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Thousands of companies have already helped themselves to one or more of our free resources. We’d love you to make use of them as well!
As AI becomes more widely adopted in both bidding and procurement, the person-to-person presentation stage of the bid will be even more vital.
This is where the evaluators get answers to really important questions:
Can I work with them?
Are they ready to get going?
Can I trust them?
Do they inspire me?
Do they know their stuff?
Are they a cohesive team?
In my experience as a coach and trainer, many organisations simply don't think in the right way about presentations. Here are four examples of where some go wrong:
This is a biggie. The conscious mind can only process a small amount of information at one time and – crucially – can't read and listen simultaneously. Movie and documentary makers get this. Internet content providers get this. Normal people get this when they're having everyday conversations. But when it comes to bid presentations (or any presentations, in fact) this knowledge often flies out of the out of the window. We besiege our audiences with masses of information at once and compel them to choose between reading, listening, flipping between the two or switching off. Spoiler: they frequently choose the final option.
Some of this comes down to convention but some of it relates to point 1 above – we're thinking about ourselves, not the audience. We haven't got time to rehearse what we're going to say, so we rely on our visuals as prompts, regardless of the terrible impact it's having on our audiences' brains. Or, we decide that the slides should do a poor double-act as a leave-behind to save us the effort of creating a separate pitch book or follow-up document that would wow the client.
And there's more. There are so many ways that we can command the audience's attention – through structure, visual and verbal storytelling, movement and repetition, to name but a few.But do we use these? Certainly not as much as we should.We offer unique courses that will change your team's mindset about presentations and give them some powerful tactics to use and share. We've worked with teams in sectors from management consultancy and financial services to technology and construction and the feedback's always amazing – even from seasoned professsionals with many years of presenting experience.(We not infrequently hear the phrase 'quantum leap'.) These courses (which are very different from traditional presentation skills training) are great for salespeople, bid professionals and, indeed, anyone who simply wants to present with much more impact. Typically, we work directly with organisations, but I'd love to know if any of you would be interested in public courses where you can send one or two people. Very happy to chat about what SP can offer here.
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