Presenting to Executives & Getting Leadership Buy-In

Presenting a project proposal to the executive team for the first time can be a frightening prospect. You may feel confident in the work that you’ve done but nervous about conveying the ideas effectively and succinctly. 

After all, if you are presenting to busy executives, there’s pressure to not only make your point but to make the best use of their time as well.

Short, Sweet and to the Point

The executive team has limited time so the best way to keep their attention is to prepare them in advance. Provide read-ahead material to allow leadership to gain an idea of the material and formulate questions. This should include an agenda page that lays out what you intend to cover and that highlights any “asks” of the leadership so they know specifically what you need. This will also help shorten the presentation time and allow more time for questions and answers.

Think about the purpose of your presentation and what your knowledge means to the executives. You want to identify a problem and let them know how you can fix it. Their role is to understand situations and make decisions. Keep the discussion at a higher level. This isn’t the opportunity to share everything you know. Remember less is sometimes more. Stick with the essential information and don’t get bogged down in the details. If they want more information, they will ask. And make sure you know the answers to those potential questions if they are asked such as

• Solution
• Pricing
• References
• Implementation

3 Questions you have to answer:

• Why we're doing this?
• Why do we need this solution?
• What's the ROI?

Step by Step

• Start by greeting everyone and briefly introducing yourself.
  • "Hello everyone, thank you for your time today, my name is John Doe"
• Get to the point right away.
  • "I'm taking your time today to reduce our employee onboarding time from 2 months to 2 weeks"
• Why did you start this project? Pose the questions to leadership as well to get them to think.
  • "How much $ are we losing from a payroll and opportunity cost perspective because our new hires are ramping up in 2 months?"

• Why do we need this solution?
  • "After my research, I'm proposing implementing Qooper to improve employee onboarding through 1:1 mentoring, group coaching and learning"
• What's the ROI?
  • "By onboarding our employees in 2 weeks instead of 2 months, we will gain $ more because they'll be performing and we will gain $ more in payroll because they ramped up in 2 weeks instead of 2 months.
• Q&A

In Conclusion

By the end you should have answered the 3 key questions and be prepared for further questions on the solution, pricing, references, implementation and integrations

This is an opportunity to showcase your talents and how much you can contribute to this project and the company as a whole.

Your vendor partner should supply you with the answers to these questions and provide a proposal you can use in your meeting as guidelines.

This is we help our customers at Qooper to propose and get approved by leadership.