Executive Summary

What is an Executive Summary?

An Executive Summary is a brief synopsis of a lengthy report, a business proposal or a bulky presentation that helps the audience get the gist of the information — short and quick.

An executive summary is one of the simplest tools to make your audience easily understand your plan or idea that also saves time. To get the attention of your audience, it is important to write an effective Executive Summary before conducting a lengthy meeting.

How to make an Executive Summary effective?

An executive summary is a tool that can make or break your first impression on your audience. To win your audience or to convince them, make sure your executive summary:

• has relevant content i.e., it is targeted to the intended audience
• is able to capture and highlight the key points of the presentation
• is designed in an engaging way to captures the audience’s attention
• is compact enough to cover all the information in a single slide

All the above points add up in making an Executive Summary effective.

Why use an Executive Summary?

The need for an Executive Summary in the corporate world is endless. The summary provides an overview of a presentation or research and is usually the first thing your audience sees. Oftentimes, Executive Summaries are the only place decision-makers go to determine if they’re going to engage with your presentation. It captures the attention of a busy audience and piques their curiosity by presenting facts from large and boring content in a short, quick summary.

Executive Summaries help analyze a problem, draw conclusions, and suggest a quick outline of an action plan, saving everybody’s time. And because people reading the summary often do not have much time to dedicate to your presentation details, using an Executive Summary helps to make a provoking impression and grab their attention in a single interaction.

What can an Executive Summary be used for?

In a business environment, evoking the attention and buying the time of business executives is difficult, especially with a lengthy and boring presentation. Therefore, an Executive Summary is used to give a brief idea of the larger content in a quicker way. It can also be used to:

• summarize the key points of a larger data, report or presentation to save time
• provide a short, concise and optimistic sketch of your organization that captures the audience’s attention
• highlight the interesting milestones, strengths and the vision of a business that provokes the audience to learn more about the organization
• help in the decision-making of the business potentials to decide whether to buy the business deal or not
• define the problems, needs, and goals of a company in brief
• sell your business proposal to potential investors

You can find a wide variety of executive summary templates ranging from business plan executive summary templates, executive summary template for proposals, resume executive summary templates, financial executive summary templates to sales executive summary templates and many more to cover all your business needs.

To learn how to make an effective Executive Summary and see executive summary example PowerPoint, read our blog: How To Ace An Executive Summary