I’ve spent a lot of time in pitch rehearsals lately. And there is a moment that happens in almost every one of them. We have done the strategy work. We know what the client cares about. We know where the competition is strong. We know what our team has to prove.
We have built a story around those things rather than simply walking the selection committee through the proposal they have already read.
Then the technical team starts rehearsing. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, they begin turning the pitch back into a presentation about themselves. The project executive wants to explain his experience. The project manager wants another slide about the process. Someone decides the client really needs them to explain the org chart. And the person with the deepest technical expertise wants to give a four-minute answer to a question that required about 45 seconds.
It happens because when people are outside their comfort zone, they retreat to what they know. They are aware of their past accomplishments and believe that should be sufficient to convince a selection committee they are the best choice. Well, you aren’t the only one, buddy.
A shortlist interview isn’t a resume competition. It is a buying decision.
Your team does not need to prove everything they know.
They need to help the client believe they are the right people to trust with what comes next.
I was coaching a team recently where we had developed a very clear strategy for the interview. We knew the concerns sitting underneath the client’s questions. We knew what competitors could credibly claim. And we knew exactly where our team had an advantage.
Then we started practicing Q&A. One of the first answers was technically excellent. It was also way too long. By the time the presenter finished, the strongest point in the answer had disappeared underneath three minutes of explanation. So, we stopped and asked a different question:
What do we need the client to remember from this answer?
That changes everything. Instead of beginning with information, you begin with the message. Then you prove it. Then, when it helps, you tell the story that makes it memorable.
Message → Proof → Story.
The expertise is still there. We are simply helping the audience find the part that matters.
That is presentation coaching.
And it is very different from telling somebody to “slow down,” “make eye contact” or “be more confident.”
Different presenters need different coaching.
I see this constantly. You have the person who is terrified to present and memorizes every word. You have a charismatic presenter who is so comfortable that nobody is quite sure what they will say next. You have the technical expert who has answered every question since 1997. You have the executive who believes their title means they should speak for half the presentation. And occasionally, you have the unicorn who is concise, conversational, persuasive, and perfectly on time.
Protect that person at all costs.
Everybody else needs coaching. Not the same coaching.
The nervous presenter may need fewer words and more structure. The overly polished presenter may need to stop sounding rehearsed. The technical presenter may need permission to leave 80 percent of what they know unsaid. The senior leader may need to understand that their job is not necessarily to have the most airtime. Sometimes their job is to establish confidence, reinforce the big idea, and then let the people who will deliver the work shine.
That is why choosing the interview team matters too. I don’t automatically want the highest-ranking people in the room. I want the right people in the room. Every person should have a reason for being there.
And then there is chemistry. Clients tell us they want chemistry all the time. AEC firms seem to interpret that as: “Everybody, try to look like you like each other.” That is not chemistry. Chemistry is watching one person finish a thought, and another naturally builds on it. It is someone remembering a detail from an earlier comment and referring back to it. It is teammates listening to one another rather than silently rehearsing what they are supposed to say next.
It is the selection committee thinking: These people already feel like a team.
You cannot manufacture that five minutes before you walk into the interview. You rehearse it. Not until everyone sounds scripted. Until everyone knows the story well enough that they no longer need the script. That is the difference.
The first rehearsal should probably be ugly. We call it the Ugly Table Read. Nobody is standing. Nobody is worrying about hand gestures. I do not care whether somebody says “um.” We are sitting around a table and saying the words out loud because that is when you discover what works. That beautiful sentence marketing wrote? Turns out no human being can say it. That transition that looked perfectly logical on the slide? Makes absolutely no sense when one presenter hands the conversation to another. That five-minute section? It’s really nine minutes.
Good. Find all of that now.
Because the first job of rehearsal is not polishing the presenters. It is pressure-testing the story. Only after the story works do we start working on the performance. And somewhere along the way, we need to create the STAR Moment: Something They’ll Always Remember.
Because after several firms walk into that room talking about remarkably similar experience, remarkably qualified people, and remarkably proven processes, somebody on the selection committee is eventually going to have to distinguish one from another.
What will they remember about yours?
That is the question I want AEC teams asking before they walk into the room. Because once the pitch is built, the work is not over. In many ways, that is when the harder work begins. You have to take the strategy out of the deck and put it into the people. You have to help technical experts understand what matters most, what to leave out, when to tell the story, when to hand off the conversation, and how to answer a question without burying the answer. You must rehearse enough to create confidence and chemistry without rehearsing the humanity out of the room.
And somebody has to know how to coach all of that.
That is exactly what we are teaching in the next edition of SmartSKILLS: The Art of the Pitch: From Story to Stage.
Our original Art of the Pitch session focused on how to build the winning interview strategy: understanding what the client really cares about, assessing the competitive landscape, finding the story, and creating a presentation that informs, influences, and entertains.
This time, Katie Cash, Sr. VP of Strategy at Smartegies is taking us into what happens next.
The pitch is built. Now, how do you get the team to deliver it?
We are going behind the scenes of the presentation coaching we do with AEC teams before they face a selection committee.
How do you coach the nervous presenter differently from the person who talks too much?
How do you prepare technical experts for Q&A without giving them canned answers?
How do you run an Ugly Table Read?
How do you create better transitions and real chemistry?
How do you develop the STAR Moment?
And how do you get five people with five very different presentation styles to walk into the room looking like one team?
If you attended the first Art of the Pitch, this is the next step.
If you missed it, you can still follow along. We will quickly revisit the fundamentals and then take the work from story to stage.
Because a strong pitch strategy matters. But somebody still has to deliver it.
Until next time,
Judy Sparks