How do you decide what to cut when presenting to senior leaders?
Sort everything with a stoplight. Green goes in the talk, yellow gets a brief mention, and red goes in the appendix, ready if someone asks.
What I say in the video
Senior audiences care about your conclusion, not your process. And the best way to earn their trust in it is knowing what to leave out. A helpful way to work through this is the stoplight model. Green, that's information that everyone needs to understand the recommendation. Yellow, that's information that might be useful for some people. And red, deeper detail that only comes up if someone asks. Green goes in the main presentation. Yellow might be mentioned briefly. Red belongs in backup slides or an appendix. This lets you stay concise while still being prepared for deeper questions.
What I didn’t say in the video
People skip this because cutting feels like hiding your work. You spent two weeks on that analysis. Giving it one sentence seems wrong.
When I ask clients to sort their slides, almost everything comes back green. I ask one question per slide instead: if this disappeared, could the room still follow the recommendation? About a third of the greens turn yellow or red right there.
And red isn't wasted. When an executive asks the hard question and you go straight to the backup slide, that's the moment they decide you know your stuff. The detail earns more trust as an answer than it ever did as slide nine.
Try it today
Before your next presentation, mark every slide G, Y, or R. Count the greens. Then try to lose two.
Bill Smartt is a New York executive presence and public speaking coach and the founder of Smartt Talk. He works with leaders in financial services, tech, advertising and startups.
