Presenting financial information can be tricky, primarily when the audience is not related to finance. General audiences can be easily bored or distracted. For many people, numbers can be scary. Usually, a presentation that throws big complicated numbers at the audience can be counterproductive as people are easily dismayed by numbers that are not easy to understand.
It’s debatable why people can be so fearful of numbers, but there can be several reasons, including how they sometimes make it difficult to grasp the presentation. Many people treat numbers as if there is an aura of mystery surrounding them, and it’s easier to lose interest altogether than trying to solve the mystery.
But what can you do when your job requires you to present financial data regularly? How can you make your presentations engaging, and why “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” when presenting financial information?
Engaging your audience
You might find numbers fascinating, but the chances are that most people you need to present financial data to will be easily distressed by seeing so many numbers in front of them. They’ll eventually lose interest, and boredom will fill the room as everybody in the audience will start losing interest one by one.
It’s never enough to keep people attentive even when what you have to present can benefit them. If that were the case, people would spend more time on educational sites than social media. But it is a grim reality that mind-numbing applications like TikTok drastically decrease their attention span. And if you happen to be in a position where you have to present information to people that might require them to use more brain cells than usual, chances are they’ll give and go back to something that interests them more, even if it’s a fly that comes sits on their desk.
It’s not only essential to make meaningful content; it’s critical to make it captivating. And anything that is not simple will hardly be attractive to people as they would refuse to grapple with concepts that they find complicated. Whereas what appears to be simple will be more understandable, hence more worthy of their attention.
Getting your point across
Getting the attention of your audience is only the beginning. Maintaining it by keeping the audience interested is a bit more complicated. But if you succeed in doing both, the next step is to convey what you want to. Getting your point across is the ultimate goal of a presentation, but it’s easier said than done, and it can be even more challenging than just grabbing somebody’s attention.
Moreover, what good is getting an audience’s attention if you fail to deliver your message? All that hard work to make your presentation interesting will go down the drain if you fall short in hammering the point home. That is why it becomes even more essential to make a presentation of financial information simple and easy to understand because it will be nearly impossible otherwise to get your point across.
Achieving results
When presenting financial information to people, you need to make your presentation simple to make it captivating and achieve the results you want with your effort. You can deliver an excellent presentation that leaves an impression on the audience, but in the end, your presentation is only as good as it is in helping you achieve the results you were looking for.
Whether your goal is raising awareness regarding your product or generating sales, you are much more likely to achieve the desired results if people understand what you’re saying. Otherwise, your efforts will fall on deaf ears. Even if people find your presentation impressive, they’re unlikely to take any actions based on it if they don’t understand what it was all about.
When your presentations are simple, no matter the content, it conveys confidence to your audience as they’re more likely to consider you an authority on the subject. If you can make your presentations simple, people will not only understand them but respect you for helping them understand what they considered to be incomprehensible before you made it look easy.
Not only will your audience admire you for your effort, but they also won’t refrain from trusting you and acting upon your suggestions and advice. It can help you sell your product and establish you as a valuable community member. It can significantly impact your career in the long run as your efforts will be perceived as meaningful, helpful, and hence marketable. Ultimately, you can rest after a tough day with the realization that you helped people to the best of your capacity. You will educate people regardless of how daunting the task was and empower them to make better decisions after learning something from you.
