What to say on the last slide of a presentation?

Say the next step out loud while the closing slide shows it in writing: what you're asking for, who does it, and by when. If there's no ask, say the single number or sentence you want people repeating after they leave. Avoid using the last slide to say thanks — say that verbally instead, so the projected frame keeps working during Q&A.

What is a good ending slide for a presentation?

A good ending slide holds one of three things: the specific next step with an owner and a date, the one number that defines your argument, or your name and contact details at a size readable from the back of the room. All three keep earning attention during questions. A thank you slide stops working the moment it appears.

What do you call the last part of a presentation?

The final section is usually called the close or the conclusion, and the visual that accompanies it is the closing slide or end slide. In pitch and sales contexts it's often a call to action slide, because its job is to state the ask rather than summarise. Appendix material sits after it and is only opened if a question requires it.

What should be the first slide of your presentation?

One sentence that states what's at stake, set in type large enough to read instantly, plus your name and the date in small text. That's the whole slide. It orients the room in about four seconds and gives your first spoken line something to lean on. Save the agenda and the company backstory for later slides.

What is the very first slide called?

It's called the title slide, or the opening slide when people are describing its function rather than its label. PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides all generate a title slide layout by default with a title and subtitle placeholder. You can keep that layout and still replace the generic title with a claim your audience actually cares about.

How to use storytelling in a presentation?

Treat the deck as one arc rather than a stack of topics. State the tension on the opening slide, show the evidence that resolves it through the middle, then close by returning to the same tension with an answer. Read your slide titles in sequence with nothing else on screen — if they don't form a coherent sentence chain, the narrative isn't there yet.

What are some examples of storytelling in presentations?

A common pattern is the hourglass: open broadly with a problem the whole room shares, narrow into your specific work and data, then widen again to what it means. Another is before-and-after, where the opening slide shows the current state and the closing slide shows the changed state. Both use the first and last slide as the two ends of a single arc.

What is a business model presentation?

It's a presentation whose central question is how the company makes money, rather than what it builds. In a longer deck that question collapses into a single business model slide: who pays, for what, how much, how often, and what it costs to serve them. Everything else in the deck is either setup for that slide or consequence of it.

The Last Slide of a Presentation Is Not Thank You

Most decks are built from the middle out. Someone opens a template, fills in the data slides, then bolts a title slide onto the front and a "Thank you" onto the back because both felt required. Those two get the least design attention and, minute for minute, the most audience attention.

Across years of art direction on pitch and campaign decks for brand, beauty and hospitality clients, the pattern holds in every format. The last slide of a presentation is the frame that stays lit the longest. The first one decides whether anyone listens to the rest. Fixing both ends takes about ten minutes, and it's the highest-return ten minutes in the whole build.

Direct answer. The last slide of a presentation should carry your next step, not "Thank you." Because the last slide stays projected through the entire Q&A, it's the single most-viewed frame in the deck. Put your ask, your contact details, or your one defining number there instead.

Why the First and Last Slide Get Remembered

Order matters to recall, and a deck is an ordered sequence. Research on sequential memory describes two effects that shape what an audience retains: the primacy effect, where subjects show "better performances for memory items appearing at the beginning of a sequence," and the recency effect, the same advantage for items "appearing at the end of a sequence" (Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 2024). The opening slide and the last slide occupy the two positions that memory already favours. Spending your design effort on slide 14 instead is spending it where recall is weakest.

There's a second, more practical asymmetry. In "Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides," Kristen Naegle's Rule 2 is to spend only one minute per slide. Every slide gets about sixty seconds — except the last slide of a presentation, which stays on the wall for the full question period. A ten-minute Q&A gives that frame ten times the screen time of anything else you made — which is why presentation structure should be planned from both ends inward.

What to Put on the First Slide of a Presentation

The first slide of a presentation has one job: orient the room in about four seconds so your opening line lands on prepared ground. The first slide of presentation decks that come in for a rework usually tries three or four jobs and lands none.

Three things belong on it:

One sentence stating what's at stake. Not a topic label. "Q3 Marketing Review" is a folder name. "We're spending 40% of budget on the channel that converts worst" is a stake. The sentence is the slide.
Your name and the date, small. Metadata, not content — it exists so the deck survives being forwarded.
Nothing else.

Set the sentence in your largest type size and let the whitespace do the rest. If the template reserves the top third for a lockup, override it — this is the one slide where layout bends to the sentence.

In the decks we've reworked, the change that consistently moves a room is replacing a noun with a claim. A noun invites people to wait and see. A claim invites them to disagree, which means they're listening. If you're assembling the slide deck from scratch, write this sentence before you touch any layout.

What the Opening Slide Should Never Carry

Three things to cut on sight:

A full-bleed company logo. A logo as the entire first slide says the most interesting thing about the next twenty minutes is who's speaking. It almost never is. Brand presence belongs in the frame furniture — a corner mark, a consistent type family — not the headline.

"Thank you for having me." Gratitude is a spoken register. On screen it burns your primacy position on a pleasantry you'll say aloud anyway.

An agenda as slide one. An agenda describes the container before anyone knows why they'd open it. If the talk needs a roadmap, put it at slide two or three, once there's a reason to care about the route. Under fifteen minutes, skip it: a well-built presentation structure is legible from the slide titles alone.

The Business Model Slide Is the Load-Bearing Wall

Between the two ends sits the slide that carries the argument's weight. In a pitch or commercial deck that's the business model slide, and its position matters as much as its contents.

The business model slide answers one question: how does money move? Who pays, for what, how much, how often, and what it costs you to serve them. Five facts. A business model slide showing a value-chain diagram but no price has answered a different question than the one being asked.

Placement rule: it goes after the evidence that the problem is real and before the numbers that show the model working. Earlier and it reads as speculation. Later and everyone's already asked about it during your traction slide. In our client deck reviews, this is the most common place a strong story loses the room — not because the model is weak, but because it arrives out of order in the narrative arc.

One format constraint, from experience: pick a diagram or a table, never both. Two visual systems on one slide means the audience spends its sixty seconds deciding which to read. If your pricing has real tiers, the same discipline that makes a sales proposal readable applies — one structure, stated once.

What to Put on the Last Slide of a Presentation

Here's the argument most worth winning: the last slide of a presentation is the only slide in your deck that gets sustained, uninterrupted attention, and almost everyone wastes it on two words.

MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering Communication Lab instructs presenters to "End by connecting back to the thing the whole audience cares about, not a 'Questions?' 'Thank you!' or 'backups' slide" (MIT Communication Lab). The reason is duration. The last slide of a presentation is projected for the entire question period, so whatever the closing slide shows becomes the backdrop of every answer you give. A thank you slide turns that backdrop into blank wall.

Three last slide formats that keep working during Q&A:

1. The next-step slide. The ask, with an owner and a date. "Approve £40k for the Q4 test — decision by 12 September." Every question asked in front of that slide gets asked in the context of the decision you want. This is the call to action slide in its most useful form: one action, one owner, one deadline.

2. The one-number slide. One figure at enormous size with a six-word caption. Use it when the ask is soft and the goal is retention — whatever number you want quoted in the follow-up email.

3. The contact slide. Name, role, email and a link, set large enough to read from the back row. Unglamorous, and correct for conference talks, where the realistic best outcome is that two people write to you afterwards. A call to action slide and a contact slide are the same slide when the action is "email me."

Say thank you out loud. That's the register where it works. A thank you slide does none of these three jobs, and the last slide is the most-watched position in the deck.

Storytelling in Business Presentations Links the Two Ends

This is where storytelling in business presentations stops being a soft skill and becomes a layout decision. The opening slide and the last slide are the two ends of one narrative arc; the middle is evidence. If they don't answer each other, you don't have a storytelling presentation — you have a report with a cover.

The test for a storytelling presentation takes thirty seconds. Read the first slide, skip everything, read the last slide. The pair should sound like a complete thought: tension, then resolution. "We're spending 40% of budget on the channel that converts worst" → "Approve £40k to reallocate it — decision by 12 September." That's an arc. "Q3 Marketing Review" → "Thank you!" is not a thought at all.

Storytelling in business presentations fails at the seams more often than in the middle. Teams write good evidence slides, then frame them with two placeholders. The repair is structural: rewrite the last slide first, then rewrite the opening slide to set up exactly the tension the close resolves, then check that the business model slide sits at the arc's turning point. Working backwards is faster, because the close is the only slide with a defined job.

A storytelling presentation also has to survive being read without you. When the deck circulates after the meeting — and pitch decks always do — the first slide and the last slide are the two anyone actually reads. Teams running recurring decks lock that pair into a template, the same way they'd lock a campaign visual system rather than redesign it each round.

The Ten-Minute Fix

Run this on any deck you've already built:

Open to the last slide. If it says "Thank you," "Questions?" or shows only a logo, delete the contents.
Pick which of the three formats you need. Ask pending → next-step slide. No ask → one-number slide. External audience → contact slide.
Write the closing slide in full sentences first, then cut to the shortest version that still names the action, the owner and the date.
Go to the title slide. Replace the topic label with the tension your close resolves. Keep your name and the date; remove the rest.
Check the business model slide's position — after the problem evidence, before the traction numbers.
Read slide one, then the last slide, out loud. If it isn't a complete thought, the opening sentence is wrong, not the close.
Confirm both frames share type sizes and margins. Mismatched ends read as two different decks — the same visual consistency problem that shows up across campaign assets.

Steps 1 to 3 take six of the ten minutes. That's where the return sits.

The Short Version

Two slides do disproportionate work, and both are usually left on defaults. The first slide of a presentation should state what's at stake in one sentence — not a topic, not a logo, not an agenda. The last slide should hold your next step, your defining number or your contact details, because it's the frame that stays lit while people ask questions. The business model slide belongs at the turning point of the narrative arc.

Rewrite the last slide first, then the open, then read the two in sequence. If they form a single thought, the presentation structure has a spine. Build both ends in Playyy's presentation maker and keep the pair locked as a template for every deck after this one.