HOW TO LOSE $55 MILLION
OR THE PERILS OF LAST MINUTE PREPARATION

If you had a chance to make $55 million
in new revenue . . .
How much would you practice?
How much would you prepare?
How good would you be when you finally entered the room to make
your presentation?

The answers should be . . .
I'd practice and prepare, for six months,
or if I already knew the client and was an excellent presenter, I'd
still put in at least four weeks of preparation with the team. My
presentation would rate an A+.

Frequently the answers are more like --
Practice? What's that?
Preparation? We'll do that the morning of the program.
How good are we? Damn good....of course we didn't get the
business, but that's not our fault.

A corporate businessman and friend shared a story with me which I find incredible. Sadly, it's a tale which is repeated over and over, to the detriment of many a business.

My friend tells it like this. The "A" Team from corporate
headquarters was scheduled to arrive the day before the
presentation, so they could meet the sales rep and review their
pitch. There were 5 of them, including my friend, on the team and
this was a big piece of business for them.
They wanted everything to be perfect.

The only problem was, their area sales rep didn't show!
The "A" Team was stuck, without a copy of their program,
basically twiddling their thumbs until the actual day of the
presentation. It was scheduled for 2:00 P.M. the following day, so
they felt confident that at least they had the next morning to
prepare.

The sales rep finally called and said he'd been delayed.

He arrived at 10:00 A.M. the day of the meeting,
but without a final presentation!
He didn't have the Power Point slides ready, and they found
themselves scrambling to put their program together from scratch.

There was no time to practice, let alone review potential questions the client might raise.
In reality they were going to have to "dance" and dance fast.

When their presentation was nearing the "close," the ill-prepared
rep turned to my friend and asked him to give the closing
statement. This wasn't in the plan, but then of course they didn't
have a plan in the first place.
He had to come up with a "close" from thin air.
Of course, he did a good job (he's very good), but there was just no way to do an excellent job, which is what $55 million in business surely demands.

Later, he rated their performance a "B," which was probably
generous, but then of course it wasn't an A+ which is what they
needed.

I'd like to have a moral to this story, but it seems so obvious as to
be unnecessary.

The more you've got to Gain,
the more you need to feel the Pain . . .
of Preparation and Practice.

Last Minute Preparation is a predictor of:
Pitiful, Poor ,Performance.

When you need an A+ performance, you need to do A+ Preparation.