Strategy Consultants’ toolkit SELLING YOUR IDEAS

Transcript:Strategy Consultants’ toolkit SELLING YOUR IDEAS:
Strategy Consultants’ toolkit SELLING YOUR IDEAS WITH POWERFUL CHARTS Introduction 2 In order to communicate complex business ideas and recommendations, a presentation needs to be clear, concise, and easily understood Strategy consultants do that by telling a story, most commonly through presentations These presentations are normally data-driven and chart-centric But making data easy to understand is HARD This presentation will highlight the charts and visuals that top consulting firms and corporate strategists use to make their strategic insights clear and understood Dividing up the Market Many business presentations start with a review of the current “status quo” So it is common to ask: How do I divide the client’s market or how to I categorize my client's revenues or costs? A simple single 100% stacked bar is a good way to categorize markets, revenues or costs. Make sure the categories are “MECE”—Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. If there are more than 10 categories, group some together or group the smaller ones in “Other.” In all slides with charts, include a tag line to present the key message, like the one to the left. 80% of revenue comes from the 5 largest verticals. 3 Drilling Down 4 Once you have an overall sense of the market, you will often want to ‘drill down’ into the details for a specific market, competitor or expense category. Charts are easiest to understand when you have 5-7 categories. Drilling down allows you to explode a specific category one more level. Drilling Down— Exploding a Category If there are more than 10 categories that are important or there’s one key category that you want to subdivide, use a second bar to ‘explode’ a category from the first bar. Use color to further highlight a key category. 5 Drilling Down with Multiple Charts FY 2012 National Expenditures FY 2012 Eastern Regional Expenditures Use multiple charts on one slide to divide a measure along a key dimension. In this case, we have expenses by region on the left. The horizontal stacked bars on the right provide the detail for the measure. In this case, we have expenses broken out in the largest region. Source: http://media.ussa.org/Public/Communications/2013/McKinseyStudy.pdf 6 Adding More Measures 7 So far, we’ve looked at one key measure along a single dimension For example, revenue by vertical market or expenses by region. Add a second measure to examine both number of customers and total customer revenue by region