13 Best Practices For Client Presentations
12/16/2008
For the marketing consultants, and the people who work with consultants, this one is for you.
Sometimes I think of a consulting project as a well orchestrated event. So many pieces have to integrate to be successful. For example, you've spent hours and hours and possibly months researching, analyzing and developing recommendations. The day has finally come to present to your client. At this moment in time How you present is as critical as What you present.
One of my favorite from the heart gigs is co-teaching a management consulting class at
Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. This innovative course provides undergraduate (juniors and seniors) with a unique opportunity to actually be a consultant to a non profit "client. It's not often that a consultant gets to touch the lives of people beginning their careers.This is why I give up summer weekends to prep the course and cut business trips short ..
The course was profiled in Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell's ebook Creating Customer Evangelists - click on Bloomberg Marketing and highlighted in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Our clients this year included: Christian City, Parent to Parent of Georgia, Junior League of Atlanta, Martin Luther King Historic Site, Georgia Family Credit Union Project, Park Pride, MUST Ministries, National Gaucher Foundation.
In addition to working with the amazing students and great "clients" (over the past 5 years), I've had the opportunity to collaborate with some talented co-instructors. None more so than this year .. Dr. Skip Gunther, a retired Booz Allen Hamilton partner.
Skip has to be one of the most eclectic guys I know not only is he an adjunct prof at Goizueta but the Leader of
Brookwood Split, The High Energy Party Band. The band plays renditions of the most popular rock, funk, soul, and R&B cover songs of the past thirty years. You're in the metro Atlanta area check out Brookwood Spit .. even worth a trip OTP!
In keeping with the music intro Skip wrapped the semester with a few notes on how to make a client presentation sing (ouch! sorry Skip). His advice to the students is equally, if not more, valuable to professional consultants. Thanks for sharing it with Diva Marketing Skip.
13 Best Practices For Client Presentations from Prof Skip Gunther
1. Be sure to put your presentation and report into proper context before jumping into findings, conclusions, recommendations – several of the teams missed an opportunity here.
2. Always think like an executive: how much will it cost, what will my expected returns be, what will it do to the organization, who can I have do this?
Often, these questions are answered in part by doing a pro forma financial analysis. Other parts of the answers come from prioritizing the recommendations so that your audience can see relative degrees of importance
3. Make certain that you introduce your team (name and role) as one of the first agenda items – it helps keep the audience focused on your presentation rather than thinking about who these other people are and why they are there.
4. Always tie your recommendations back to your research findings and conclusions. Your recommendations may be great ones, but, when not placed in context, they may cause your audience to wonder about why this particular recommendation over something else.
5. Always make certain that your client is totally on board before making a presentation to others.
6. Don’t try to disguise incomplete analysis by representing it as something that it is not – you will be found out and will lose all credibility with your client (and others). Intellectual honesty is always best.
7. Be careful with flipping dense word charts too quickly, or, if your intent is to make a simple point with obvious depth of supporting points, touch on a couple of the supporting points at least before moving on.
8. Rise to the cause if your team looks at you for the response to a question, and either give a thoughtful answer, or acknowledge that you will have to think about that and get back to the person asking the question – try not to come across as talking without thinking, as doing so will result in your loss of credibility, which is never a good thing.
9. Work to have some kind of mechanism at the start to totally engage your audience – a provocative question often does it – and make sure that the potentially distracting stuff like not introducing team mates is not present.
10. Always try to give credit to the client for good ideas, key insights, etc.
For example, all of your recommendations may have initially come from the client, but the contribution you made was to put them into a framework and in context so that everyone can see what great ideas they are.
11. Good consultants look for ways to reflect praise back to their clients. After all, you are (usually) getting paid and that (plus the strong satisfaction of doing a creative, professional job) is your reward. The client has to live with what you present and recommend.
12. Present enough of the supporting analytics to motivate your conclusions and recommendations – much of this will find its way into the appendices, but always have ‘just enough’ in the story line.
13. Always be meticulous in citing your resources – it’s ok that you didn’t create everything, but what you did was integrate it into a story to solve a problem.
So .. how to you bring the notes together and make your cleint presenations rock n roll?
