Three tips for preparing for your next executive business review (EBR) to show up and feel confident in what you’re presenting.

Prepare a story, not a slide deck

When you’re beginning your prep for an EBR, start with the deck story you’re presenting telling. Here’s the outline I collaborate with my account team on to guide this story:

When we fill this out, I’ll usually end up with a list like this:

I don’t expect to get all of this done (because this list is usually much longer). That’s why we rank order them, so we have a very clear set of objectives we’re all aligned to since you can’t do everything in 60 minutes. And, if I’m struggling with reducing the list length, I’ll look ask myself “Do I need their leadership on to accomplish this? Do we need to accomplish this within the next 3 months?” Since there are items you can review with your champion and don’t need their leaders on to accomplish.

Once I have an outline, I will begin to put together a deck that tells a story that drives a conversation that will achieve my desired outcomes.

As I build my deck, I’m also preparing my questions I want to ask so I can make this a conversation—of course, my questions are pointed to help me walk away with the items I list under “What do I want to learn from them during this call?”

Pre-EBR checklist

The 7 things I’ve found when I do them during my preparation I leave the call feeling good about how it went:

1. Review my notes, their goals, their support interactions, their product feedback, and research the attendees

2. Analyze their results and identify the successes and the potential issues/gaps

3. Identify recommendations I have for them that are aligned to their business objectives

4. Connect with my account team to review the deck together and assign speaking roles

5. Schedule time with my champion to review the deck together

6. Send a pre-email a few days before to the attendees recapping the desired outcome, agenda, and asking them to let me know if they have any conflicts

7. Draft my recap email on the day of the EBR

Do multiple practice rounds

Take a few minutes and walk through the deck yourself, rehearse your talk track and questions, and feel if it flows.

I like to do this out loud so I can get a feel for if things flow well and feel like the story I want it to be or if I’m trying to squeeze too much information into a slide or if I’m jumping thing-to-thing too much and the story is becoming muddied.

This is a good time to also see if your questions are planned at good times, I’m mainly looking to feel if the necessary context is provided as a precursor to the question or if it’d seem like I’m coming out of left field.