Behind Every Successful Consulting Presentation
One of the significant areas to focus while delivering a Consulting Presentation is communicating a straightforward offering to the client and winning a great degree of confidence with the client on the offering.
Approach To Consulting Presentation
It is essential to divide the presentations into multiple smaller parts and decide which slides to elaborate on. Equal emphasis on all slides may not be the best use of time.
There are two approaches when presenting to a client.
- Take them along your thought process and then reach a conclusion (recommendation and decision) and seek agreement on it.
- Situation Analysis
- Problem Statement
- Decision Criteria
- Recommendation
- Next Steps
- Present our conclusion and seek agreement; present our reasoning only when asked.
- Problem Statement
- Decision Criteria
- Recommendation
- Next Steps
- Situation Analysis (usually as annexure)
The strength of the latter approach is that we are upfront, taking responsibility in a manner: "Leave the problem to us, we will take care of it (sustainability), you focus on your other business processes". The weakness is it works well only when there is a tremendous amount of trust in our integrity and competency. Else, they would always want to know the why. Reasoning behind the approach can always be revealed in the annexure. In the former approach, we take the client along our deliberations - how we reached our recommendation. At times, it signals a lack of confidence in our thought process. We can still use it to create buy-in to the process.
Usually, clients are more interested in the objective or outcome. They may have little concern about wanting to know the approach. In such a scenario, why do we need them to buy into it? If we assure the results, the client probably will not worry about the process.
There are situations when we need the first approach, such as a new client or a scenario where our expertise in a critical area related to the consulting engagement is limited.
When you take on consulting engagements, you need to deliberate on these approaches and decide suitably for every arrangement. As they say, one size does not fit all.
