How to Make a Business Intelligence Presentation [Narrative & Design]
- Ink Narrates | The Presentation Design Agency
- Sep 2
- 6 min read
A few weeks ago, our client Charles asked us a sharp question while we were designing his business intelligence presentation:
“How do I make all this data actually mean something to people in the room?”
Our Creative Director didn’t blink. He simply replied,
“You don’t show data, you show decisions.”
As a presentation design agency, we work on many business intelligence presentations throughout the year. And in the process, we’ve noticed one common challenge: most people drown their audience in numbers, hoping the message will magically stick.
So, in this blog, we’ll talk about how to turn raw data into a story that leads to action.
In case you didn't know, we specialize in only one thing: making presentations. We can help you by designing your slides and writing your content too.
What a Business Intelligence Presentation Really Is
Let’s get this straight. A business intelligence presentation is not a spreadsheet with nicer fonts. It’s not a parade of charts either. At its core, it’s a tool to guide decisions.
The whole point of gathering business intelligence is to cut through noise and reveal insights that move a company forward. If your presentation doesn’t help the audience understand what to do next, then it’s just data dressed up in slides.
Here’s the mistake most people make: they confuse information with intelligence.
Dumping quarterly metrics into a deck isn’t intelligence. Telling the story of why sales dipped in the West region and what can be done about it—that’s intelligence.
Think of it this way. Your audience isn’t in the room to admire your pivot tables. They’re in the room to make a decision. If your presentation doesn’t connect the dots for them, you’re leaving them to do the hard work you should have already done.
How to Make a Business Intelligence Presentation
If you want to make a business intelligence presentation that actually moves people, you have to stop thinking like an analyst and start thinking like a storyteller. The job isn’t to prove how much data you’ve gathered. The job is to make the right insights obvious and impossible to ignore.
We’ve broken the process into five parts. Each one forces you to move away from “data dumping” and closer to creating a presentation that sparks decisions.
1. Start with the decision, not the data
Most people open their laptops and start pulling in dashboards, charts, and tables. That’s the wrong starting point. You don’t design the slides around the data you have. You design them around the decision you want the audience to make.
Ask yourself one blunt question: “What do I want them to do after this presentation?”
If the answer is fuzzy, your presentation will be fuzzy. If the answer is sharp, your presentation will have direction. For example:
Wrong approach: “We’ll show the Q3 numbers, customer churn, revenue breakdown, and sales forecast.”
Right approach: “We want leadership to invest in customer retention because churn is bleeding our profits.”
Notice how the second one has a clear decision baked into it. Once you know the decision, you can reverse-engineer the story. Every chart, every data point, every sentence either supports that decision or distracts from it.
2. Choose the narrative lens
Here’s a truth we’ve learned from working with dozens of clients: data is only as powerful as the story you wrap it in. The same set of numbers can feel like a problem, an opportunity, or a warning depending on the lens you choose.
There are a few narrative lenses you can use:
Problem–Solution: Show what’s broken and how to fix it.
Cause–Effect: Connect behaviors to outcomes.
Before–After: Show the difference between the current state and the future if action is taken.
Options–Recommendation: Lay out the possible paths and push for the strongest choice.
For example, we worked on a BI presentation for a retail client who was losing market share. Their initial deck was just sales charts. We reframed it with a “Problem–Solution” lens: “Our market share is declining in urban areas because our pricing is mismatched. Here’s the fix.” Suddenly, the data became the backbone of a compelling story rather than a loose pile of stats.
The lens forces you to connect the dots. Without it, your presentation is just floating data with no anchor.
3. Design visuals that reveal, not overwhelm
Let’s talk about charts. Too many BI presentations look like someone hit “export” from Power BI or Tableau and dumped it all into slides. The result? A mess of spaghetti lines, overlapping bars, and color-coded legends no one has time to decode.
A good chart doesn’t make you squint. It punches you with clarity.
Here’s how we approach it:
Strip away noise: Remove unnecessary gridlines, 3D effects, and clutter. If the audience has to decode it, you’ve already lost them.
Highlight the point: Don’t just show a sales chart. Circle the region that dropped. Use color contrast to show the one metric that matters. Guide the eye like a tour guide, not a librarian handing out books.
One idea per slide: If you need more than 20 seconds to explain what’s on a slide, you’ve packed too much in. Break it down.
Think of your visuals like billboards. They should be understood instantly. If you need to explain a chart for five minutes, the chart has failed its job.
4. Translate insights into human language
Data people love jargon. CAC, LTV, MoM, YoY. And while those terms matter in the right circles, your audience isn’t there to memorize acronyms. They’re there to understand impact.
Your job is to translate.
Instead of saying: “Our CAC increased by 15% while LTV stayed flat.” Say: “We’re spending more to acquire each customer but not making more from them.”
Instead of saying: “There’s a 12% variance in projected vs actual revenue.” Say: “We overestimated sales, and we missed our target by $1.2M.”
Notice how the second versions hit harder. They’re in plain English. They make the stakes obvious.
The audience should never have to pause and ask, “Wait, what does that mean?” Every time they do, you lose momentum.
5. End with a call to action, not a summary
This is where most BI presentations collapse. People end with a recap of all the charts, as if reminding the audience of every number will magically lead to a decision. It never does.
Instead, you have to close like a pitch.
Ask yourself: What’s the one action you want them to take today? That’s your ending. Don’t recap, don’t rehash. Drive the action home.
Example:
Weak ending: “So those are the Q3 results. Any questions?”
Strong ending: “Q3 showed us churn is costing us $2M per year. We recommend shifting 20% of the marketing budget to retention initiatives. The choice is simple: invest now or keep bleeding revenue.”
See the difference? One leaves the room cold. The other leaves the room with a decision to make.
Let’s imagine this in practice...
Suppose you’re preparing a BI presentation for your company’s leadership on customer churn. Here’s how it would look if you followed the five steps:
Start with the decision: You want leadership to approve a retention budget.
Choose the narrative lens: Use “Problem–Solution.” The problem is churn. The solution is retention programs.
Design visuals: Show one clean chart that highlights churn’s growth over the last three quarters. Then contrast it with the revenue lost. Don’t clutter it with 10 other metrics.
Translate insights: Say “We lost 8,000 customers last quarter. That equals $2M in revenue.”
End with a call to action: Recommend a specific investment in retention and the expected upside.
That’s it. No drowning people in dashboards. No overwhelming them with numbers. Just a clear story that uses data as the evidence, not the star.
Why Hire Us to Build your Presentation?
If you're reading this, you're probably working on a presentation right now. You could do it all yourself. But the reality is - that’s not going to give you the high-impact presentation you need. It’s a lot of guesswork, a lot of trial and error. And at the end of the day, you’ll be left with a presentation that’s “good enough,” not one that gets results. On the other hand, we’ve spent years crafting thousands of presentations, mastering both storytelling and design. Let us handle this for you, so you can focus on what you do best.