RECYCLE, RECYCLE, and RECYCLE. The three commandments consulting slide building… This is a rule-of-thumb that quickly becomes evident when a junior consultant realizes they’ll have to make a metric-load of PowerPoint slides every day.
There are two main reasons why you need a solid PowerPoint template deck:
- Quality: Recycling slides that have already been used and approved by the partners of top consulting firms will increase your hit-rate. Most importantly, your clients will see tried and true layouts that have been refined to best communicate ideas and tell stories. Also, your manager won’t have to waste time reviewing your creative new slide layout and tell you ‘let’s beautify this’ or ‘pls fix’.
- Speed: This is a no-brainer. Starting slides from scratch is an utter waste of time. This is why most consultants start their slides from full templates or from the components of templates (e.g., copy-paste a title, chart, or table to edit).
The remainder of this article is dedicated to outlining the slide types that you need in your consulting template deck. How did we select which slide types are essential? You may ask… All PowerTools staff (i.e., seasoned ex-consultants) reviewed each-other’s template decks and aggregated the best of the best. What resulted is the Consulting Toolkit. A deck of 200+ consulting slides, all categorized into slide types, sequenced by a consulting deliverable’s typical order, and formatted consistently with a professional and modern look.
1. Titles, contents, and dividers
These slides help structure the presentation by clearly marking sections, and guiding the flow of your project’s narrative. Without them, your deck will feel like one big mash of slides, making it unapproachable to your audience.
2. Executive summaries
Executive summary slides distills the key insights and recommendations for members of your audience who may not have time to review the full presentation (e.g., senior executives). You should see the executive as an elevator pitch of your deck; a simple and concise one-pager of only the most important takeaways.
3. Standard texts
These slides provide space to articulate detailed information, explanations, or context in a structured format. Every slide is a bucket of ideas, and your template deck should have different versions of the same text slides, with different numbers of idea buckets.
4. Frameworks
Framework slides allow consultants to visually organize complex information into logical structures for clearer decision-making. This is why you’re paid the big bucks, to synthesize complex information into considerations, and ultimately solutions.
5. Hypotheses
Hypothesis slides are used for testing assumptions and guiding the problem-solving process with data-driven insights. Consulting projects often use the hypothesis approach, somewhat like scientists… The team formulates ‘best guesses’, which are then validated or nullified through research and testing.
6. Option comparisons
These slides enable consultants to present different strategic options side-by-side. Presenting all options along common scales helps visualize tradeoffs, facilitating client decision-making.
7. Competitor analyses
Competitor analysis slides help identify strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning relative to industry peers. They are often used in market analyses (e.g., market entry study), but can also be adapted to compare different elements (e.g., products, teams).
8. M&A analyses
These slides support mergers and acquisitions discussions by outlining potential synergies, risks, and financial impacts.
9. Harvey balls
Harvey balls are frequently used by consultants to simplify the comparison of multiple qualitative factors or subjective assessments in consistent and visual way.
10. Processes and journeys
These slides map out step-by-step processes. This may be phases in a project proposal, or even customer journeys to demonstrate workflows.
11. Tree diagrams
Tree diagrams (e.g., problem tree, decision tree) deconstruct complex hierarchies or systems into their components. They also help visually the relationships and dependencies between these components.
12. Organizational diagrams
These diagrams present team structures, reporting lines, and roles to facilitate organizational clarity. These can simply be used to show the project’s governance structure, or even to assess the client’s organization.
13. Column and bar charts
Column charts are useful for showing changes over a period of time or for visualizing comparisons amongst different items.
14. Line charts
Line charts are ideal for showing data trends over time, allowing clients to track performance or market evolution.
15. Waterfall charts
Waterfall charts decompose cumulative impacts on a certain metric (e.g., revenues) to show how each factor contributes to overall change.
16. Bubble and scatter charts
These charts are useful for comparing multiple elements across different variables, demonstrating relationships, clusters, or outliers in your dataset.
17. Pie charts
Pie charts visually represent proportions or percentages adding up to a whole (i.e., 100%), simplifying complex datasets into digestible segments.
18. Multiple charts
These slides consolidate data representations of different types (e.g., line chart, bar chart) enabling a comprehensive analysis of different metrics in one single view.
19. Findings and recommendations
These slides summarize key insights from the project’s analysis and present actionable recommendations for the client. For example, a list of initiatives across different business areas.
20. Timelines and implementation plans
Timelines outline project phases and deadlines, while implementation plans break down actions for successful execution. They can be used for project status updates, or as part of the project content themselves.
21. Next steps
Next steps slides provide a clear roadmap of immediate actions required to move forward.
Time is precious in consulting. And so is presentation quality… A solid template deck isn’t just a shortcut, it’s a proven approach to delivering clear and professional slides. With the right templates, you can focus less on formatting, and more on delivering the insights that matter to your clients. Whether you’re drafting your hundredth user journey or a quick competitor overview, having these slides at your fingertips will save you hours and elevate deliverables.
This is why we highly recommend building your own template decks by collecting your best slides through time. Although, if you do want want to cheat a little, you can kickstart your deck with the 200+ template slides we pulled together.