Make Persuasive Presentations with Bottom Line Up Front

"Bottom line up front" means serving your audience the conclusion as the first dish. Answer the “So what?” straight off. Don’t build up to it. Don’t leave the bottom line for your audience to decipher. Whack them over the head with it when they walk in the door.

This is harder than it sounds. You may have even been taught in school to gradually build up to your conclusion.

The idea of bottom line up front (shortened to B.L.U.F) comes from the military, where clear communication has high stakes. Let’s look at a slide deck to see B.L.U.F in action.

A non B.L.U.F Headline

The non B.L.U.F headline is not helpful. Is E-commerce growing versus physical retail? Who knows? I’ll have to decipher the slide to find out.

A B.L.U.F Headline

The B.L.U.F headline made the point clear. You have just handed the reader what you need them to know: Number one, E-Commerce has been growing versus physical retail and number two, it’s now 13% of all retail

Make your slides B.L.U.F by making your point in the headline

A typical slide has a headline and a body. Here’s how to make them work together in B.L.U.F harmony.

B.L.U.F headlines make a single clear point

• Every slide headline should be a complete BLUF statement. It should contain the take-away.
• The headline should never be a generic description of what the slide contains. Instead of a headline like “User Feedback” you should summarize the learnings from user feedback, “Users liked simple setup. Struggled with advanced features”
• A BLUF headline can be longer, that’s fine. They are allowed to run to two lines at a large font. You can remove extra words like “the”,”a/an” or “is” and still get the point across.
• If you are doing BLUF slides right, you may spend more time trying to craft the headline than you will on the slide body.

The slide body only exists to support the B.L.U.F headline

The body of the slide should only contain information that supports the point from the slide headline. If something does not build on the slide headline, it does not belong in the body of that slide.

Following the above rule will naturally make your slide body content lighter. Don’t pack multiple conclusions into a single slide.

Do not repeat the same point you made in the slide headline in the body.

Look at Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, where almost every slide is a great example of a B.L.U.F headline + slide body that supports the headline.

B.L.U.F makes your argument easier to understand

• First, B.L.U.F forces you to actually come up a take away. It can be tempting to just dump a bunch of information into a slide and hope a meaningful point comes through.
• Next, B.L.U.F makes your argument transparent. The headline statement + supporting body makes for a clear structure. You’ve saved everyone time by making your presentation much quicker to understand.
• Finally, the real magic of B.L.U.F comes when you put all the slides together. If I only read your slide headlines and ignore everything else I can still understand the message of your presentation. If I agree with your slide title I don’t even need to waste time reading the slide body.

Lets see B.L.U.F in practice

Imagine I am trying to woo Google leadership to support my new product idea called the G-Shoe. I made these two presentations with the exact same slide body content but different slide headlines. See how simple it is to grasp the argument in the B.L.U.F slides on the right-side?

Good luck with your new B.L.U.F skill!