Before reading this you may be interested to read my previous posting No Time to Rehearse? You’re Fired!

At many professional firms, preparing for a sales meeting means many hours spent preparing a PowerPoint presentation deck that will double as a leave-behind. This document and maybe a proposal, too, have been through several iterations, proofed and reproofed, adjusted, adapted and then admired by the sales team who may or may not remember to thank the graphics specialist who stayed up all night incorporating last minute changes.

With document in hand and confidence buoyed, the sales team grabs a cab to take them to the client’s office.  During the fifteen minute ride they decide what they will say and who will say it.

This is insane.

Long ago I was put in charge of a struggling office that was losing pitch after pitch. To turn the situation around, I did post mortem interviews with as many people who had hired other firms as I could.  I used a process for the interview that avoided biasing the clients’ responses (see Chapter 24 in the second edition of my book, Rain Making: How to Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field for a detailed description of the process.).  I must have done twenty such interviews over several months, sometimes with separate members of the client’s selection committee.

I first asked the client why she had chosen the other firm, letting her prioritize her reasons without any suggestions from me.  I then asked what our competitor had done well, what we had done well and not so well, again without offering any suggestions.

Once I had her view of the decision, I asked her to compare what we did with what the competitor did, starting from first contact.  One issue at a time I asked how each firm handled the initial phone inquiry from the client, how each handled the fact finding meeting, the proposal, the pitch meeting, the leave-behind document, and follow up.

Not once was the proposal or leave-behind mentioned by any of the clients until I brought it up.  Not once!  When I did bring them up, it was clear the clients didn’t remember them very well, if at all.  I suspect that many of them never so much as glanced at the leave-behind.  The deck or pitch book were mentioned by two or three clients, all referring to one image, a particularly compelling diagram our competitor had concocted.

What they did remember and what all of them volunteered without prompting was how our people and our competitors had handled themselves in face-to-face interactions with their people.  This they could talk about in detail and with emotion. This is what they cared about!

Like so many other firms we had been putting all our energies into things that mattered little and treating cavalierly that which really counted.  It was insane!
And when we fixed it by taking rehearsals seriously—putting in time and effort where it mattered—we began to win again.
 

For more advice like this, please see Ford Hardings’ new book: Rain Making, Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, 2nd Edition

“Rain Making, in its new edition demonstrates its position as the single most sensible, accessible guide to building a professional practice…”
David Maister, author of Strategy and the Fat Smoker and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford)

Any athlete, no matter how talented, who doesn’t practice with the team falls short of being a true professional. Any actor, musician or dancer who doesn’t rehearse, is unlikely to make it as a professional. Professionals who don’t practice quickly find themselves without a position, part or seat with the team, cast or ensemble.

Accountants, actuaries, architects, engineers, executive recruiters, lawyers, management consultants, publicists have to prove themselves as presenters to make partner. That is because partners are professional presenters. They present to their clients, to judges and juries, to arbitrators, to zoning boards, to industry groups and to each other. And, of course, they present to prospective clients.

“When a group of our engineers stands up in front of a selection committee, they are being judged not so much on their abilities as engineers as on their presentation skills,” George Friedel said when, as head of sales for Parsons Brinckerhoff, he was helping stack up one of the most impressive win rates I know of.

“By the time the client gets to the short list, they know that each of the firms they are considering is technically qualified. They choose on the basis of which team will work with them best. At that final meeting, then, your ability to communicate effectively using entertainment techniques, is more important that your ability to engineer,” he added.

Spend enough years participating in the bake-off competitions for huge infrastructure projects that a firm like Parsons Brinckerhoff pursues and you will know this is true. It is equally true, though less obviously so, of most sales meetings that professionals have. The infrastructure engineering firms know what’s at stake and they do rehearse, sometimes well and sometimes not, but they do it.

There are many professional firms that prepare for an hour-long sales meeting in the ten minute cab ride to the client’s office. Or they will spend 30 hours of firm time preparing slides or a leave-behind document and not five minutes on rehearsing. They have all kinds of excuses:

• I don’t have time.
• There’s no time when we can all get together.
• I don’t learn anything from rehearsals.
• I don’t do well in rehearsals, but I’m great in front of the client.
• What’s to rehearse?
• I never rehearsed before and have done okay.

I have a response for all of these excuses. Say: “Okay, you don’t have to rehearse, but if you don’t win the business, you’re fired. You’re fired because you have been unprofessional and wasted firm time and money and were unwilling to do what it takes to minimize the chances of losing. You will have set a bad example for the others in the firm, and I must make it clear to all that what you did was unacceptable.” And if they don’t rehearse, and they lose, fire them.

Whew!! I feel so much better having gotten that rant out of my system! Could you visualize me letting him have it? How I whipped that office into shape! Oh, that felt good.

I can now focus on something more helpful to you. In next week’s posting on being prepared, I will describe what preparing for a sales meeting means.

(Sims Wyeth also discusses presenations in his post The Show in Business

Different consultants, seeing the same client situation through different disciplinary lenses, can come up with strikingly different guidance. Three of us, all of whom consult to professional firms, thought it might be interesting to see how our different orientations influence the advice we would give to a client about the same topic: Things you shouldn’t say or do at a competitive presentation of your services to a potential client.

We are: a) presentation coach Sims Wyeth who can show a wet blanket how to set itself on fire when on a podium, b) marketing consultant, Suzanne Lowe, author of Marketplace Masters: How Professional Firms Compete to Win, who can get a burlap bag full of cats, dogs and canaries humming the same tune, and c) me. Our firm helps professionals becomer rainmakers.

I decided to establish criteria by which submittals (all from me) for inclusion in my list of Five Biggest Presentation Don’ts could be rated. To do the rating I assembled a committee of fifteen totally objective judges carefully selected to ensure inclusion of representative members by gender, education level, geography, political leanings, age, race and ability to hold their liquor. After assuring myself that all fifteen could meet the last criterion, I asked them to rate 114 entries for the things you shouldn’t say in a presentation of your services to a prospective client. Each submission was rated on three criteria, which are:

a) Relevancy: Thou shall not talk about things of no interest or importance to the client.
b) Redundancy: Thou shall not say things said by your competitors.
c) Believability: Thou shall not tell any whoppers, or anything that sounds like one.

Ranked from weak to laughable, the committee chose the following five things not to say:

1. We are organized into seven practices (or studios). Only one judge rated this entry, the others falling immediately into a deep sleep upon its being read to them. The insomniac judge’s mark was for lacking relevancy. As he dozed off, too, he muttered, “The client doesn’t care. Tell her about the part of the organization relevant to her and skip the rest.”
2. We want to be your partner on this matter. Three judges revived enough to give this claim three marks on believability. As one judge said, “The last time I tried that one, the client said, ‘Really? How much money do you plan to put up?’ This is just an inflated way of saying you’ll give good service.”
3. You will be our most important client. “I bet you say that to all the girls,” said one judge in falsetto. The other judges tittered quietly at that comment, while the funny one added his mark to five others on the basis of believability. Said another, “Even if it’s true, what will happen to your other clients, if I hire you? If a client comes along who is even prettier than I am, what happens to us.”
4. We are the oldest and largest . . . This got ten marks. The first six for being totally irrelevant. Again a judge said “The client doesn’t care.” To which I said, “What if there are many fly-by-night competitors in this field and you want to show you’re different from them?” “Then tell them that,” snapped a judge. “Say, ‘In a field where a lot of companies come and go, we are committed to being long term providers, and the age and size of our firm prove it.’” One judge also gave a mark each for redundancy and believability, saying, “I once attended competitive presentations where two firms claimed to be oldest and largest. Because their definitions of what they were oldest and largest of differed, both were telling the truth. The selection committee members weren’t impressed.”
5. What makes us special is our people. Every member of our totally objective panel rolled on the floor at this one. One laughed so hard, he rolled under the conference table, and we had to listen to his sporadic te-he-he’s for the rest of the meeting. The other judges marked this one down by 38 points, giving it the lowest score in recorded history. (I know, there were only fifteen judges, but they had become drunk with their power by this time and insisted they had to have more than one mark each to give this one the rating it deserved.) Thirty of these marks are for redundancy. One judge exclaimed “Don’t ever say those words! Don’t ever say them, because everyone does at every presentation!” She began to mimic presenters, saying the overworked words again and again in different tones of voice with mock sincerity, causing a howl of laughter once again. “Your people’s specialness must be in a way that is important to the buyer or he doesn’t care,” explained one. The final mark is for believability. The oldest judge said, “It sounds like so many warm words to me. I don’t want warm words. I want meat.”

We all adjourned to the cafeteria for lunch.

If you would like to submit additional things that shouldn’t be said or done in a presentation, Suzanne, Sims and I would be glad to pass them on to our totally objective board of fifteen judges for rating. To see a marketing expert’s choices for presentation don’ts, go to Suzanne Lowe’s blog. To see a presentation coach’s choices, go to Sims Wyeth’s blog.