...tooting all the whistles available. Keep these visuals as simple as possible so you gain the advantage they provide, while avoiding having the brilliance of the visuals overwhelm the substance of the presentation. You want the audience to remember your recommendations, not how arrows flew in from different sides, and the "creative" use of colors.
Stand while presenting. Inexperienced presenters will prefer sitting while making the presentation. It may be more comfortable, but the presenter who stands has better presence, better voice control, better eye contact. All "Murder Board" presentations should be made standing to help presenters get used to "being on stage."
When evaluators fail to make eye contact. It can be disconcerting to presenters to find evaluators failing to make eye contact. It could be that these evaluators are busily taking notes, or they could be looking only at the slides, and it could also be that they wish to limit "human contact" so as not to be swayed by the personalities of the presenters. In any event, presenters should continue to look at the evaluators.
The Question & Answer session. The RFP generally calls for a Q&A session for clarification purposes after the formal presentation. Unless the evaluators say they wish to direct their questions to specific team members, the team leader from the prime contractor should
quarterback this session, directing questions to team members according to their respective expertise. The stress level on presenters will probably be less during the Q & A session because it will take place within the more familiar conversational context. But don't be lulled into a false sense of comfort.
Practice Q & A sessions should be an integral part of the Murder Boards so as to anticipate the type of question likely to be asked. The Q&A session is where the evaluators' doubts and questions can be resolved, key points driven home by the presenters in their answers, and the confidence level of the evaluators with the ability of the team to “do the job” increased.
When a small company, responding to a "small business set aside," has a large corporation as a sub–contractor, evaluators may ask if the small firm is actually “fronting” for the big company, thereby allowing the bigger company to get a piece of the lucrative "set aside" pie. The small prime must be prepared to document convincingly that it sought the larger firm to sub-contract a portion of the RFP, that it was not "recruited" by the large firm. If done adroitly in the Q&A session, this can actually work to the advantage of the prime, as evaluators may see the leveraging advantage of having a corporate giant's "reach" being applied to the "small business set aside."
