Making an Analyst Presentation when your team is distributed

We had an interesting situation where we had to make a presentation to a Gartner analyst who was in the east coast of the US. Our team was working out of Palo Alto and Bangalore in India. We used Adobe Connect to share the product overview and demo with the Analyst. It worked well.

We rehearsed the hand-over twice to ensure that the presentation will go smoothly. Dry runs are very important when a distributed team is making an important presentation.

Effort : It took us an hour of preparation for every minute of the presentation. For example the 30 minute demo took about 30 hours to design, build and rehearse. The overview took about 5 hours to design build and rehearse. The sales and marketing section of the presentation part took about 4 hours of planning, creation, discussion and rehearsal.

Lesson learned: Always leave 10 minutes for unplanned activities. No matter how much you plan, no matter how seasoned the team is, when the audience is distributedsomething always comes up. In our case that something did come up and we cut short the 4 demos 2.