Public Speaking Tips: Professional Slides
Insurance agents gain visibility and credibility through speaking engagements. The right slides can help.
A NextAgency Resource
Speaking before community groups can establish your reputation as a life and health insurance expert. Professional-looking slides enhance the results; poorly designed ones undermine it.
Last Updated: July 12, 2026
Synopsis:
Speaking before service groups is an often overlooked marketing tool for life and health insurance agents. These agents are experts. They know how health, senior, and life policies work and understand the regulatory context that governs them. They educate prospects and clients one-by-one on these topics every day. Sharing their expertise with groups (e.g., Chambers of Commerce and service organizations) gives these agents an opportunity to enhance their reputation and credibility with little additional effort.
Speaker Marketing for Life and Health Insurance Agents
Local Chambers and service organizations like Rotary, Kiwanis, and the rest need speakers who can address topics of interest to their members with expertise and in an interesting fashion. In other words, they’re looking for you.
The fact is, you are an expert. You know more about the health, senior, or life policies you sell than 99% of the people in your community. That’s why your clients get their coverage from you. They value your knowledge. What’s this ICHRA they’ve heard about? Are annuities useful or a scam? What do seniors need to understand about the Medicare alphabet? And which one covers their drugs?
Members of these groups want to hear what you have to say. Not all will need your services that day, but they may remember you when they do. Or know someone who does.
So, develop a 30-40 minute presentation on a topic you can talk to. Create an outline, then a speech. As you do, remember, you’re not crafting a sales pitch. You’re there as an expert. The audience is focused on you. That’s all the sales pitch you need.
The Role of Slides
Your slides are not the presentation. They are there to support you, the presenter. The slides are a supporting player, not the star. They should emphasize what you’re saying, not say it for you. They should provide context or drive a point home. That’s all. The audience should be able to read the slide in a second and then return their focus to the reason they’re there: you.
This means your slides should be clear, concise, and complement your talk. I’ve seen too many speakers, however, put their entire presentation on slides and simply read them. They diminished themselves. They were no longer the knowing professional, they were a human PDF. They lost not only standing with the audience, but the audience’s attention as well. Since people can read silently faster than you can recite the slide contents, the audience reads ahead, then checks their email. Slide after slide after slide.
Most professional speakers you talk to will agree: there’s a place in hell reserved for slide readers, right next to those who talk during movies and recline their airplane seats.
There is one exception. If you almost never read a slide, when you do it signals to the audience that what you’re saying matters a lot. Using this technique sparingly, maybe once or twice a presentation, can elevate your talk. Overuse this approach and your presentation sinks out of sight and mind.
The Secret: Keep Them Simple
You talk in complete sentences and that means your slides don’t have to. Simple phrases are your friend. Your audience can read them and return to listening to you without losing your thread. “Medicare Advantage versus Medicare Supplements.” “Term vs. Whole Life.” “Open Enrollment Basics.” These drive home your point without distracting from it.
The exception is if you’re quoting someone. Include the minimum amount you need to fairly convey the statement, let the ellipsis do the rest.
Sometimes you don’t even need words. Are you talking about how new laws out of Washington are impacting health care coverage or the price of Medicare? A picture of the Capitol when talking about federal laws and regulations will do the trick. A picture of your statehouse works when you’re talking about state provisions. If you’re going to talk to them about the tsunami of new plans out there, a picture of a big wave gets your point across. Stock photos are cheap. Good free images are available on the web. Spend five minutes finding the ones that get your point across and you’ll save a thousand words.
If you have multiple elements on a slide, be sure to align them. That just means they line up either horizontally or vertically. It’s a subtle touch, but with a big impact. Alignment is what makes your slides look professional.
Go Big Or They’ll Go Home
The single most frequently broken rule in slide design is using fonts too small to read from the back of the room. If you’re using phrases instead of sentences you’ll have room. So go big. Fonts of 28-36 points will serve you well. Go smaller and you’re imposing an eye exam on your audience. That’s not what they came for.
Remember, slides are free. Whether you have 10 or 20 doesn’t matter as long as your clicker’s battery holds out. If you have six points to make about your topic, why cram them on one slide? It’s easier for your audience if you use six slides. That helps them connect what they’re seeing to what you’re saying. I once sat through a presentation with a single slide that had 27 bullet points. No one could read it, and no one tried. No one paid attention to the speaker, either. Three-to-five bullet points per slide will serve you well.
Don’t get fancy with your fonts. Your goal is legibility. Cursive writing is rarely legible. Comic Sans is hard to read and not funny. Well, not in the “laughing with you” sense of being funny. You’re best off using a sans serif font like Arial, Calibri, or Helvetica. (Sans serif fonts lack the embellishments of serif fonts like Times Roman).
Then let those words stand out, don’t hide them. Your audience is there to learn something, not play Where’s Waldo. I tend to use a dark background and light text if the slides will be projected. These are easier on the eye. But you be you. Just have a solid background and text that stands out against it. This means no artwork or pretty designs to distract from your message. Sure, a subtle gradient is fine, but so is solid white or black.
What Belongs on Your Slides—What Doesn’t
Here’s advice most speakers find hard to accept. Leave your logo off all but the title and closing slide. This is counterintuitive. If you’re there to promote yourself, the audience should be reminded who you are and repetition drives that message home. The truth is, putting a logo on every slide simply clutters up the page. At first your audience may simply find it distracting. Then annoying. Then they stop noticing it altogether. Instead, keep your slides clean and uncluttered with no unnecessary distractions.
The exception is your title slide. The audience will see that as you’re introduced so it should include the title of your talk plus the name of you and your agency.
When your talk is done you’ll usually ask for questions. It’s tempting to have a slide reading “Questions.” But that’s a missed opportunity. You’ll let the audience know it’s time for questions. So put up the title slide again, but this time include your agency’s URL and your email address and maybe your phone number. Make it easy for the audience to jot down how to reach you later.
Another way to reduce clutter: don’t title each slide. If your talk flows, the audience will follow along. The title becomes a label they don’t need. If you absolutely need them—for instance, to keep track of where you are in your talk—use a smaller font than the body of the slides (20 points is about right) and a lower contrast. That way you can read them, but the clutter is minimized.
What Changes on Webinars
Most of these rules apply just as well when presenting over Zoom or other webinar tools. There are a few things to consider, however.
Your slides share the screen with you. On a laptop, the audience may be looking at your slide at half their screen size with your face in a little box in the corner. Fonts that read from the back of a ballroom may still feel too small in a browser window. Go a bit larger than you would for a meeting room.
Links, not handouts. On Zoom, there’s no question of using your slides as a handout. Instead, just upload a PDF of the flier discussed earlier or drop a link to your site in the chat.
Don’t Forget to Follow Up
You’ve delivered a dynamic presentation with perfect slides — including a closing slide with your email address. You may have handed out a “how to” guide based on your talk that includes contact information and passed out business cards. Think you’re finished? Not so fast.
Handouts and the like are a good start, but these tactics are passive. They work only if attendees reach out to you, and many will intend to, but won’t. Instead, make active follow-up part of your speaking strategy. If someone asks a question after your presentation, ask for their card. If appropriate, ask the event organizer for a list of attendees. Offer to email your slides or another resource to anyone who shares their contact information.
Then follow up with them. An insurance agency management system or CRM like NextAgency makes this follow-up easy. Upload the contacts you’ve gathered into NextAgency then launch automated work flows to implement drip marketing campaigns. Then track these opportunities through NextAgency’s sales pipeline until they become your clients.
Public speaking is a great way to build your business. It’s the follow up that makes it effective.
Do What Works for You
No one comes to a meeting or a Zoom webinar to applaud your design skills. They come for you and your message. Good slides support that message. Bad slides get in the way. The rules above aren’t hard and fast — except the one about not reading your slides verbatim. That is more than a rule. It is a commandment.
The rest of the advice offered here, however, is yours to use as appropriate to your style and your audience. Remember, however, the audience is preeminent. They’re there to see you, but you’re there to be seen by them. So put yourself in their seats. Then write your speech and design your slides accordingly.
Learn More:
Additional resources for life and health insurance agents on marketing, running your agency, AI, and sales are available through the NextAgency Resource Center.
Author Information:
Alan Katz is a co-founder of NextAgency, an agency management system built for agencies selling and servicing health, senior, and life policies. He is a past president of NABIP. Alan is a nationally recognized speaker on technology, health care reform, and business planning.