Consulting Proposal Deck

About this template

What this deck actually sells

Clients buying consulting are buying staffing, duration, and the deliverables produced in that time. This 14-slide file reflects that: two of the four body slides (team composition on slide 8, the week-by-week workplan on slide 10) are given over to terms. The order is cover, agenda, four dividers with four body slides (diagnostic design, analysis method, team composition, weekly workplan), a comparison slide, metric cards, a trend chart, and a closing slide. A vertical running title repeats each slide’s heading, so edit it whenever you change a title; on the metrics slide the abbreviation KPI sits beside it.

Start with the cover fields and the agenda counters

The cover carries small fields for category and format, prefilled “Proposals & Planning” and 16:9, editable. Turn them into document control information such as engagement type and submission date. Replace the TEMPLATE / 2026 line and the company and presenter placeholders at the foot with your firm name and the engagement lead, and delete the template blurb – the line that begins “this template organizes 14 slides from diagnostic design to trend analysis” – in favour of one line stating the scope under review. The agenda lists diagnostic design, analysis method, team composition, weekly workplan, findings and prescriptions, key metrics and trend analysis in numbered order, each line closed by a counter of the form “01 / 07”. The first four are carried by divider-and-body pairs (3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10), and the last three by the comparison slide 11, the metric cards on slide 12 and the bars on slide 13. No line is a name without a slide, so the only thing to remember when you cut or add one is to move the denominator 07 with it.

What belongs on the four body slides

1. Slide 4, diagnostic design. Leads with deciding what to examine and how far, and ships with on-site observation of 5 departments, 24 in-depth interviews, three years of operating data. This is where you fix the scope numerically, so the department count and interview count must equal the ones behind your fee; the 24 interviews also appear on the metric cards.
2. Slide 6, analysis method. Leads with disclosing the route to the conclusion in advance, and ships with six benchmark companies, measured process cycle times, three hypothesis workshops – activities the client must put in a calendar, not a methodology name.
3. Slide 8, team composition. Partner at 0.3 man-months for oversight, three consultants full time, 14.5 man-months total. Check that the per-grade man-months add up to the total; if they do not, the fee loses its basis.
4. Slide 10, weekly workplan. Weeks 1-4 diagnosis and interviews, weeks 5-8 designing and validating the improvements, weeks 9-12 handover and embedding. Name a deliverable for each block, for example a three-option comparison table for weeks 5-8, so acceptance has a criterion.

Effort cards and the weekly bars

The metric cards read 12 weeks, 14.5 man-months, 24 interviews, fee KRW 280m. They already show scale of effort rather than a promised saving, which is the honest version, but footnote whether the fee includes VAT and whether expenses are separate. Dividing 14.5 man-months into KRW 280m gives a day rate immediately, so assume the client does that arithmetic and bring a rate card. The trend bars read 62, 95 and 118 for weeks 1-4, 5-8 and 9-12, plus 34 for reporting, captioned “unit: index”. The first three labels are exactly the blocks used on slide 10, so if you change one side, change the other or the two slides drift apart. Only the last bar is not a week block, so if you plot effort per block, replace the caption with a real unit and say what the reporting bar counts. The bars are shapes, so resize by (value / largest value).

What causes trouble at acceptance

• Promising recommendations with no deliverable list. If you need to show the report structure, duplicate a divider-and-body pair and renumber the agenda counters up to 08.
• Omitting client obligations, then absorbing the delay when data or interviews slip past the 12 weeks.
• Editing slide titles but leaving the running titles unchanged.
• Handing slide 11 over with the sample diagnosis on the left – weak decision evidence, inconsistent metric definitions across departments, improvements that never reach execution. The three prescriptions on the right (12 redefined KPIs, documented collection rules, named owners and dates) only hold if each answers a finding from your own interviews.
• Closing on the tagline and a thank-you alone. Slide 14 still carries presenter and company placeholders; put the proposal validity period and a contact there.