The 11th-Hour Prep Work You Must Do Before Any Big Pitch Meeting

By Tom Searcy | July 26, 2011 @BNET.COM

It has all of the excitement of the big game, the high school play, and your first illicit smoke wrapped up in one. It’s “all-you-can-eat night” at the adrenaline junkie café.

I’m talking about the night before the pitch for the big piece of business — it could be the final interview in an RFP process, a proposal meeting with the big prospect, or the next step with your biggest client. Regardless, it is show time and you and your team, (your team could be no bigger team than your pet, yourself, and your coffee pot), are up late getting ready with all of the final details.

I have been through it a ton of times and I have watched dozens of clients go through it. This experience has taught me some key things that you should do to get it right in getting ready.

First, I am not going to tell you that you should have prepared beforehand and that it is about organization, planning, blah, blah, blah — you already know all of that and you are still pressed for time up until the last minute. What I will tell you is that if you focus on the wrong things, you may get through the pitch well, but you may hurt your chances of getting the business.

Here are the right things to prepare:

Who’s the “shoe”? - In Vegas, when you are playing cards, the cards are dealt by the dealer from a box called “the shoe.” In our terms, whomever is playing your master of ceremonies is the shoe. He or she is managing the meeting and the movement through the presentation as well as fielding the questions from the audience and selecting members of the team to answer. There can only be one shoe in a meeting for your team. Pick this person early in the process so that you can always ask, “Do you understand this and can you run this part of the meeting?”

People over slides - A lot of the preparation I usually see is around the presentation slides, as if the slides will tell the story. Slides don’t — you and your team do, so work your people hard. So much so that you can cut slides. Know what they will say, the props they will use, and what questions they will ask the group you are pitching.

The “Murder Board” exercise - Everyone on your team has a secret fear that he or she might be the one to screw up. Ask yourself and your team: What questions could they ask us in this presentation that would absolutely kill us? Then make certain you have the questions answered well and the person responsible for answering the question assigned. A fast, strong answer to a killer question is a great tone setter for the meeting.

Never trust your technology demo - Be prepared to pitch without it — and smoothly transition if it blows up. I have seen tech demos become tech dramas A LOT. The technology may be an important part of your pitch — it might even be the whole reason for the meeting — but if it blows up, you have to be prepared to address it and move on.

Get five hours of sleep - You don’t need a full night’s sleep. But adrenaline and caffeine work better with a foundation to sit on and five hours of sleep will give it to you.

While I’m at it, I’ll also give you some of my worst mistakes:

• Opening the shrink-wrap on the software package we had decided to use to create some of the elements of the next day’s pitch for the first time at 2 a.m. on the morning of the meeting.
• Taking the red-eye from one pitch to get to the next pitch. That day I got the names, business issues, and even the terms of the deal mixed up so badly that the prospect asked us to come back in the afternoon when we were a little clearer on the details (this one is so painful, almost 20 years later I can hardly write about it).
• Taking a team of the CEO, CFO, and COO to a meeting for which they had not adequately been briefed. I also failed to go through the Murder Board exercise and assigned them roles for the presentation. They spent the majority of the meeting arguing with each other on the assumptions in the presentation in front of the client

If you are a part of big pitches, you may have some of your own war stories to share. I would love to hear them.