Most business professionals aspire to deliver presentations with the precision and impact of a consultant. With a clear storyline and sharp slides, consultants are able to guide their audience effortlessly from insight to decision.
Even with deep subject-matter expertise, internal presentations often struggle to achieve the same clarity, confidence and level of impact.
The good news? Consultant-style presentations aren’t magic, they’re learnable. And with the right mindset and support, they're easily achievable.
Where most teams go wrong with presentations
Consultants are known for presentations that are carefully structured, with messages deliberately crafted and every slide serving a clear purpose.
Many internal teams strive to achieve the same: to present ideas clearly, confidently and in a way that drives decision.
Yet day-to-day reality often looks very different. Slides are built quickly, data is copied and pasted, messages evolve late in the process and formatting consumes time that should be spent sharpening the story.
Common pitfalls show up across industries and roles:
- Text-heavy slides overloaded with information instead of a clear takeaway
- Decks built before the story is fully formed
- Inconsistent structure that forces audiences to interpret rather than decide
- Hours spent formatting, updating and realigning slides instead of refining the message
The result is a presentation that looks busy and feels unclear, making it harder for decisions to happen.
Create professional presentations like a consultant
What makes consultant-style presentations great is how the data is visualized, how ideas are sequenced and how the story guides an audience easily to a conclusion.
Key characteristics are:
- A clear storyline defined upfront, not discovered halfway through
- One core message per slide, reinforced visually and verbally
- Logical progression that leads the audience toward a decision
- Language that is concise, confident and outcome-focused
This approach reduces the cognitive load for the audience. They don't have to hunt for the point or decode dense charts, the presentation does the thinking for them.
In consultant-style presentations, the story exists before the slides do. And when the story is clear, the entire process of building and updating slides becomes easier, with fewer disruptions and far less rework.
But workflow and tools are also of great importance. If professionals are constantly reformatting charts, reconnecting data or building slides from scratch, structure alone will not solve the problem.
Smarter tools support better stories
Consultants rely on systems to maintain quality at speed. Internal teams need the same advantage.
When repetitive tasks are automated, professionals can redirect their energy toward thinking. When data stays connected, slides stay trustworthy. When structure is consistent, storytelling scales across teams.
With Grunt, your team will improve the workflow, cut down time on slide formatting, and stay on-brand for every presentation. Features like live Excel connections, visual structure tools and AI-assisted creation reduce manual work while increasing clarity.
Secrets of Consultants: 11 tips to build the perfect PowerPoint
Consultant-style presentations follow clear rules and there is a checklist behind every strong deck that covers structure, writing, visual clarity and professional polish.
If you want to see exactly how consultants approach this process, our webinar “Secrets of Consultants: 11 tips to build the perfect PowerPoint” breaks it down step by step. In 30 minutes, our experts Gustav Wind (Head of Enterprise Sales) and Einar Bjering (COO & VP Product of Grunt) walk through the thinking, structure and habits behind consultant-level presentations.
Watch the webinar and get the full consultant-level checklist for building presentations that actually drive decisions.
