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Careful Preparation, Continued |
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7. Practice: Conduct a Dress Rehearsal
The dress rehearsal is your final run-through. If you know what kind of room you'll be presenting in, select a room that is similar in size and layout. If you plan to bring your own equipment to the actual presentation, bring it into the room and set it up just as you really might. (You don't want to find out too late that the crates are too heavy for the three presenters to manage, or that none of you knows how to set up the equipment when you have an audience in the client's office, so you need to find out these things now.) Here are the important things to attend to for the dress rehearsal:
Invite People to be Reviewers
Encourage reviewers to emulate the people you think will be in the room during the actual presentation. If the client will have just a few people, your dress rehearsal should have just a few people; if your client will have an auditorium of 50, move your dress rehearsal to the local high school, if necessary, and invite 20 officemates.
Rehearse Without Interruption
Comments and suggestions should be written down and provided to the Proposal Manager for dissemination the next day. Creating a dress rehearsal that emulates the actual presentation gives the presentation team an anchor that helps them manage the nervousness common on the day of presentation.
Create a Supportive, Positive Atmosphere
The frame of mind of your presenters is determined by the atmosphere during the rehearsals. Stressed out, scared, harassed presenters don't do as well as presenters who have some confidence and are relatively calm. Your organization may have a zealot, a "screamer" or a "slash and burn artist" for written proposals, and indeed you may need someone who can bring up the unmentionable issues. Organizations without someone willing to say the unmentionable or take the chance of hurting someone's feelings, suffer the consequences when these weaknesses are noticed by the selection panel; however, the better approach for Oral Presentations is a supportive, positive atmosphere.
Solicit Questions and Answers
Your team should have already anticipated some likely questions and determined the best way to handle them. The lead person for questions (usually the proposed Project Manager) should be prepared to answer or hand off the question to another member of the team. Calm, confident presenters find better answers than nervous, tense presenters. Unless you are unqualified to do the work, your representatives will have the right answers. But enabling them to come up with those answers when they are on the spot is the difference between the winner and the rest of the organizations who got dressed up for nothing.
Really DRESS for the Dress Rehearsal
And speaking of dressing up - ask the team to wear the complete outfit they plan to wear to the presentation to the dress rehearsal and for an entire day at least one week in advance. Nothing stings worse than a pained expression caused by new shoes that pinch or a suit jacket that rides up every time the speaker turns to point to the chart.
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A competition for a large grant required researching a topic (banking deregulation and its impact on the U.S. economy, the banking industry, and the housing industry) for three hours and then presenting to a group of 20 industry experts. Each of the teams did a credible job, but the grant was lost during the questions and answers.
During questions and answers, a member of the panel asked what we thought about the tax implications. Most of the teams tried to bluff their way through an answer. Just one team explained honestly that while tax implications would certainly have some effect, they were not prepared to discuss that impact at this time. That's the team that didn't try to bluff their way through, and that's the team that won the grant.
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