that public speaking ranks above death in most people’s fears.
But giving a presentation doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With the help of pre-built professional PowerPoint templates, your presentation will give you confidence in your speaking points. Let’s learn more about the keys to giving professional presentations.
How to Build Professional Business Presentations
Professional doesn’t have to mean stuffy and boring. Instead, it implies a sense of polish and precision. Here are four musts when it comes to building professional PowerPoint presentations:
- Free of errors – sit in a room with experienced professionals, and your typos will stick out like sore thumbs. A combination of proofreading and preparation will ensure that your presentation is error-free.
- Include charts and graphs – the business environment is full of data. Using a few charts or graphs gives the audience a sense of confidence in your points by supporting them with hard facts.
- Don’t be afraid to BLUF – use the “bottom line up front”, or BLUF principle to cut straight to the point you’re making. Instead of belaboring an hour-long presentation and hiding the conclusion in the back, give the conclusion first, then explain how you arrived there.
- Include supporting slides in the appendix – it helps to anticipate potential questions that your audience may have. Be sure to include slides at the end of the presentation that address them. In case a question comes up, you can jump to the appendix with the data that helps answer it.
A great example of a professional PowerPoint presentation is Zillow’s 2018 Investor Day deck. Most publicly traded companies will host an annual investor’s day where they showcase the company to current and potential investors, including analysts.
Professionalism is a must with this type of audience, and Zillow’s slide deck has all of the key elements.
Giving a successful presentation is about confidence. When you feel a sense of surety in your presentation, the audience is more likely to perceive you as professional and competent.
Using PowerPoint is all about building your confidence as a speaker. Your slide designs should include content that reiterates your speaking points and even presents them from a new angle. While some audience members will learn best by listening, others are more visual learners. Using a slide to present information to them visually is crucial to driving your points home.
The Top 10 Breathtaking PowerPoint Templates
Professional audiences expect more than PowerPoint’s built-in designs. That’s why it helps to use pre-built designs that go above and beyond the standard layouts. Using templates ensures that you’ll create a presentation that the audience has never seen.
Here are 10 of the best breathtaking PowerPoint presentation templates that keep your slides professional:
1. Digital Marketing Strategy
Fully editable in PowerPoint, this template features two pre-made themes and 40+ unique slides in each theme for your next professional presentation with a digital focus. This PowerPoint business template gives the perfect opportunity for discussing your plans regarding social media, SEO, inbound marketing, and outbound marketing. Use the free custom fonts to set your presentation apart from typical PowerPoint presentations.
2. Business Report
With its modern and minimalist style, this business PowerPoint template is perfect for the professional that’s focused on a straightforward and simple presentation. The clean design of the slides in this template will help you ensure that your audience stays focused on content with no distractions on the design itself. The included slides highlight the important aspects of your annual report without sacrificing professionalism.
3. SWOT Business Presentation
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats: these are four key forces that impact every business. It’s only natural that you would use a professional PowerPoint template that highlights them all. When giving a marketing presentation, using a SWOT approach helps your audience see that you can visualize all of the challenges and opportunities ahead for your business. The included slides will help you hone in on each of the four key SWOT forces and analyze them appropriately.
4. Business Plan Powerpoint
For the professional needing an unfussy, carefully crafted template that adds to the presentability of their presentation, the Business Plan PowerPoint template is the right choice. The attention to detail in these ultra-modern and uniquely designed PPT templates is perfect for the business professional whose presentation needs nothing less than the best. These professional PowerPoint templates are ideally suited for a variety of professional presentations, ranging from business to portfolios, advertising, or branding.
5. Business Plan
This multipurpose business template provides plenty of flexibility and customization for your next presentation. With over one hundred slides, this professional PowerPoint template has a wide array of slides created with business and marketing professionals in mind. Included layouts help you cover key business concepts like SWOT, Porter’s Five Forces, organizational schemes, and company structures. Charts can be edited in Excel, and the organized style and subtitles provide a polished touch.
6. Simply Business Proposal
The Simply Business Proposal PowerPoint template features creative but simple slide designs for a variety of professional business presentations. Layout and content for slides contain material that would be fitting for finance presentations, team training sessions, reviews, creative agencies, pitch decks, and more. Elements in each theme are easily customizable, requiring no other software in order to customize these easy use professional PPT templates.
7. Noah Business Powerpoint
The Noah Business PowerPoint templates are multipurpose and perfect for professional presentations on business, e-commerce, and product promotion. Featuring thousands of ready to use icons and hundreds of vector shape icons, slides are quickly customizable with visual options. You can also sample the included infographics, diagrams, maps, data tables, and more. The 80 unique slides in each file put an array of designs at your fingertips, so that your next business presentation will stand out.
8. Foundation Business Presentation
With its unlimited color options, the Foundation Business Presentation PowerPoint template is perfect for corporate or personal presentations. Using this clean and easily customized PPT template makes it easy to match your slides to the tone of your presentation. Fully animated, featuring handmade infographics, price tables, and more, the 60+ multipurpose slides in this PPT template are re-usable for future business presentations.
9. Multipurpose Business Report
The Multipurpose Business Report templates are easy to edit, giving more time to focus on the content of your presentation and less time working with hard to use PPT templates. With drag and drop functionality, your next business presentation will come together easily with this professional business template. This template is full of infographics that you can use to illustrate the steps in a business process visually.
10. BePro Powerpoint Business Template
When you need a modern and creative professional business PowerPoint template, look no further than the BePro PowerPoint Templates. Built by a UI and UX expert, BePro has the professional design elements that can help your presentation stand out. But thanks to easy-to-edit elements, you don’t have to give up the option to totally customize your professional PowerPoint presentation.
All-You-Can-Download Business PowerPoint Templates
The examples above far exceed Microsoft PowerPoint’s built-in presentation templates. When you use a professional PowerPoint template, you start with slide design ideas in front of you. That saves you hours of design work versus designing on a blank PowerPoint layout.
All of the templates featured in this round-up are available via Envato Elements, a subscription service for creatives. These PowerPoint templates and thousands more are included when you subscribe to Elements. You can even mix and match the best slide designs from multiple templates, merging them together to glean the best components.
Caption: Envato Elements includes all of the professional presentation templates we explored, plus thousands more.
Using a pre-built template greatly reduces the time it takes to design your next professional business presentation. It’s always best to spend less time on visual design and more time on the content you’re presenting. This ultimately leads to better presentations with strong speaking points.
Walk into the boardroom with confidence, thanks to great PowerPoint templates and the principles in this round-up. Use any of these templates to set the visual tone for your next business presentation.