How Much Do You Practice Your Presentations?

My wife Karen and I are just back from a great two-week trip to England.  A week of fun and a week of work.  We have been to London and surrounding areas several times, so this time we decided to venture a bit farther and visit Liverpool, home of four young blokes that we now know as The Beatles.  We visited the main Beatles museum and the next day had a private car tour with a guide from the Fab Four tour.

If you love The Beatles, or even if you only sort of like them, this is a trip you should not miss.  We all know their history from the Ed Sullivan show forward. But our trip to Liverpool gave us the history of their youth and growing up in Liverpool, their school days, and the early band started by John Lennon, The Quarrymen. This band evolved into The Beatles who are the best-selling band of all time, having sold over 800 million hard copy and digital copies of their songs.

The part of their development that really caught my eye, and ear, were the three years they spent playing in Hamburg, Germany, beginning in 1960.  I believe that without these three years in Hamburg, The Beatles would never have risen to the fame they did.  Why do I say that?  Here’s why.

During those three years they played in several different bars and clubs.  They would play four and one-half to six hours per night, six days per week, for 90-day periods.  Their skill when they arrived was basic at best.  Yes, they were very enthusiastic.  Yes, they had raw talent.  Yes, they had desire.  But they were not a “band” yet.  They were not as musicians say, “tight”.  John Lennon said, “We had to play for hours and hours on end. Every song lasted twenty minutes and had twenty solos in it. That’s what improved the playing.”

Thousands of hours of playing their early songs and lots of cover songs.  Night after night, four to six hours each night they played.  Twenty-minute songs with twenty solos in it.  Mistakes were made, but over time smoothed over.  They learned each other’s nuances, hand motions, head motions.  They learned how to play with each other.  Over and over again they sang the lyrics, practiced the harmonies.  They began to get better.  They just kept grinding away, practicing, practicing, practicing.

And then one night, Brian Epstein heard them, liked them and eventually got them out of their Hamburg contract.  He took them back to London and introduced them to George Martin, a record producer.  And the rest as they say, is history!

A question popped into my head during our tour, how much time do we spend practicing our presentations?  Not building, not crafting, not creating, not editing, not fooling around with PowerPoint, not trying to decide what product or solution we should show, not deciding the order of the agenda.  I mean once the entire presentation and agenda and flow is set and agreed upon, how much time do we spend standing up in front of the monitor, clicker in hand if PowerPoint, and saying out loud exactly what we intend to say on each slide or each portion of the product or solution demonstration.  As if the real customer audience was in front of us.

What’s your answer?  Thirty minutes or less?  An hour?  A few hours?  How much is the sales opportunity worth to you, your commission (your family), and your company?  Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions?  Are we really spending only an hour or less that has that much personal and employer revenue potential?

The Beatles practiced thousands of hours over three years in Hamburg with no real visibility into their future.  They just had potential and a dream.  They knew to get to where they wanted to go, they needed those thousands of hours to get there.

Am I suggesting you spend thousands of hours practicing a specific presentation?  Obviously not.  Not hundreds either.  What I am suggesting is that we need to practice our presentations more than we do now.  We need to practice out loud, with our team, until we can get as “tight” as we can.  Do you think if you practiced for two to four hours for a big, large opportunity, the customer would notice?  Of course they would.  Might that differentiate you from the competition.  I believe so.

Take a moment, be honest with yourself.  Write down how much time you spend “practicing”.  Commit to increasing that number to a larger number.  Think like The Beatles.  Find your Hamburg!  It sure helped the Fab Four achieve infamy!  Would you like a little fame?

Give me a call or email…. share with me your practice habits…. your new practice commitment.  Let’s start a conversation!
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