For a Great Pitch Meeting: Rehearse the Transitions
Don Peppers
Customer experience expert, keynote speaker, business author, Founder of Peppers & Rogers Group
When a prospect organizes a formal competition for its account – kicking off with an RFP, say, followed by one or a series of written responses – they will often meet with two, three, or even more “finalists” at the end of the process, and how this final pitch meeting actually plays out is critical for determining who gets the account.
It’s important to "rehearse" for these kinds of pitch meetings, as well as for other high-opportunity meetings you might be able to arrange with prospects from time to time. At a minimum, a rehearsal can consist of an informal walk-through of the points to be covered by the various meeting participants from your side, but for an important piece of business you should also conduct a more formal “dress rehearsal” of your full presentation, from start to finish. Generally, the more complicated the sale is, the more moving parts need to work together seamlessly, and the more important it is to rehearse the process.
One big advantage of having a full rehearsal is that it allows each presenter on your side to see what every other presenter will be saying, so everyone's remarks can be better coordinated, language and terminology aligned, and redundancy avoided.
If you work in a company with more than two or three hundred employees, your pitch meeting could easily involve executives from different divisions or units, some of whom barely know each other. And rehearsing for an upcoming meeting is the fastest way to get a bunch of smart-but-independent executives to think and behave more like a cohesive team.
But the biggest reason for rehearsing is to eliminate the glitches, contradictions, and lack of coordination that will plague any multi-person presentation, even one being conducted by executives who know each other quite well.
If your staff is inexperienced in public speaking, it is generally true that the more you rehearse the better. However, like training for a marathon, too many rehearsals can be exhausting. If your presentation runs a couple of hours and you rehearse all the way through more than once or maybe twice, you'll wear yourself out and peak too soon.
The most difficult part of any presentation, however, isn’t lining up each individual presenter’s message. It’s managing the transition from one speaker to another. If you concentrate on polishing these transitions, you will get 90% of the roughness out of your presentations, and your team will look more like a team.
So after first running through a full rehearsal, here's what you can do to hone your presentation to a sharper and sharper point without wearing out the team:
Let’s say your presentation will open with Jack, for instance, then Jerry and Sally will each present before turning it back to Jack for a closing bit. Just start by asking Jack to rehearse his first minute or two, as he opens the presentation. Then skip to his last minute, which presumably includes a lead in to Jerry's topic. Now Jerry rehearses his first minute, and then his last minute, leading in to Sally’s presentation. Sally does her first minute, then her last minute, turning it back to Jack, who again does a first minute and a last one, concluding the whole presentation.
You can rehearse a planned one- or two-hour presentation this way several times without wearing out your team. Simply by improving your team’s handoffs to each other you’ll sharpen the key messaging in your meeting, and you'll come across as a team, rather than just a collection of smart individuals.
------------
This is my third post in a series on how to execute better pitch meetings. The first two posts:
So You Scored a Face-to-Face Pitch Meeting? Here's How to Win It
How to Use Fewer Slides in a Pitch Meeting
Transitions are not about slide decks.
Customer experience expert, keynote speaker, business author, Founder of Peppers & Rogers Group
11 年Look, I don't want ANYONE to think I'm in favor of long meetings. I'm definitely not. But anyone who thinks they need less than an hour to explain a complex business undertaking, often involving millions of dollars of investment by a client in several different work streams over a period of time usually measured in years must not have been competing in the same pitches I've been competing in for most of my professional life. In these kinds of situations, you want all the discussion you can get - you want the prospect to ask every question and raise every issue that they might feel is relevant. But you also have to organize things so that the meeting doesn't simply wander aimlessly across all those different topics.
I try to make the world a better place, one step at a time.
11 年Any concept complex enough to require a two hour meeting to fully explain all the ins and outs of it needs to be written out longform and published as a PDF, complete with diagrams, a contents page, an index and probably half a dozen appendices.
I try to make the world a better place, one step at a time.
11 年No presentation should last one hour, let alone two in my humble opinion. I know someone who spends around half of his working days in meetings and he refuses to go to any meeting that will last more than 45 minutes at the most.
Thank you, Don! Perfect to come across this in my feed as I am about to walk into a rehearsal - will focus on transitions and keep Bill Crandall's advice in mind, too.