Winning the Room is a comprehensive guide for everyone seeking maximum impact and audience engagement from their presentations. Bill Franks reflects on his own journey and learnings from decades of presenting, showcasing what worked well and what should be avoided. And he does an outstanding job making it tangible, sharing his experience and providing many examples and illustrations, which makes for a hands‐on, pragmatic, and also entertaining read.

Franks provides well over 100 pertinent tips and tricks on how to best convey insights, how to tell an engaging story, and how to connect with an audience. From planning a presentation, its design, and storyboard; to choosing the appropriate level of detail to be conveyed; and closing with advice on optimal presentation delivery; Winning the Room covers it all.

The author draws from his rich history as an educator, researcher, and chief analytics officer as he places special attention on one critical skill that's regularly at the heart of successful presentations: the translation of data into charts, figures, and, ultimately, credible insights. Readers will learn how to sidestep the common pitfalls of poor data representation and learn specific actions to take to increase the likelihood that an audience will be able to follow and understand a presentation even of complex datasets and challenging insights.

Winning the Room is relevant to a broad audience: The book is a pointed refresher for more‐seasoned business leaders, project managers, researchers, and consultants. It's also the one complete reference on presentation preparation for those early in their career: professionals, academics, and students alike. It's a wonderful reminder of how optimal presentation preparation creates a platform to elevate solid work into something impactful and consequential, and of how, conversely, even the best ideas, findings, and analyses will suffer diminished returns and lessened relevancy when presentation preparation is incomplete or an afterthought only.

Bill Franks penned a strikingly germane and practical handbook on how to connect and resonate with a presentation audience. His advice is highly relevant and applicable in virtual as well as in‐person presentation settings and adds a seasoned practitioner's perspective on how to create results, not just reports.

Rasmus Wegener, PhD

Senior partner, Bain & Company