Imagine that you’re giving one of the most important RFP pitches of your life…
But you’re nervous, so your mouth is dry, and you start stumbling over your words, and beads of sweat are forming on your temples, and the people who will be judging you, the people who will be making the decision, they’re staring back at you, and they’re wondering what’s wrong with you.
You know deep in your bones that you are the right person for the project, but you don’t know how to get that across. So the selection committee picks someone with less experience.
There are four underutilized techniques you can use to make sure your pitches never go like this. Our job is to train you in those techniques.
Why engineers?
Engineers have a special need when they are talking to others: They are technical people speaking to non-technical people. Getting those non-technical people to buy in is much easier if the engineers “talk to the dog” — speak in the language of the audience, not in the language of engineers.
How do I know if my engineers need communications assistance?
Your engineers might need communications assistance if you experience one or more of these situations:
- Your RFPs are getting turned down late in the game.
- You would like your engineers to represent the organization in public.
- Other departments groan when they hear the engineers will be presenting.
- You feel like the engineering voice is being drowned out in board meetings.
- You are trying to raise money, and an engineer is part of the pitch.
Who hires us and why:
- A Dutch civil engineering firm that is pitching a commercial development project in Riyadh.
- A Turkish software startup that wants to grow its sales in Europe.
- A British cloud storage company that wants its CTO to present better to the board.
- An Italian steel manufacturer that wants to increase its credit line with a German bank.
- An American e-commerce company that wants its software engineers in India to communicate better with warehouse managers in California.
Basically, it doesn’t matter whether your flavor is software, electricity, or construction. If you’re an engineer who pitches X to Y, we’re the ones who help.
What we do:
Research
Design
Speechwriting
Delivery
Companies we’ve worked with:
Work samples:
A required slide for most proposals. Typically, a budget committee will review at least 5 proposals at every meeting, so they’ll need a way to quickly remember which project was yours.
The team slide is an essential part of the deck when presenting to most budget committees. After all, they want to know who is going to be spending their money.
The project timeline slide is a key part of any deck. In this case, the client wanted a simplified Gantt chart that would show just the major steps of the project.
Of course, every budget committee wants to know what something will cost. That’s their whole reason for existence! This was a cost projection for a simple project: Some on-prem servers and per-employee software licenses.
Somewhere, usually in the pitch’s early slides, there will need to be a shot of the product in use. After all, you want the budget committee picturing what their money is going to buy. Words are necessary for this, but they are not enough. You need images too.
One of our clients was pitching to a budget committee that had been burned by projects staffed by inexperienced implementation teams, so it was especially important to represent the combined experience of this team.
