The Presentation Scorecard

When I see an opportunity that’s a great fit for my solution, my mind naturally goes to what will give me an advantage against all competitors. A competitor can be the incumbent solution when they don’t have mine or one from another supplier.

My goal is to have the client eliminate my competitor from consideration or make them column fodder. Column fodder means the client is using their presence to show management they’ve done their due diligence. Basically, the same end result.

So, here’s a strategy than can help you with both.

It’s called the presentation scorecard.

The presentation scorecard is a tool you offer your coach, your champion, or whoever is leading the evaluation. It contains key decision criteria you’ve uncovered in discovery. You can even include a couple of criteria that haven’t been discussed yet, but have been important to other clients making decisions like this one.

The client benefit of this scorecard is it easily helps them keep track of what vendors address (or don’t address) in their presentations. “How well do these vendors address our needs and wants?” The scorecard helps client attendees make sure their minds stay on point and makes it easier to differentiate between vendors as they go through their sorting process.

The scorecard is much like the kind of tool a job interviewer would use to evaluate and rank multiple job applicants.

The design of the scorecard is quite simple. It’s a grid.

In the columns is where the solution options (vendors 1, 2, 3 etc.) scores go, say 0 - 10.

The rows are reserved for key criteria (their prioritized needs and wants).

There’s a lot of flexibility in what goes in the rows. Specific features or functions of the application, how support is handled, an understanding of what the client really wants, whether questions are answered clearly and honestly, how well they address conflicting objectives, etc. are all viable criteria.

I recommend putting the criteria in descending order, from most important to least important.

The client can have copies of these distributed to all attendees to use during the presentation.

You may be wondering how this helps you and when the best time is to use this strategy.

Let’s talk about the second question first.

This works really well when you’ve done a great job at discovery and when you’ve talked to multiple stakeholders ahead of time. That’s because you’re going to use the criteria you’ve provided on the scorecard to lay out your presentation.

And it helps you in the following ways:

(1.) If you’re in the lead you’ll probably widen it.

(2.) If you’re neck and neck, you can create some separation.

(3.) Unless you blatantly word the scorecard with your terminology (don’t do that!), it’ll be seen as a helpful tool.

(4.) Even if they don’t use the scorecard as is, if you do a good job, it will influence what they do.

Have a great week!

Bob

P.S. Details of this strategy (and dozens more) will be provided in a new offering coming soon. I’ll send you a link where you can learn more later this week.