What is a consulting presentation?

Organizations bring in management consultants when they are grappling with a difficult problem that they aren’t sure how to solve.

Consultants provide the client with unbiased advice that is supported by insights that they have seen in other organizations.

These consultants go through a rigorous problem-solving process. Put simply, they identify the underlying problem, consider all credible solutions to the problem, and recommend the most appropriate solution for the organization.

At the end of the consulting engagement, the Partner or Project Leader will meet with the client and discuss their recommendations. They will also provide the client a consulting presentation that summarizes the analysis and recommendations.

How do you present a consulting presentation?

In most cases, the consulting presentation isn’t “presented” as such. Instead, the consulting Partner or Project Leader will talk through a few key slides from the consulting presentation in their final meeting with the client.

In reality, a consulting presentation is a slide deck that summarizes the analysis and recommendations for the client to reference after the consulting team has finished the engagement.

How do you write a consulting presentation?

As a consultant, you very quickly realize there are two important parts to writing a consulting presentation:

  1. The ‘thinking’. This is the rigorous problem definition, analysis, synthesis, and insight that happens before you open up PowerPoint. Without this, even the most well-crafted consulting presentation lacks impact.
  2. The presentation. This is the distinctive, structured, and clear way that consultants build their slide decks. Without this, even the most powerful insights lose their force.

You start your consulting presentation by focusing on the thinking. And only after you clearly understand the problem and the potential solutions, do you think about opening up PowerPoint and writing the consulting presentation.

It’s beyond the scope of this article to walk through the entire process of writing a consulting presentation. But we have a complete, end-to-end guide that walks you through the process.

In our Complete Guide to Building Strategy Slide Decks, we cover everything including structuring your consulting presentation, synthesizing your analysis, crafting your argument and storyline, choosing the right chart of visualization, building conceptual slides, writing executive summaries, and more.

Downloadable consulting presentations and examples

In addition to the guide and course mentioned above, one of the best ways to learn how to write consulting presentations is to look at how real consulting firms construct their consulting presentations.

Below, we’ve put together a list of free, downloadable consulting presentations from consulting firms, such as McKinsey & Co, Bain, BCG, Oliver Wyman, L.E.K Consulting, Kearney, and more.

These are the same presentations that we’ve used to populate our consulting slide library. All of these consulting presentations are available in the public domain. We’ve just rounded them up for convenience.

You can download all the presentations in bulk (plus some bonus presentations) using this form:

Or if you’d rather download the slides individually, you can use the list below:

McKinsey & Co presentations

Bain & Co presentations

BCG presentations

AT Kearney presentations

L.E.K Consulting presentations

Oliver Wyman presentations

Deloitte presentations

EY Parthenon presentations

PwC / Strategy& presentations

 

We’re always adding new consulting presentations to this list, so don’t forget to bookmark this page and come back regularly.