Why proposals are never, ever, going away

Raise your hand if you love writing proposals. No hands? That’s not at all surprising. Most people hate writing proposals. We find them a time consuming, mind-numbing, brain draining, frustrating chore. Yet buyers love receiving proposals, and this method of pitching for business is not going to go away anytime soon.

Why not?

Imagine for a moment that you’re got an important social event coming up. (Not really a stretch, with Christmas and the party season right around the corner.)

Maybe shopping isn’t your favourite thing. But looking at your closet, things are pretty dire. You really need to buy something new to wear.

• You could go to a crowded shopping centre and fight it out with dozen of other people for a car park. Then, you’d have to slog your way through dozens of stores in the hope that one of them might carry what you are looking for. It’s a drain on your time and patience.
• Or, you could stay home, and check out the online stores for options. You wouldn’t have to fight the crowds, but there's still a lot of stuff to sift through to try to find something you might want. This takes a huge amount of time.
• Or, here’s another option – you could book a session with a personal shopper. You’d tell them what you want, they would sit you down in a dressing room with a glass of champagne and bring you outfit after outfit to try on. This isn’t a drain on your time or your patience. In fact, it's almost like going to a day spa.

This is exactly the experience that buyers get when they put out a brief or tender and invite a response.

They get a whole bunch of people bending over backwards to craft a proposal that fits their taste and needs. They don't have to go out and foot-slog around the market. They don't have to listen to 20 people pitch in person. They don't even have to talk to you if they don't want to.

Why would they do all that work, when they can get you to do it for them for free?

If you think that proposals are an imperfect way to pitch what you do, you would be right. But they are not going anywhere, because they simply make the buyer's life very easy.

It all comes back to the distribution of labour. Under the old system of buying, where buyers had to take the time to build a relationship before they did business with you, most of the effort was theirs. Under the current system, the position is reversed.

So proposals are never, ever, going away. Even if you hate doing them, you still need to find a way to make them work for you.

If this is a problem you need to solve in your business, talk to me - I can help.

Why it’s good to be an underdog

If you want to win, you must be dominant, all-powerful and able to effortlessly crush your opponent, right? Well, not always. It turns out that there's a very special place in our hearts for winners who don't have those qualities, and who struggle valiantly against the odds. 

"The dam is broken.....the 62-year drought is over….". So declared the television commentator two minutes before the siren sounded on the 2016 Grand Final last Saturday, when the Western Bulldogs kicked the final goal that gave them an unbeatable lead over match favourites, the Sydney Swans. 

Dogs by name, and underdogs by nature, the Western Bulldogs hadn't won a premiership since 1954. They had already pulled of a coup just by making it to the Grand Final.

Though widely considered unlikely to win, the Bulldogs fought their way to a 22-point victory.

With it came the cheers and tears of thousands of people – including many, like me, who aren't even football fans. Why were we so affected by their win?

Some of the most famous movies of all time tell the real-life stories of underdogs who triumphed over adversity, including Rocky (inspired by the story of Chuck Wepner), 8 Mile, Erin Brockovich and my personal favourite, Eddie the Eagle. We see our own hopes and dreams reflected in their epic struggles.

Seeing others at a disadvantage also tends to ignite our sense of fairness and justice. This means that supporting the underdog is one way that we can confront and reduce inequality.

In fact, even suggesting that a team or person is the underdog makes us more likely to support them. In study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers asked 71 participants to imagine that two teams — one ranked higher than the other — were going to compete in an Olympic swimming event. In all scenarios, the participants said they would prefer to see the lower-ranked team prevail over the higher-ranked one, even if that higher-ranked team had been the underdog in a previous scenario.

We also relate better to underdogs, seeing them as more “real”, or more authentic. In another study, psychology professor Joseph Vandello from the University of Florida asked students to watch a basketball game in which they were told that one team was the favorite. After watching the footage, the viewers characterised the underdog team as having less “intelligence” and “talent,” but more “hustle” and “heart”. Again, this pattern was consistent even when the scenario was flipped so that the other team was framed as the underdog. The viewers simply liked the people who were losing more than they liked the winners.

What does this mean for you and your team?

If you’re already the underdogs, take heart.

In his book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell says that bigger is only better up to a point.

Gladwell identifies 7 characteristics of the "winning little guy", including an honourable reputation; doing everything in in person; determination; empathy; teamwork; and being both passionate and likeable.

To me, this also provides an excellent summary of the qualities of every winning bid team I have ever worked with, no matter how large or small.

But if you’re not the underdogs, take this as a warning.  

If your team already feels like they are the sure-fire winners, and they are in any way arrogant or entitled about this, you may have a problem on your hands.

Just like a Grand Final, one thing is for sure in a competitive pitch - it isn't over until it's over.

The culture you want for your pitch team is one where the prevailing conversation is about what we can do for the customer, not what's in it for us.

So how can you get your team to think and behave like underdogs, and harness the extra energy and empathy that comes along with it? Here are five values and behaviours to encourage. 

1. Ask more questions. Underdogs assume less, read the briefing thoroughly, and carefully flag any issues and concerns.
2. Speak with humility. Underdogs don't assume they already know everything, and they treat the opportunity (and the customer) with respect.
3. Work harder. Underdogs are in early, stay late, and put in the hard yards when they need to. They don’t leave the work to someone else. 
4. Work as a team. Underdogs don't blame each other when things get difficult, and adversity will bring them even closer together, rather than pulling them apart.
5. Express thanks and gratitude. Underdogs are excited just to be on the journey, and aren't solely focused on the destination or the win.

Is it time to pimp your proposals?

For most people in business, proposals are not a joy – they’re simply a hassle.

Proposals chew up a lot of your time and resources. You spend hours, days or weeks slaving away over them, and when you lose, there are no prizes for second place. Customers don’t give you useful feedback (or any feedback) and it can be impossible to work out what you’re doing wrong.

Imagine your most recent proposal has just been graded, and is sitting in a stack, on a desk, inside your buyer’s office.

On the bottom at level 1 are the proposals that are the most unappealing. If yours is in this part of the pile, we need to do some work on your message – what you are actually selling.

Above this at level 2 are the proposals the buyer found unclear; they didn’t quite “get it”. Here, we need to work on your presentation.

Above the line are the level 3 proposals the buyer sees as competent.  On the surface, these seem okay, but they often lack evidence to support the claims you’re making. Without this, you won’t be winning business as often as you should be.

Where you want to be is at levels 4 and 5. Level 4 proposals are convincing, and show a level of strategy and insight that others don’t. At level 5, you’ve really made it; your proposals are so compelling that buyers simply can’t say no to you. At this level, you’ll be able to leverage more business, at better margins, because you are positioned as the go-to people in your market space.

Compelling and convincing proposals are a combination of style, substance and relevance.  Problems happen when any one of these elements is missing; the “proposal” becomes a brochure, a report, or a presentation, none of which is likely to get you hired.

A proposal effort that isn’t getting you results can leave you feeling stuck and frustrated – like being trapped in the movie Groundhog Day. But no matter where you’re starting out, there is always a way to improve.

Robyn Haydon

20 April 2016

Communication skills, Continual improvement for bids, Proposal strategy, Strategies for incumbents, Strategies for challengers, tender response strategy, Tender responses

Claim + Evidence = Persuasion

Robyn Haydon

20 April 2016

Communication skills, Continual improvement for bids, Proposal strategy, Strategies for incumbents, Strategies for challengers, tender response strategy, Tender responses

The customer who is reading your proposal has many demands on their time and attention. Your proposal must entice them in, make the journey interesting, and ultimately convince them that what you are offering has real merit.

These days, it’s pretty hard to get people to read long documents. A recent study by The Pew Research Center confirmed that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.

It doesn’t really matter whether we are reading for business or for pleasure – the barriers are the same.

Improving the evidence that supports your claims is an important first step towards making your proposal more readable and more convincing.

For example, in a tender evaluation, the people sitting on the evaluation panel have to give your proposal a score.  What sets apart the proposals that achieve high scores is the quality of the evidence that they provide.

Tender evaluators use a score sheet that has a built-in process for scoring the quality of evidence you provide in each part of your submission. To get a top score of 10/10 or 8/10, your evaluator will have to justify that ‘all claims are fully supported’ in the part of your proposal that they are reviewing.

If your proposal has even ‘minor shortcomings in scope and detail’ – and this is very easy to do if you make claims without substantiating them with evidence – the maximum you can score on an answer is 6/10. In a very competitive tender, even one score this low could put you well out of contention.

Evidence is often the first thing that suffers when your writing is challenged by competing demands from your day job, tight deadlines and even tighter word limits. Here’s an example of what I mean:

XYZ Road Maintenance is Australia’s leading provider of road cleaning equipment to municipal authorities and private cleaning contractors. 

Our highly experienced, results-driven research and development team has drawn on world’s best practice to develop our Road Maintenance Widgets, which are considered the most reliable on the market today.

This short proposal extract alone has five unsubstantiated claims. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. So how do we fix the problem?

For example, let’s look at the claim of “reliability”. Here is a better way to convince the customer that this claim actually has some merit. The first sentence makes the claim, and the rest provides the evidence.

Reliability is an important indicator of widget quality, as reliable widgets have a longer lifespan, better up-time and lower overall costs of ownership.

XYZ Co. offers a ten-year guarantee on the operational performance of our widgets, double that of most other widget suppliers. 

We supply more than one million widgets each year to 87 contract customers, including almost half of Australia's municipal authorities and eight of the country’s top 10 private cleaning contractors,. Our standard supply contract promises 98.5% up-time for each individual widget; however, we have consistently exceeded this benchmark, achieving 99.3% up-time over the past three years across all 87 contracts.

Reliable widgets require replacement less frequently, reducing costs. Broken Hill City Council saved $50,000 on its annual road maintenance bill by using our widgets and private contractor Alphabet Cleaning Services has more than doubled the useful life of its existing road maintenance vehicles by replacing Acme widgets with ours.

A proposal without evidence is like a fairytale; ultimately, it's very hard to believe. Unlike a fairytale, though, reading such a proposal doesn't even have the benefit of being entertaining. It's disorienting, exhausting and the reader will most probably cast it aside without ever finishing it.

So stop cutting and pasting your proposals.

Slow down, really think about the message you want the reader to see, hear and feel, and find evidence to support every claim you want to make. You will find that you’re even more convinced about your offer as a result – and this conviction will lead to better results and more sales.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers. Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers. Re-Engage is my training and coaching program for organisations with multiple major accounts. It will give your people the framework, skills, and confidence to lead contract renewals with your existing customers. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Claim + Evidence = Persuasion

The customer who is reading your proposal has many demands on their time and attention. Your proposal must entice them in, make the journey interesting, and ultimately convince them that what you are offering has real merit.

These days, it’s pretty hard to get people to read long documents. A recent study by The Pew Research Center confirmed that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.

It doesn’t really matter whether we are reading for business or for pleasure – the barriers are the same.

Improving the evidence that supports your claims is an important first step towards making your proposal more readable and more convincing.

For example, in a tender evaluation, the people sitting on the evaluation panel have to give your proposal a score.  What sets apart the proposals that achieve high scores is the quality of the evidence that they provide.

Tender evaluators use a score sheet that has a built-in process for scoring the quality of evidence you provide in each part of your submission. To get a top score of 10/10 or 8/10, your evaluator will have to justify that ‘all claims are fully supported’ in the part of your proposal that they are reviewing.

If your proposal has even ‘minor shortcomings in scope and detail’ – and this is very easy to do if you make claims without substantiating them with evidence – the maximum you can score on an answer is 6/10. In a very competitive tender, even one score this low could put you well out of contention.

Evidence is often the first thing that suffers when your writing is challenged by competing demands from your day job, tight deadlines and even tighter word limits. Here’s an example of what I mean:

XYZ Road Maintenance is Australia’s leading provider of road cleaning equipment to municipal authorities and private cleaning contractors. 

Our highly experienced, results-driven research and development team has drawn on world’s best practice to develop our Road Maintenance Widgets, which are considered the most reliable on the market today.

This short proposal extract alone has five unsubstantiated claims. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. So how do we fix the problem?

For example, let’s look at the claim of “reliability”. Here is a better way to convince the customer that this claim actually has some merit. The first sentence makes the claim, and the rest provides the evidence.

Reliability is an important indicator of widget quality, as reliable widgets have a longer lifespan, better up-time and lower overall costs of ownership.

XYZ Co. offers a ten-year guarantee on the operational performance of our widgets, double that of most other widget suppliers. 

We supply more than one million widgets each year to 87 contract customers, including almost half of Australia's municipal authorities and eight of the country’s top 10 private cleaning contractors,. Our standard supply contract promises 98.5% up-time for each individual widget; however, we have consistently exceeded this benchmark, achieving 99.3% up-time over the past three years across all 87 contracts.

Reliable widgets require replacement less frequently, reducing costs. Broken Hill City Council saved $50,000 on its annual road maintenance bill by using our widgets and private contractor Alphabet Cleaning Services has more than doubled the useful life of its existing road maintenance vehicles by replacing Acme widgets with ours.

A proposal without evidence is like a fairytale; ultimately, it's very hard to believe. Unlike a fairytale, though, reading such a proposal doesn't even have the benefit of being entertaining. It's disorienting, exhausting and the reader will most probably cast it aside without ever finishing it.

So stop cutting and pasting your proposals.

Slow down, really think about the message you want the reader to see, hear and feel, and find evidence to support every claim you want to make. You will find that you’re even more convinced about your offer as a result – and this conviction will lead to better results and more sales.

What’s in it for me?

When you're the incumbent supplier seeking to retain a customer or contract, big-noting yourself is almost impossible. The customer has experienced how you work, heard about everything you’ve already done (good and bad) and seen you warts and all. Good performance is just an expectation; it’s what you are being paid for. The customer isn’t going to give you a gold star for meeting your KPIs. That’s why relying on your track record when it comes to competing for business you already have is never a successful strategy for incumbents.

Culturally, at least here in Australia, our aversion to other people big-noting their achievements begins early. This year, my son started Year Four, and he and his friends have been learning all about leadership. This culminated in each of the kids campaigning for a junior school leadership position, like Sports Leader, Arts Leader, Environment Leader, Social Responsibility Leader or membership of Student Representative Council.

On the day the kids had to make their pitch to each other, I asked my son how it had gone. His first reaction was one of disdain. "Some people are just show-offs," he said, clearly unimpressed by students who had spent most of their time telling the kids about their own achievements. I asked if there were any pitches he had liked. He told me about a few who had outlined their plans to make things better for others, through imaginative fundraising campaigns, looking after the school grounds, and the inevitable vote-grabber; campaigning for TVs and cushions in the boys’ restrooms. (Apparently, “the girls have them”.)

What’s in it for me? Every buyer (or voter) asks this question, whether they already know and work with us, or not.

When you're pitching again for business you already have, resist the urge to talk only about what you’ve already done, or risk sounding like a know-it-all that no one wants to vote for. Spend at least half of your time outlining your plan to build the customer’s future; this immediately switches the focus from pitching to helping, and you’ll find it comes as a relief both to you and to your audience.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers. Re-Engage is my training and coaching program for organisations with multiple major accounts. It will give your people the framework, skills, and confidence to lead contract renewals with your existing customers. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Who moved our cheese?

It takes time and effort to build new products and services, and to position for new business – all without a guarantee of return. So when times are good and the work is flowing in, it’s tempting to push this down the list of priorities. But fortunes can change quickly. And when they do, having a solid backup plan can mean the difference between hope and devastation.

During the week, the business press announced that supermarket giant Coles was replacing Bega, its current private label supplier for cheese, with a new supplier, Murray Goulburn, in a five year deal worth $130 million.

Loss of a contract this size isn’t great news for any company, especially a publicly listed one. However, Bega's CEO Aidan Coleman was on the front foot quickly with an explanation to the market about how Bega planned to replace the loss of revenue.

Supermarket private label contracts typically have low margins, although the contracts may be longer than usual (five or ten years).

In announcing the change, Coleman explained that Bega had been preparing for the loss of the Coles business, and was driving its brand towards higher margin and higher value added products.

For example, in late October, Bega announced a joint venture with Blackmores to produce infant formula. If you've been following the news recently, you will have seen that retailers have had to ration the sale of infant formula in Australian stores due to high demand from people buying to export back to China, following health scares in China with locally-produced formula.

Infant formula generates substantially higher margins and value add than private-label cheese products. Bega thinks it will be able to divert about $60 million worth of cheese inventory into the infant formula business, potentially compensating for the loss of the Coles contract. And although losses always hurt, at the same time, you can feel how excited Coleman is about the future of his business entering into this new market.

Only work you love and want more of is going to grow your margins.

Good, solid bread and butter work – although I’m sure you appreciate it – probably doesn’t fire your imagination any more.

And “marginal” work, like this private-label example, often doesn’t generate a good enough return compared to the productive capacity that is expended in delivering it.

We can’t control everything in business, but we can chart a course for where we want to go. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers. Do you have ambitious growth targets this year? Keen to win the business you REALLY want, at the margins you want, and have more fun doing it? Let me help you to design and build an offer that is so commercially valuable, your target customers would be crazy not to buy it. For a copy of the white paper Pole Position - How to Achieve New Business Success, email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Bridging the confidence gap

In the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about our own internal barriers to business development (as opposed to the barriers that customers and the market throw at us).

Practical barriers are the things we think we "need" in order to get out there and talk to people about what we offer (product information, marketing collateral, competitor research). Structural barriers are the systems that we create – for what seem like sensible reasons at the time – and that actually end up holding us back.

Psychological barriers, however, come from several places; lack of confidence, too many comparisons to others, and the experience of loss and rejection.

Let’s look at confidence first. Confidence can be a barrier, because in other people’s eyes, confidence equates to competence. This, in turn, has a huge effect on our ability to turn opportunities into sales.

In The Confidence Gap, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman point to a growing body of evidence that shows just how devastating a lack of confidence can be. Success, they found, correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence.

While Kay and Shipman’s research related specifically to confidence issues affecting women, lack of confidence is a problem for anyone working in a profession where public performance and scrutiny are a regular part of the job – like business development and sales. 

To overcome a lack of confidence, we might try to “fake it until we make it.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t work too well.

According to Cameron Anderson, a psychologist at UCLA (Berkeley), extremely confident people genuinely believe they are good, and it’s this self-belief that is attractive to others. “Fake confidence just doesn’t work in the same way,” he says. No matter how much bravado we muster, Anderson explains, others will pick up on our shifting eyes, rising voice and other giveaways.

In 2009, Anderson undertook a study to find out why confidence leads to a perception of competence. He gave a group of 242 students a list of historical names and events - including some that sounded plausible, but were actually completely made up - and asked them to tick off the ones they knew. Some students ticked off the fakes as well as the real events, implying that they thought they knew more than they actually did. Afterwards, Anderson also asked the students to rate one another according to their social standing within the group. The students who had picked the most fakes also achieved the best ratings – in other words, those who had the strongest confidence in their abilities also had the highest social standing.

Real confidence only really comes from self-belief: from understanding our true value. When you have done the work to establish the worth of what you’re doing and saying, it’s much harder to shake your confidence.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers. Had a tough year? Missed out on business you really wanted? Let’s make sure 2016 is different. The Pole Position program will position you to win the opportunities on your radar for next year. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Get out there and get on with it!

When it comes to new business development, there are a number of barriers that we will all face from time to time.

These can be internal barriers –the barriers that we make ourselves, or that come from within us – or external barriers, which come from outside of ourselves, including the barriers put up for us by customers and competitors.

One of the internal barriers is what I call “practical barriers”. This includes lack of access to product information, marketing collateral, competitor research, or any one of a number of other things that we think we "need" in order to get out there and talk to people about what we do and offer.

It can be hard to argue with practical barriers. After all, a thing either exists or it doesn’t.

However, when our reluctance to “do” business development is primarily about our lack of brochures, slide decks, white papers, and those sorts of things, what this really means is that we’re not yet sold on what we are supposed to be selling.

The first sale is always to yourself. If you aren’t sold, no one else will be.

In their book Conviction, Peter Cook, Matt Church and Michael Henderson explain that it is more likely to be the person who is doing the selling who has objections – ‘too pricey, don’t need it, not now’ – instead of the customer.

In place of “objections”, they say, what customers really have is questions, considerations, alternative options and time. These are all things that we need to manage when educating ourselves about what are selling, and all of it comes before we try to educate a customer.

According to a study conducted by B2B research and advisory firm Sirius Decisions, up to 70% of content and collateral created marketing departments in business-to-business organisations sits unused anyway.

Practical barriers aren’t really barriers – they are more like “objections” we have to the idea of getting out there and talking to people about what we do.

Worry less about how good your PowerPoint slides are and think more about the value in what you’re selling.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers. Had a tough year? Missed out on business you really wanted? Let’s make sure 2016 is different. The Pole Position program will position you to win the opportunities on your radar for next year. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

What do customers really want?

What do customers really want? It’s a tantalising question, and the central mission of business development. Get it right, every time, and you'll have more business than you know what to do with.

But like the Holy Grail, the answer to this question can be frustratingly elusive. There are many reasons why this is the case. Here are just a few of them:

Personal differences. Like you and I, customers are complex beings. They don't all want the same thing. It doesn't matter if they have the same problems, are in the same industry, or work for the same company.

Changing priorities. Even the exact same buyer may want one thing one day, but something else the next.

Invisible forces. We can never possibly hope to know everything there is to know about another human being. We can't see everything that's going on inside their world or their head.

People have tried many things to overcome these problems; asking customers what they want, poring over a customer’s mission and vision statements, and telling them what other customers have done in similar situations. Some of this can be useful, to a point. But it is not without its problems. 

For example, have you ever bought a present for a friend who admired something in a shop window, only to find that when you give it to them, six months later, they have no recollection of it and it’s pretty clear that they don’t really want it?

Market research can be a bit like this. It turns out that market research (asking customers what they want) is a poor predictor of what they will actually buy. According to AcuPoll, as many as 95% of new products introduced each year fail. Time Magazine lists the top 3 product failures of all time as the Ford Edsell (1957), which cost $2.9 billion in today’s terms; the Hewlett Touch Pad (2011), which was discontinued almost immediately at a cost of $885m in assets and $755m in wind-down costs; and Crystal Pepsi (1992). All were backed by expensive market research and extensive marketing campaigns.

One useful way to figure out what customers really want is to watch what they do, not what they say.

Yesterday, The Age reported that Spotless Group lost a 31-year contract at Suncorp Stadium to the much smaller O'Brien Group (which employs 6,000 people to Spotless' 30,000) as part of an international tender. Suncorp said that the winning O'Brien bid "best met all key criteria" and described them as innovators, with a bid that included a plan to redevelop Suncorp's 70 bars and restaurants. It can be inferred from this that Suncorp valued the winner’s investment of time and thinking about how to revamp their hospitality suites and overall customer experience.

What are your customers spending their time on? Their energy? Their money?  This tells you what they are valuing right now, and give you clues as to how to frame your own offer. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers. Had a tough year? Missed out on business you really wanted? Let’s make sure 2016 is different. The Pole Position program will position you to win the opportunities on your radar for next year. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

How to avoid becoming a commodity

Buyers don’t commoditise suppliers. We do that to ourselves, by not giving them the criteria to make a better choice.

Warren Buffet once said that “price is what you pay, value is what you get”. While it’s a simple idea on the surface, there’s a lot to this concept of value.

Price is easy to understand, which is probably why we default to it so often. “Value” is much harder.  Value is both a subjective and objective concept. It exists in tangible and intangible form.

Value is like a snowflake – no two people see value in exactly the same way.

What creates value for me probably won’t represent value for you. That’s because we have different hopes, dreams, goals and problems to solve.

Acccording to the Harvard Business Review, value in business markets is the worth in monetary terms of the technical, economic, service, and social benefits a (business) customer receives in exchange for the price it pays for (your) market offering. The HBR authors, James C. Anderson and James A. Narus, point out that these same customers are increasingly looking to their purchasing or procurement departments as a way to increase profits, and therefore will pressure suppliers to reduce prices. (No surprises there).

So, they argue, if we are to have any hope of getting our customers to think about total costs rather than simply the cost of acquisition, it’s essential to have an accurate understanding of what our customers value now, and would value in the future. 

Because of this, I reckon the way we run new business pursuits is completely wrong. We wait until customers tell us what they want, and then, like everyone else, try to give it to them – for the lowest price. And all the while, we know there is a better solution for the customer – if only we could crack the commercial value that will make them sit up and take notice.

A recent study on sales execution trends by Qvidian found that only 63% of salespeople actually make their targets, with pursuits ending in “no decision” the major reason for the shortfall. While four in 10 salespeople thought that an “inability to effectively communicate value” might be behind their lack of success, only half of them also chose this as a skill they needed to work on.

Understanding what customers truly value is the only way to combat price pressure, and to avoid becoming a commodity.

There is thought and work involved – certainly more than sitting and waiting for a tender to cross your desk – but it’s the most worthwhile work you will ever do.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers. Had a tough year? Missed out on business you really wanted? Let’s make sure 2016 is different. The Pole Position program will position you to win the opportunities on your radar for next year. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

The momentum of continual improvement

The most successful suppliers fall quickly into a pattern of continual improvement as soon as they win a contract or customer. Unfortunately, others – who are really just doing no more than keeping up with the basic requirements – are probably setting themselves up to lose.

Newton’s first law of motion – the law of inertia – tells us that “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

When it comes to important contracts and customers, the procurement process is the “unbalanced force” – something outside ourselves that propels suppliers into a kind of recurrent stop-start motion.

Bid, deliver, and then bid again.

But that doesn’t make this a pattern for suppliers to aspire to.

For incumbent suppliers, what happens in the delivery phase – which is usually the longest and most significant in the relationship – is what sets the stage for winning again.

What customers usually see from a supplier is this.

There’s the initial flurry of excitement when competing for the business, followed (usually) by a short lull while the customer makes up their mind. When we win, it’s a steep climb to get everything set up right, and then we settle back into a comfortable level of delivery until we need to compete again.

But what they EXPECT from us is this:

Choosing the path of continual improvement is what really helps to sustain a customer relationship over the long term.

That’s because not everything is within our control.  We can’t control how customers choose to buy, and we can’t control what competitors do either.

But we CAN choose our own state of mind.

We do get to decide how much of our energy, enthusiasm and ideas – in short, how much of ourselves - we’re prepared to commit to making sure our work gets better and better. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Could you fall victim to the Recency Effect?

Human beings have pretty selective memories. It turns out that we judge much of our life experience not on the totality, the average, or a glance back over the highlights, but on the basis of the last few minutes.

Have you ever walked into a customer’s office expecting to make a presentation about performance over the last month or quarter, and spent the whole meeting talking about last week’s non-delivery or a stuff-up that happened yesterday instead?

Welcome to the Recency Effect, which tells us that the most recently presented items or experiences will most likely be remembered best.

In Change Anything, a New York Times bestseller about the science of personal success, the authors conclude that much of what we feel about our daily relationships stems from only a few moments that overwhelmingly colour our perception.

The book relates a study by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who asked colonoscopy patients to rate their level of discomfort during an unanaesthetised procedure. (Australians, give thanks that we don’t do things that way here. Ouch).

Not surprisingly, none of the test subjects gave glowing reports of their colonoscopy, but the comfort levels they reported had almost nothing to do with the total amount of pain that they felt during the awkward and uncomfortable procedure.

The only thing that mattered was how painful it was right at the end.

What do colonoscopies have in common with contract or service delivery? Maybe more than you think. For a customer, giving over control of part of their business to a supplier, it really CAN feel like being operated on without an anaesthetic.

Your job is to make whatever you do for them as pain-free as possible. And no matter how well you’re doing generally, take extra care for at least three months before you need to compete again.

This will make sure that one or two mistakes don’t derail your good work forever.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Hard worker or clear winner?

There's a lot of joy that accompanies winning a new contact or customer. The hard work is over, and finally, we get a chance to do what we really want to do – the work itself.

For most people in the services business, no matter whether you're in commercial services, human services, or professional services, “the work” is what you actually signed up to do when you chose your career. You want to get out there. You want to deliver your knowledge and expertise. You want to get stuff done and to help people.

And when you’ve won the business, it’s easy to assume that doing good work is all you need to do to keep the relationship humming.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Good work is an expectation: it’s what we get paid to do. So what more do we need to do to keep business that’s important to us, apart from doing good work? That’s surprisingly simple.

There is a distinct difference between the hard workers, who do good work but don’t always retain it, and the clear winners who do both.

Hard workers tend to treat the customer transactionally, obsess about the work, and are only comfortable working with what’s comfortable and absolute.

Clear winners, on the other hand, treat the customer strategically, obsess about the customer’s business (not just the work), deliver what the customer doesn’t yet know they need, and are comfortable working in a space that’s conceptual and abstract.

When it comes to winning again, the way we THINK about our important contracts and customers is even more important than what we do for them.

If you are you part-way through a contract term with a big customer, or faced with a renewal or re-tender process in the next 12 months, join me on August 6 and find out how to get ready to re-compete. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Why “ticking all the boxes” often isn’t enough to make the sale

Imagine how much productivity is lost in businesses, and how many problems remain unsolved, just because buyers don’t have the balls to make a decision and sellers don’t push a solution when they actually have one.

Ever poured your heart and soul into a huge tender or proposal that went nowhere? Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. And it’s not just sellers whose time is wasted: it’s buyers’ too. A loss to “no decision” wastes everyone’s time and energy.

Indecision and waste are everywhere in complex sales. And not just in business.

Take real estate for example.

Escape to the Country is a British reality-TV show that helps hassled Londoners to buy property in the picturesque English countryside.

It’s highly aspirational, but not very practical, as very little property actually changes hands on the show. Most of the time it’s a lovely tour through some beautiful homes accompanied by tinkly music and a soothing voiceover.

While I like a good property stickybeak as much as the next person, I find Escape to the Country frustrating, as so few people actually BUY the gorgeous homes they look at.  Instead, they wander off “still searching for their dream home”, while the poor home owners trying to sell the place are left polishing the andirons in their inglenook fireplaces.

Why don’t these property buyers, seemingly so keen to escape to the country, actually buy? I reckon it’s because many come on the show with a massive laundry list of likes and dislikes. They are shown three homes, and the first two tick all their boxes. Ironically, it’s often the third house - the “mystery house” - that gets the best reception, as it challenges the buyers’ preconceptions and gives them something different (and better) than what they asked for.

Business buyers are exactly the same. They think they know what they want, but they don’t REALLY know until they see it.

So don’t just tick the boxes. Use your expertise, and offer them something that will surprise and delight them. That’s how you will emerge as the clear winner.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Take your power back!

For those of us old enough to remember, the golden age of selling in business-to-business markets was at least 20 or 30 years ago.  Back then, business was done on a handshake, relationships were king and suppliers had a lot of power. If you were running a business or doing any selling back then, you probably felt like you were in control.

Fast forward to today, and business of any size and scale is done through bids and tenders, procurement is king, and suppliers don’t seem to know what to do any more.

The world of sales has fundamentally changed. But some of us are still selling like it’s 1985, Wham is at the top of the charts and we are jamming out “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” on the Sony Walkman wearing our Choose Life t-shirts and fluoro cut-off gloves.

OK, maybe that was just me, but you get the picture. It’s chaos, it’s not pretty (truly) and it’s not working. Something has to change.

What’s really going on here is that we feel like we have lost our power.

It’s fair to say that not everything we’d like to control is within our control. We can’t control how customers buy. We can’t control what competitors do and say. And we can’t control how we feel about any of these things. But we can control how we exercise our CHOICE. And we can choose to think more broadly, to feel differently and to act despite our fears and challenges.

I reckon it’s an exciting time to be in business. Our world is full of possibility and potential. But this is underpinned by rapid and unrelenting change that brings many challenges.

Customers have these challenges too. So we’ve moved from a time where people and personal relationships had a lot of power, to one where ideas and innovation are the primary currency that drives customer relationships.

According to a recent study by TEC (The Executive Connection), a global network of company CEOs, the five issues keeping CEOs up at night are talent management and the need for cultural fit; the role of technology in re-shaping existing business models and creating new opportunities; the globalisation of markets; embedding an innovation mindset; and the perennial need to make good decisions. (Read the full report here) 

Do you have a solution for one of these? Prospects and customers want to hear about it.  

It’s time to take your power back, show them what they don’t know (but should) and build your customer’s future. This is what creates real and lasting customer partnerships.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

The DNA of a successful bid team

A bid team is a living organism – a group of smart people who come together to apply their skills and knowledge to developing a functional solution that will win or retain an important contract or customer.

The most successful teams share a particular type of DNA. In very simple terms, DNA is a blueprint for how to build a living organism: it gives instructions to our cells about how they should grow and function.

Likewise, bid teams need the right mix of customer and technical experts, balanced by a Bid Leader with the authority to make commercial decisions, and the skills to draw out the best ideas and drive the organisational change necessary to win.

What often happens, though, is that it’s left up to the customer experts – the sales team – to run bids on their own. Customers have expectations and the sales team knows all about them: they will happily tell you what they are. Without the leadership and authority to implement these expectations, or the technical know-how to configure the systems and processes of the organisation to suit the customer, this knowledge remains under-used.

Building your team with the right mix of people creates a meeting of minds that will help you win. As you can start to see from this diagram, it’s at the intersection of these specialities that the magic truly happens. Customer experts provide information about customer expectations, which the commercial experts use to provide leadership to the technical people, who can configure a solution for the customer.

Figure 1: The DNA of a successful bid team contains the right mix of specialists with commercial, technical and customer expertise

Avoid letting senior leaders outside your team hijack the bid strategy, particularly if they don’t know the customer well or haven’t worked at the coalface for a long time. Often these people dominate the discussion with commercial concerns and big-picture competitive strategy, at the expense of valuable customer and technical insights, and can make disastrous decisions that undermine the good work of the people who really know what is going on. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Leadership lessons from the Boov

Dreamworks’ new animation feature Home stars Jim Parsons from Big Bang Theory as Oh, an accident-prone alien who believes “Oh” must be his name, as it’s what his fellow Boov say every time he enters the room.

The Boov are a tribe of intergalactic scaredy-cats who turn yellow when they’re afraid (often) and are experts in running away from their problems. After invading Earth and relocating all the humans to Australia – the most remote place the Hollywood scriptwriters could probably think of – their leader, Captain Smek (Steve Martin) is stumped as to what to do next.

Smek is a textbook example of every bad boss you’ve ever had. Bereft of ideas himself, he straps his fellow Boov to machines and orders them to come up with some. The ideas he likes, he takes as his own. Those he doesn't like, earn the thinker a clunk on the head with his prize possession, a scepter called the “shusher”, which Smek stole from the Boov's greatest enemies the Gorg (the scary-looking dudes the Boov are running away from, and also the reason why they’re chasing him).

Steve Martin plays Captain Smek for laughs, but we can empathise with him. Smek has a lot on his plate, and we all grab for the “shusher” when we are under pressure.

For a leader responsible for a big project like a major bid or pursuit, the pressure to win or retain millions of dollars worth of revenue and hundreds of jobs is daunting, unrelenting and sometimes toxic. Under this kind of stress, we sometimes shut down a team member who has something important to say. We might inadvertently hijack an idea that actually came from someone else. It’s easy to rush in with our own ideas at the expense of someone else’s.

None of us can control what customers decide to buy. We can’t control what competitors do. It’s hard to let go of the little control we DO have over a competitive process. But trying to do it all ourselves can cost us – big time.

In an important bid, the energy and enthusiasm of your team is your most precious asset.

Preserve it by engaging an external facilitator to help you develop your bid strategy. You’ll get to contribute your valuable knowledge, support your team’s energy, nurture their great ideas, and have a sounding board to develop your own. And you get to retire the shusher.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Why buyers make the wrong decision

Competitive tenders don't always result in the best decision. Buyers go for what LOOKS like the best decision - on paper – which sometimes proves to be the wrong one.

If you've ever lost a bid you were certain you would win, been shocked by who the buyer actually DID choose instead of you, and seen that supplier go on to deliver (predictably) inferior work and results, you are definitely not alone. 

Professionals are often uncomfortable about parading their wares for money, and that’s what a tender can feel like.  In an ideal world, buyers would offer you an alternative way to show them what you can do – one that actually helps you demonstrate your best work.

For instance, if you’re an architect, how much more comfortable would you be if you were allowed to let your work speak for itself in a design competition, rather than preparing a 100 page tender response?

But of course, buyers often choose the easier option and run a tender instead.

Competitive tenders are an unnatural, artificial and uncomfortable way for professionals to sell themselves. Unfortunately, they are a reality, so we need to find a way to do our best work within them.

It all starts with your business development culture. The most successful business development culture for a services firm is one that feels natural and comfortable; supports how your smart people think best; and gets them energised and excited by the opportunity first.

When you do have to prepare a tender, think about creative ways to bring out the best in what you can do. Include infographics, use interesting case studies, and offer the buyer a taste of the great things that happen to people who make the smart choice to work with you. You'll win more business, more often, and have more fun doing it.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Five ways to write proposals that win business

For the last few weeks we’ve been looking at what NOT to do if you want to avoid losing a competitive tender. One thing all these behaviours have in common is that they are keeping you inwardly focused – on yourself and your firm.

To leapfrog the line between winning and losing, start to turn your attention outwards, to the customer and the opportunity.

The first thing to focus on is compliance. Achieve this, and you’ll be seen as a thoughtful, competent supplier. There are five hurdles to achieving compliance:

1.     Compliance with threshold requirements. If you need quality accreditations such as ISO9001 or ISO4801 and don’t have them, it’s rare to win against competitors that do.  Non-compliance is an easy reason for a buyer to exclude your bid.

2.  Compliance with any mandatory requirements. In the Request for Tender document, look for the words “must” to indicate what’s mandatory.

3.    Compliance with the specifications or scope of works. Can you do everything that the buyer is asking for? That’s important. As the expert, you may have ideas about how things could be done better (I’d certainly hope so, if you want to win). But always submit a complying bid, even if you think your alternative offer is stronger. By the time they have reached a competitive tender, some buyers have already made up their mind.

4.    Contract compliance. This is one area where buyers definitely prefer no changes. Some will even go so far as to specify that you can’t vary the contract terms.

5.  Finally, make sure your tender responses (written answers) are compliant. Analyse the questions properly to make sure that you’re answering every part, and understand why the buyer is asking each question. Include enough qualitative and quantitative evidence to give you a high evaluation score.

While the first four are usually OK, the last can be a challenge without advice and guidance. If you need a leg up and over the final hurdle, my Master Class Program will get your team compliant and see you landing on the "yes" list more often.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

The risk of choosing style over substance

In a competitive tender, the evaluation panel needs to give your submission a score. What you will be evaluated on is the commercial value of your offer and the evidence you provide to support your claims – and not how nice your proposals look and sound.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about how to sidestep common mistakes that will prevent you from winning the business you really deserve to win.

The first step is to stop the bid sweatshop, and the second is to make sure your team is primed to do the right job – not just do the job right.

If you’ve taken these steps, but still aren’t winning, it’s time to make a bigger investment in your success. At this point, most people will bring in marketing experts to write standardised proposal copy and to design templates so that proposals look and sound better, and speak with a unified, on-brand voice.

Does this result in more wins? Unfortunately, no.

Scratch the surface of these “new and improved” proposals, and really they are just glorified brochures.

I understand why people feel the need to do this. Branding and marketing help to build a successful business that supports premium-priced services. However, branding isn’t a cure-all for everything, and bids and tender responses are not a marketing exercise.

A colleague who works on government evaluation panels once told me that her team of evaluators was briefed to be wary of over-elaborate design and copywriting, as these are devices that less qualified suppliers sometimes use as a way to try to bluff their way through the process. Ouch.

Remember that proposals are a one-on-one conversation with someone who is ready to buy. Worry less about the image your proposal is portraying, and more about how convincing the message actually is. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.