Deconstruction a Great Presentation

What's your client thinking?

Ask any two consultants to turn back the clock and explain how they spent the precious weeks, days, and hours prior to giving a successful presentation, and you'll likely hear two very different tales. What takes place within this period is a complex orchestration of creative and analytical resources that is more akin to alchemy than it is to art or science. And while no definitive blueprint is known to exist, how you give birth to a great presentation is hardly a mystery.

Barbick, the project leader (and incidentally, who has a bachelor's degree in psychology), started devoting time to the meeting as soon as the client's Request for Proposal came out, 30 days before the big event. That's when he began to assemble his team, culled from five offices around the country. The team then began researching the competitors, assigned a full-time proposal writer and production manager, and began the first of many teleconferencing calls among themselves.
Individual consultants will be in a better position to customize a presentation to the nth degree — and ultimately distinguish themselves — if they've done their homework on the clients, their competitors, the clients' competitors, and the market.
This game plan — plus an extra dose of ingenuity — worked for Zoran Svetlicic, an interactive strategist in Organic's Chicago office. Svetlicic and his team recently clinched a full-service e-business account with a start-up toy company. How?
"We told the whole presentation through fables," says Svetlicic, who aims to have an outline of his presentation
within the first two days of getting an assignment, or sales call engagement, and a dress rehearsal the day before or the morning of the presentation.
With 10 days to go before their meeting, Svetlicic and his team scoured bookstores for children's stories, as well as books on child psychology and the history of toys.

The fable format worked, because the Organic team used the morals at the end of each story to drive home a point. For example, they told the fable about the astronomer who is so preoccupied with the sky that he falls into a well. The point? It's easy to overlook the obvious, which is what the toy company's competitors were doing. The Organic team wanted to demonstrate how they saw an opportunity to reinvent the market and exactly how they would do it.
"The first thing we do is try to get inside their heads and learn what makes them tick," Svetlicic says. "We do a lot of snooping on the Net, researching any articles or interviews that have been published. We try to get a sense of what type of language they use, what the hot buttons are."
Barbick, who gave his client a written proposal to review before the meeting, wanted to make sure his oral presentation was not a regurgitation of the written one. He wanted a new report with a new set of visuals, and settled on a colorful PowerPoint document for their presentation.
"Part of our strategy was to present an image that we were as cost-conscious as they were. We did not choose to come in with a PowerPoint presentation that had all kinds of audio and video clips," says Barbick.

Your client's test drive

The other trap many consultants fall into is presenting in one long monologue. This is especially difficult to avoid in cases of meeting with selection committees, who traditionally aren't very forthcoming with details.

Barbick, the Mercer consultant whose presentation was last, says he knew this all too well.
"One of the things I like to do in a presentation is to give the committee a true working session," says Barbick, who also added that one of the first things he did was turn on the lights, which had been dimmed by the previous presenters, to their fullest capacity. "The thing they are trying to answer is: What is it you are trying to do for us? How do we understand your approach? What will it be like to work with you? It's consulting on the spot. It's like going for a test drive."

This was not going to happen if the clients just settled back in their seats to hear the presenter speak. Because Barbick's team was hoping to recommend a different approach than its competitors', they looked for the dead giveaway: Did the selection team ask questions? "When they've heard the same thing before, you don't get a lot of questions. When they ask a lot of questions, which they did, it's indicative that we had a new approach."
Many consultants feel that new business presentations are the ones that most often produce the octane necessary to propel careers. But Matthew Levin, a consultant with Sibson & Co.'s Chicago office, says a client-deliverable presentation, which he gave about 10 months ago, was one that gave him a professional boost.

His presentation was the culmination of a nine-month, $300,000 project. It was nine months of focus groups, interviews, data analysis, and modeling in order to whittle five strategic alternatives down to one. The presentation, made to about 150 people, was data-heavy, and took about two weeks to put together.
"I usually look at their facial reactions. Does it look like people understand what I'm saying? If not, I'll say, 'We can take time for questions now. It's important that you understand the presentation throughout,'" says Levin.
Tom Antion, the author of Wake 'em Up, says that it's easier to gauge a client's response when consultants have spent enough time practicing bits of their presentation. "Take certain chunks of your material — two, five, 10 minutes' worth — and practice it out loud between 30 and 50 times. Do it in your throwaway time — washing your hair, driving to work, or jogging. Practice it out loud, because your mouth doesn't always go where your mind tells it. Your mouth and your brain will keep the information coming out, while you're paying attention to whether the audience is with you or not."
This worked for Barbick, who was presenting before a global company that was reining in their European operations four years ago.
While waiting for the main decision-maker, the executive vice president of global operations, his assistant took a look at the board. "The boss hates flow charts," she said.
"Everyone went kind of pale. But at that point there was nothing we could do. We very strongly believed we designed the right approach. And it won out," Barbick says. "We clearly communicated the process and how the flow chart would work. We got hired, and he said that this was the first flow chart that he had ever understood."

Sidebar: Power Points:

• Great presentations often begin with consultants doing the necessary homework on clients, competitors, their clients' competitors, and the market.     
• Too often a presentation's quality suffers because consultants are tinkering with PowerPoint slides or some other component up until the very last minute. Great presenters are aware of their limitations when it comes to beating the clock. 

• One trap many consultants fall into is presenting in one long monologue. This is often difficult to avoid in cases involving selection committees, who traditionally aren't very forthcoming with details.

Sidebar: Stop Me If You've Heard This Before … Or Just Stop Me

Ever hear the one about the consultant who told the Peter at the Pearly Gates joke to a group of religious healthcare professionals?
"It was a lead balloon with this group of serious folks," says Manuel Lowenhaupt, a principal in Deloitte Consulting's Boston office, who
witnessed the reputable consultant's gaffe. "If you are not good at telling jokes, think about skipping it. Instead of doing a mediocre job at telling a joke, why not get to work and use humor later?"

There's one simple rule for using humor in a business presentation, says Tom Antion, the author of Wake 'em Up: If it doesn't make a point or reinforce one, don't use it. "In this very politically correct society, a lot of humor that was used in the past is now taboo. You don't say, 'Take my wife, please,' and you don't say anything regarding drinking, disabilities, and sexual preferences. Any of those things is absolutely taboo."
Lowenhaupt, a seasoned presenter, says consultants risk losing more than they'd gain by using humor. "I have a good friend who is a very good public speaker. He told jokes to a middle-aged female professional group, and they thought he was a clown. That's not how you build credibility."
Lowenhaupt says that consultants can liven up a dry presentation with a story that includes amusing elements. "I borrow carefully chosen cartoons by Gary Larson and Scott Adams and scatter them into my presentation."
There is actually a formula to telling jokes in business presentations, says Antion, who is based in Landover Hills, MD. It goes like this: point, illustration, point.

For example, Antion was booked to do a child care conference and used a battery-powered lollipop sucker to make his point that children these days have it too easy. The punch line was, "Kids nowadays don't even need to lick their own sucker." And then he restated
his point, "It's no wonder they are growing up and going to therapy."
"People can only take so much heavy information before they zone out," cautions Antion. "Humor is used as a respite, to give the mind a little break so you can breathe."