Next Steps Slide

If you’re serious about driving action and alignment coming out of a meeting, you need to understand how to build a powerful next steps PowerPoint slide. A good “next steps” slide is simple, yet effective. So, what belongs and what doesn’t in a next steps slide? Let’s break it down.

What Is The Next Steps Slide In PowerPoint?

For starters, what is a next steps slide in PowerPoint? The purpose of any presentation deck you put together should be to gain buy-in and motivate action.

Whether you’re recommending a specific action or sharing a critical insight, if there’s no behavior change because of your work, what was the point?

A next steps slide in PowerPoint is the culmination of your presentation, including the tactical actions required to execute the recommendation you presented.

Any meaningful next steps slide includes three critical components:

What are the actions that need to be taken?
Who should own them?
When should they deliver by?

If you’re not including all three components as you land a presentation, you don’t have a complete next steps slide.

What Is The Purpose Of The Next Steps Slide?

Next steps slides are critical to ensuring good ideas aren’t just agreed upon but acted on. Specifically, your next steps should be tactical recommendations for how to move forward and implement the agreed-upon plan in a meeting.

In a Pyramid Principle style presentation, you lead with your key takeaway, supporting it with distinct sets of supporting rationale that reference curated data. Once you’ve clarified your key takeaway and proven it through the “chapters” of supporting rationale, you end with a next steps slide that assigns tangible actions to distinct stakeholder groups to keep maintain forward progress. Remember, this is a tactical slide, and it should be treated as such.

Next Steps Slide Examples

Now that you firmly understand what goes into a next steps PowerPoint slide, it’s time for us to get tactical and share examples.

For starters, it’s okay to title the slide “Next Steps” or something similar.

Next, we like instituting a table on the slide that outlines 3-5 specific next steps (in order of priority).

The columns of the table are as such:

The action that needs to be taken
Who is going to take that action
The date by which the action will be complete

For example, if the recommendation of your presentation was to acquire your second largest competitor, a next steps slide might include the following:

Head of Strategy – Hire external advisors / investment bankers (by Dec. 31)
Finance/Strategy – Work with advisor team to establish internal valuation opinion (by Jan. 31)
IB Partner – Contact potential target to determine appetite for acquisition discussions (by Feb. 14).

Next Steps Slide Design

Next steps slides don’t need to be catchy – they need to be clear. Remember, a clear slide beats a pretty slide every time.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the clarity and aesthetic are mutually exclusive.

Stick to the slide template your company requires and build a clear next steps slide that includes the three components we’ve already discussed. Our favorite tool to structure next steps is a simple 3-column table.

If you want to get a little bit fancier than a text slide, it’s common for next steps slides to show an upward sloping staircase, an arrow going from the bottom left corner of the slide to the top right corner of the slide, or a graph that is shown moving up and to the right.

You get the point – the visualization represents a process moving forward.

Next Steps Slide Template

If you’ve been tasked with putting together a next steps PowerPoint slide, you probably want to leverage next steps slide templates. Fear not, we’ve got you covered. Below are a handful of examples we’ve sourced for you.

Keep in mind – not all of these follow our best-practice guidance. However, it’s important for you to see different perspectives so you can decide for yourself what makes the clearest next steps slide.

Conclusion

Next steps PowerPoint slides are important to ensure you’re ending meetings with a unified plan of attack instead of confusion over what happens next.

If you’re not driving action or alignment in a presentation, you’re leaving an opportunity to increase your influence on the table – and wasting your time and the time of your stakeholders in the process.

If you’re ready to take your presentation and storytelling ability to the next level, bring our team in to your organization to run a dynamic group training. Our training has transformed the performance of teams inside of Meta, Hershey, CVS Health, and more. Your team could be next!