Chapter 8
If You Want Big Contracts, Get Really Good at Short List Presentations
“Timid salesmen have skinny kids.”
—Zig Ziglar
In many industries, prospective buyers will request proposals from a few vendors, weed through those proposals, narrow down the possible vendors to a short list, and then have each of the short list vendors participate in an interview or a formal presentation to determine which company wins the contract. Keep in mind that these purchasers don’t always use the presentation as the determining factor in choosing their vendor, but it will at least be a factor in excluding vendors if nothing else. However, if you are a qualified vendor, you give the best presentation, and no other political factors are involved, you have a good shot at closing the contract.
The main thing to remember about these interviews is that the purchasers (usually a committee of some kind) will make the assumption that you are a qualified vendor simply because you have been invited to present and compete for the contract. The committees often have a team of people who weed through the thick proposals to exclude any companies that aren’t qualified. So unless you prove otherwise to them, they will almost always automatically assume that you are qualified.
In Chapter 1, I stated:
The confidence that a person shows when standing up to speak is often perceived by others to be competence in what he or she does.
This statement is vitally true in short list presentations and interviews. When a presenter participates in an interview, the committee will determine that person’s competence based on the content delivered and the confidence that the presenter exhibits when delivering this content. The presenter can be the most experienced, the most seasoned, the most qualified, and the most recognized expert in the entire industry, but if the person looks timid or nervous or in any way sounds unsure or confused, then that presenter will often be excluded from consideration immediately (especially if other, less qualified presenters look confident and sure of themselves). The good news is that if you are one of the less qualified presenters but you look extremely confident and sure of yourself, then there is a good chance that the committee might pass over these other presenters and consider you.
All other things considered, confidence and surety in the presentation mean more than actual experience or expertise during the interview process. Remember, this is true only because the people making the decision assume that all of the presenters are qualified; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been invited to present.
DIG YOUR WELL BEFORE YOU ARE THIRSTY
Since self-confidence is so important in these types of presentations, don’t wait until two days before the presentation to start preparing for it. By the way, I’m not talking about the presentation itself. I’m referring to the preparing of presenters well in advance so that when the opportunity presents itself, you and your presenters are able to capitalize on that opportunity.
About six years ago, I was brought in as a speaking coach for a joint venture between a big engineering firm and a minority general contracting company. The companies were trying to close a commercial town square retail center, so the stakes were very high. The prospective client wanted to meet the team that they would be working with, so the presentation team was composed of the general contractor, one of the vice presidents of the engineering form, the project manager, the superintendent, the lead engineer, and a couple of other team members who would appear but not have speaking parts. The general contractor, vice president, and project manager had all participated in countless presentations and were very seasoned. The superintendent had much less experience as a presenter; he was much more comfortable with power tools than a slide show. However, he was prepared and ready to do his part. The lead engineer, though, had never in his career participated in any type of sales presentation and had likely given only a small number of any other type of presentation as well. He was totally unprepared to have a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars weighing on his shoulders.
Luckily, we were able to minimize his part in the presentation and build his confidence so that he performed adequately, but every single person on the team (even the engineer) knew that he was the weakest link on the team. When the presentation was finished, I went to the vice president of the engineering firm and mentioned to him that he put an enormous amount of pressure onto the shoulders of a man who was totally unprepared. If that contract had fallen through as a result of the presentation they just completed, he’d have himself to blame, not the engineer. This particular engineer had been working for the company for more than 10 years and had never been trained for a vital part of his success.
Over the next two years, we conducted presentation training for every single person in the company. By the way, once we had trained all of the executives and then trained the next generation of leaders, I figured that my role as their presentation trainer would end. I was wrong. The vice president had already seen so much value from the earlier classes that he ended up having me do additional classes for everyone else in the office, including the receptionist. Over these two years, his team closed more than 80 percent of their short list presentations (an incredibly high percentage). After the first few successes, we started to realize something very simple but profound. Almost every one of the competitors for these projects went into the presentation with at least one or two really good presenters, but they were always accompanied by a supporting cast who were hit or miss in terms of portraying confidence when they stood up to speak. Our teams were always polished and in control—right down to the people sitting at the back of the room who weren’t even involved in the presentation but who, at times, answered questions from the committee when needed. It made a big difference.
About a year after I taught the last class for this company, the largest general contracting company in the United States made an offer to buy out the company. Almost every team member who went through the coaching ended up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock options in the purchasing company, and the high-level executives generated millions in stock in the bigger company. Everybody won. The clients got better service, the engineering firm got tremendous growth and created hundreds of new jobs, the executives created a massive amount of wealth, and the employees experienced an increase in their standard of living.
Don’t wait until a big company invites you to compete for a big contract before you prepare yourself and your team to be able to capitalize on the opportunity.
Dig your well before you are thirsty.
SHOW CLIENTS HOW YOU CAN HELP THEM GET WHAT THEY REALLY WANT
We covered this quite a bit in Chapter 2 on how to design your presentations, but it is so important to success in sales presentations for you to focus on what the customer wants, not what you want to say. To do this, you will need to do some research ahead of time. If nothing else, google your potential client. You’d be amazed what you can find out.
One of the most fun classes that I have ever taught was a couple of years ago when I was hired to do sales training for a brewery in Salt Lake City. (They had a bar downstairs where they held tastings of the fresh beer right as it was brewed!) One of the sessions I covered in the class was about how to do research and how important that research can be in helping the company better understand and persuade clients. I spent an hour or so prior to class searching for information about the brewery and each of the individuals attending the class. In that hour, I uncovered who the executives of the company were and found a lot of information about their backgrounds. I found an article about the sales manager who hired me in which he was being interviewed because he was a car collector. I found out where one of the ladies in class grew up, what college she went to, what sorority she was a member of, the names of a few of her best friends, and what companies her best friends work for. I found out that one of the other sales reps started out working in the family art business and that he was named after his uncle who owns that art business. (The amount of information that I found in such a short period of time was actually kind of creepy, but shockingly effective.)
When researching the company, I learned that it is the only brewery in the country whose energy needs are being provided entirely through renewable forms of energy. This sounded like a great selling point, so I did some more research. It turns out that the company paid the same fee to the electric company as every one of its competitors, but because of its environmental philosophy, the brewery was purchasing offsets that were used to generate an equal amount of green energy, such as wind and solar. This meant that the brewery’s expenses were higher than its competitors’. Without knowing anything about the company’s prices or pricing structure, within an hour, I was able to find out that, most likely, its prices were higher than the competitors’ or its profit margin was going to be thinner. If the profit margin was lower, then the company would likely have to sacrifice somewhere else, either lower sales commissions or maybe less marketing. I wasn’t exactly sure at the time which of these was the case, but the research allowed me to ask much better questions. The answers to those questions helped me provide a better course for the company.
You want to do the same type of thing when you begin to research your clients before these interviews. If you are going to be presenting to a school board, go to its website and read up on the members. Most public hearings such as school board meetings are taped and offered on demand on the school district’s website. You can watch some of these recordings and get a better feel for each individual member and what that person deems most important. You can do a news search for all the members on the committee and see if any news stories have been written about them. Look to see if they have a LinkedIn account or even a Facebook page. Try to collect as much information as you can about the company and the individuals making the purchasing decision.
Once you do some preliminary research, you will want to design some questions to ask the client that will help you uncover what the real needs and wants of the client are. For some reason, most presenters skip this step all together. During one of these short list coaching sessions, I suggested that the group of presenters call the contact person who was organizing the presentation schedule to help us clarify what was most important to the committee, and one of the presenters paused, looked at me, and said, “But it is a sealed bid situation.” I wasn’t sure exactly what difference that made, so I just paused and didn’t say anything. He continued with, “Since it is a sealed bid, we can’t really talk to anyone before they open up the bids.”
“Who said that was a rule?” I asked.
The silence was my answer. They all assumed that they couldn’t call the organizer, but they went back and checked the request for quote (RFQ) and found that there was actually a phone number listed within the text of the RFQ for just such a call. Within a few minutes, they found out that although the overall price was important, the organization had set a pretty aggressive schedule that was actually much more important to the success of the project than the price—and the organizer freely volunteered this information. We altered the presentation dramatically as a result.
Once you figure out what is important to the purchasers, design your presentation focused on the three most important points.
I like to use buying a car as an example to explain this process, because it is often so obvious once you see the process happen in real life. Whenever someone purchases a car, the person will have a hierarchy of car features based on what is most important to him or her. Let’s say that the car buyer travels a lot by car for work and often drives 3 to 4 hours a few times per week to travel from city to city. He uses the mileage for the car as a tax deduction. The car that the buyer owns now has been a great car, but it has been in the shop twice this year, so the buyer has spent money on repairs and rental cars. He also has sales samples to carry in the car when he travels for business and a wife and two kids when he is at home, so passenger space and cargo room are both pretty important.
So the buyer’s hierarchy is as follows:
Dependability + Warranty + Gas Mileage + Cargo Space + Passenger Room + Price
The buyer walks into a car dealership and the salesperson asks, “So what kind of car are you looking for?”
If the buyer has done a little research, he might give a name of a model. But let’s say that the buyer says something like, “Maybe a minivan or an SUV.”
The salesperson takes him to the lot and picks one minivan and one SUV, and they go on a test-drive in each. At the end of the test-drive, the salesperson asks, “Which did you like better?” The buyer selects the SUV.
This happens in a very similar way on two additional car lots, but because none of the salespeople asked even a few preliminary questions about what the purchaser wanted, the only real information that the buyer has to make a decision is the test-drive itself, the gas mileage sticker on the window, and the price. Mentally, the buyer will go through the checklist either consciously or subconsciously.
Dependability? Well, all three salespeople said that their brand was the most dependable, so at least two of them were lying. Warranty? Well, each of them had a three-year warranty, but I’m not sure which company best backs their warranty. Gas mileage? The sticker said that the SUV from the second company had the best number, but they were all within one point of each other. Cargo space? SUV number one looked biggest, but they were all pretty similar. Passenger room? SUV number three had third-row seats, but it cost $2,000 more than the other two.
Since none of the salespeople took an interest in the customer, he makes the purchasing decision based on the numbers in the window (either the mileage or the price). In fact, the buyer might actually choose to pay $2,000 more for the SUV that has the third-row seat—the fifth most important aspect. However, it didn’t have to be that way. All it would have taken was a single salesperson to ask a couple of questions. If any one of the salespeople had determined that dependability and warranty were most important, then the salesperson could have introduced the buyer to the service manager and asked the service manager about the dependability of the car. That little extra contact would probably be enough to put that particular car over the top, because the other salespeople did so little.
I find that short list presentations and interviews are often organized this way. Presenters often spend a lot of time talking about themselves, their company, their experience, and their expertise, and they very rarely pause and focus on what the client really wants. If the presenters can prove to the client that their team can give them just one of the things that they really want, they will often get a nice response. If the presentation team can give the client two or three things that are wanted, the decision becomes a no-brainer.
“Since you are a road warrior, I know how important having access to your car is, so you don’t want it to be in the shop. Just by buying a new car, any new car, you’re going to eliminate that repair cost and inconvenience that you’ve been experiencing recently. Out of all of the SUVs that we sell, this particular model is the one that we see least of in the service department. In fact, I’ll walk you through the service area as we head back to my office, and we can do a spot-check to see what cars are in there. This car has the standard three-year or 30,000-mile warranty, but since you drive 15,000 miles per year on average, I’m going to upgrade the warranty to include 45,000 miles so that it fits the way you drive. This car gets only 19 miles to the gallon in the city, which is the price that you pay for the passenger room and extra cargo space, but on the highway, that goes up to 23 miles to the gallon, so that will help you a little. This one is a little smaller than the ones that have the third-row seats, but the bigger versions lower your gas mileage by about 3 miles to the gallon. Since the IRS gives only you 50 cents per mile, every little bit helps, though. Do you have your samples with you? Let’s go see how they fit in the cargo area?”
See how much better that presentation is than, “What kind of car are you looking at?” and “Which did you like better?”
Focus on what the client wants and needs, and you will help the client make a better, more informed decision!
SHOW THE COMMITTEE THAT YOU ARE A TEAM
Two of the main things that purchasers are looking for, since they already assume that you are qualified, is whether they like you and whether they can work with you. One often-overlooked aspect that will build great rapport with the audience is the way that the presenters edify and interact with one another. Are the presenters showing respect to their team members by building up the expertise of the other presenters, or is there only one main presenter who is building up himself or herself? If your group is the former, then the audience is much more likely to respect you and want to work with you.
One of the groups who I worked with in the past did this by inserting their introductions for one another into the heart of the presentation, versus giving a quick introduction for each presenter at the beginning of the presentation. The lead presenter covered the first point, gave an example, and included a cool analogy. Then he introduced the second presenter by saying, “I know that the schedule is vital to the success of this project, so I’d like to introduce David (first name only) to you. He’ll be your project manager, and he has a phenomenal success rate at completing projects either on time or early. In fact, three of his last five projects were each completed at least two weeks prior to the contracted deadline. David?” When David introduced the engineer, he gave a similar introduction. Every time that they switched to a new presenter, the previous presenter would build up the credibility of the next speaker before he or she even said a word. It worked wonderfully.
USE SHOWMANSHIP TO MAKE YOU AND YOUR TEAM MEMORABLE
I’ve given a lot of examples of different types of showmanship you can use in your presentations, but keep in mind that everything I have given you in this book has already been used, so it may not be as fresh or impactful as something new that you make up yourself.
For example, I explained earlier in the book how one company used the big posters with the portraits of the team members as a way for the committee to remember them. The reason why we had to come up with that piece of showmanship was that in an earlier presentation, the same group had been using a place mat for the committee members. The place mat was pretty cool, and I thought it was a great idea. It was an 11 × 17 piece of glossy card stock that included the company name and logo, a portrait of each presenter with a short biography, the agenda bullet points, and even a space for notes. These place mats looked great, and they seemed to be very functional.
The committee meeting where the presentations were being made was open to the public, so I was able to sit in the gallery and watch the team that I was coaching, as well as all the other presentation teams, give their presentations. Just before the first team started presenting, they gave the committee a place mat. The second team gave the committee a place mat. Our team was third, and we gave them a place mat. The fourth team didn’t provide a place mat, but they gave a terrible presentation and I got the feeling that this might have been the first sales presentation that the team had ever delivered. I suspect they were excluded pretty quickly.
The point is that somewhere along the way, some company had a great idea to give out a place mat, and because it was such a good idea, everyone started doing it. Once everyone started doing it, it was no longer showmanship. So our group decided to do something different, and the big posters worked really well. Guess what happened the next time they presented? Correct. A bunch of the other teams had big life-sized posters.
In another presentation, one of our competitors decided to make a huge schedule board that was about 4 feet tall and 10 feet wide, and the team used that board as the agenda for their presentation; they never used a single PowerPoint slide. It was a very well-organized presentation, and they delivered it beautifully. They ended up winning the contract.
The next time we competed with that company, we knew we had to be better. We created an animated video of the schedule, where the committee could see step-by-step what each phase of the project would look like.
When one company does something new and fresh, it gets noticed. When everybody does the same thing, though, you’re likely to just get lost in the crowd. So be creative.