The presentation is in less than a week and you’re still staring at blank slides.
You know the final deck will be replete with numbers, charts, and graphs. Nothing too exciting, other than the fact that major priorities and their funding depend on it. The team did their part. They sent you six decks to “use as reference” and highlighted a handful of slides that worked well last time.
So you start building. You’re grabbing slides, updating numbers, stitching together a Frankenstein deck and trying to make it all make sense. Before you go further, stop and ask yourself one question: Who’s this presentation really for? You might say, “It’s for the board,” or “It’s for our leadership offsite.”
But the truth is, right now, this deck is built around YOU. It says what you want to say. It promotes what you want to pitch.
That’s the mistake…and it’s why even the best ideas can fall flat — as Nancy Duarte has shown, the audience is always the hero of the story.
You are not the hero. Your audience is.
You’re the guide, the mentor, the sidekick if you will. You’re there to help them move from where they are now to where they want to be. That guide-first role is a core principle of modern storytelling frameworks, including the work of Donald Miller, who emphasizes that the audience drives the story, not the presenter.
Here’s a shift that can transform a deck from “noise maker” to “influence”:
That deck needs to be speaking to them not “at” them. Your slides, your bullets, your message, all of it should say, “I understand you. I see what you’re up against. And here’s how we can help.”
That one mindset change rewires everything. It changes your slides, your tone, your structure, and, more importantly, your results.
Real-world example: The “campaign deck” nobody bought
A senior marketing exec asked me to redesign their annual campaign pitch. Their original deck was a 42 slides pachyderm. Packed with data, very colorful and certainly very well-intended but it only spoke about them.
It read like:
- “Here’s everything we’re doing.”
- “Here’s why we’re proud of it.”
- “Here’s why we need your buy-in.”
So what was missing? Anything the leadership team (the audience) actually cared about. That narrative flip — shifting from self-focused to audience-first — is something Andy Raskin has helped many companies master. And it works.
So we rebuilt the story.
Slide 1: “Your market has changed.”
Slide 2: “You tried to adapt, but it’s not going as well as expected.”
Slide 3: “Here’s the way forward and here’s how we get there.”
Same content, same data but the story flipped…and so did the reaction. Halfway through, one of the execs stopped the presentation and said, “I’m convinced. Let’s vote on it.” The plan got the green light in less than 20 minutes.
What this means for your next deck
If your opening slides say things like:
- Our strategy this year is…
- We recommend that we…
- Here’s what we’ve done so far…
Bottom line
Every presentation is a chance to move an audience, not just impress them.
So the next time you build a deck, don’t center it around what you want to say.
You need to know who they are, and what they’re hoping for. Put yourself in their shoes and build the deck around what they need to hear.
Because they’re the hero. You’re just here to guide them to that state of bliss.