By Dean Hyers and Pete Machalek of SagePresence
Your team comes together to prepare for a project interview – the "shortlist presentation." Some of the team is excited, others are frustrated, and a few are downright nervous.
Presentation prep can be productive or problematic. You need a team on the same page of strategy and execution, along with a clear message delivered with personality and conviction.
Unfortunately, you often get something else. Strategy is elusive. Each team member understands the brand differently, or not at all. People have different ideas on approach and how to differentiate, or they have no ideas at all. Prep time is limited. Key members are sporadically unavailable. Everyone is working in different ways.
If you do manage to land on an approach beyond just talking about "the stuff of the project," the plan gets lost as you near the big moment. Suddenly, your unique approach gets replaced with your standard approach, and you realize you have too much information for your timeframe.
Why does this happen so often, and what can you do about it?
Problem #1: Your team has no strategy
It's easy to imagine that what works in one interview will work with all interviews. So you try to apply every lesson learned from the past to create one perfect approach for your firm that will always optimize your chances of success.
It's a nice thought, but one doomed for failure, because every sales presentation comes with unique circumstances, and very often what works for one selection committee will fall flat for another. Sometimes it's about showing team synergy. Other times it's about a differentiated process. Success may hinge upon strong leadership, sensitivity, risk mitigation, or politics.
What is vitally important for one is irrelevant to another. What you need is a unique strategy for each opportunity. The way to get there is to start the preparation process with some good, focused questions, like:
Which firm is favored?
If one of your competitors is the presumptive winner, you're going to need to come out swinging, challenging the thinking of the selection committee to successfully demonstrate a danger you can help them avoid.
If your firm is favored, you're going to need to show you're not resting on any laurels and take the opportunity seriously.
If there are no favored firms, you're going to want to differentiate.
How formal is this experience going to be?
Some committees are under a magnifying glass and need to conduct interviews without any appearance of bias. Others run under their own auspices and encourage creativity and interactivity.
Get clear on their expectations and preferences so can you can be sure you give them what they require. At the same time, compare this information to your strategy to ensure you have a conscious, consistent plan.
If you're trying to show how well you listen to your clients, you may want to employ an interactive approach that solicits prospect input. If you want to show you are professional and prepared, a formal presentation can do that. If you want to demonstrate how well your team works together, then pair off your team members so they can present with each other. If you're trying to provide an experience of working with you, you can bring a "pull process" or "charrette" approach to the presentation.
Try to find an intersection between the strategic ideal you want, and the format the prospect has come up with to create a match that gives you an edge.
What personalities are we trying to win over?
Social style theorists have identified four basic sets of communication preferences. There are drivers (who listen for results, don't like problems or being dragged into the weeds, and are skeptical of emotion), expressives (who like to hear passion and expression), amiables (who value teams and relationships), and analyticals (who want logic and detail).
The preferences of your selection committee should impact how you design and deliver your interview message.
- Driver-led: Consider starting with the end (the result). Keep it simple and minimize emotion.
- Expressive-led: Emphasize vision and show passion. Be more expressive.
- Amiable-led: Start with the problems, not the goal, and speak to people issues.
- Analytical-led: Emphasize process. Dive deeper, and show evidence.
- Mixed Committee: Base your approach on the key decision-maker, and adapt to others as you go.
The better you define the personalities of your selection committees, the better you can adapt to them.
Problem #2: Your team has the wrong mindset
Too often your team is focused on looking good. That's a self-focus, and it reverses the flow of productive, creative thinking. Self-focus is protective, and protective thinking leads to defensiveness and holding back.
Instead, get everyone on your team in a helping mindset. Don't have them present to impress. Don't have them present to win. Instead, they can impress and win by throwing everything they've got into helping. If the presentation helps the selection committee move forward in some way, your team will win with them. In the process, presentation prep will feel good for your team, maybe even fun, and it will align their thinking with the service mindset that you want them to have with your clients every day.
Don't present to get. Present to give. Give solutions to help your prospect get closer to their goals.
Problem #3: Your team keeps discussing to avoid practicing
Nothing is more uncomfortable than a practice run in front of your peers. That's why most of your team's prep time will be burned up talking through details. In many presentation preps, little to no rehearsal happens on the rehearsal day because your people just keep talking their way out of it.
Instead, try this approach:
Right from the first day of prep, make each person stand up and present whatever they're thinking to the team, so every bit of discussion comes in presentation form.
If you're the leader, don't ask, "How are you going to cover your talking points?" Instead, say "Show me." When someone shares an idea for a talking point, say, "Good idea. Stand up and let me hear it."
By taking a stab at presenting their message throughout the exploration, your team will be rehearsing all the while, fitting the ideas into words and timeframes, while creating a muscle memory of presenting them.
Problem #4: There's too much content
I can't think of a time in the last fifteen years when people didn't have more to say than they had time for. But most teams tend to present as many details as possible, and then try to create a single clear point out of them.
Your team will come up with everything imaginable, then they won't have time to cover it. And details don't speak well to most of the top-dog decision-maker personality types.
Let's reverse the process. Compare information to strategy to know what to weed out, and what to keep. And for what you keep, define the point of each message first and then hang details off of it.
A point is a complete story, going from problem to outcome by way of your solution. Your job is to find the simple story. Example:
- Problem: Budget is running out and we can't seek additional financing.
- Goal: We need to achieve a great end-result without going back for more money.
- Solution/Recommendation: Let's differentiate between needs and wants, so that we can prioritize what to keep and what to drop.
If every movement of the presentation lays out a simple story before you dive into the details, you can make your point and then share as much detail as time allows. If you run out of time before you get through everything you hope to say, you've at least made your points.
Problem #5: Your team reverts to your default approach under pressure
Pressure builds as you near a big presentation, so expect your team to fall apart toward the end. They will want to throw your strategy and approach out the window and revert to whatever they do as a default. They might turn on each other and start picking other team-members apart. They may start questioning everything.
They are afraid. And fear unchecked is a major downfall to group presenting. That fear inhibits people from feeling ready to rehearse, so they burn too much time in discussion, and leave too little time to practice implementing their strategy.
To remedy this, write down the strategy and approach and reinforce it at every turn. "Team, let's take a moment to remind ourselves of our strategy, and how we're going to approach this presentation." And get into rough rehearsal as soon as possible so you can be practicing as you get your heads around all the information that makes up an interview.
Conclusion
There are no guarantees of success, but there are steps you can take to increase your chances. If you follow these guidelines to have your team prep effectively, you will make the most of every opportunity, and have a better experience in the process.
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Dean Hyers and Pete Machalek are co-founders of SagePresence and co-authors of Winning AEC Interviews.
Did you miss the last PM Digest on presentation strategies? Check it out!