Would your proposal get a standing ovation?

When we're pitching something new to a customer, our main task is to convince them that will be better off with us than they would be without us. This means transporting them to a brighter, bolder future that they never knew existed; something that too many proposals simply fail to do.

Recently, I saw the stage show Velvet, a disco mash-up featuring burlesque, circus performers and one of Australia’s most enduring pop stars, Marcia Hines.

In the real world, the show ran 90 minutes. In the Velvet world, this felt like only 90 seconds. It was that good.

From the opening bars of the disco classic If You Could Read My Mind to Craig Read’s exuberant, pink and yellow lycra-clad hula-hoop act set to the thumping beat of Shake Your Groove Thing, Velvet was like being transported straight to Studio 54 circa 1974. By the end of the show, DJ Joe Accaria had every single person in the Malthouse Theatre on their feet clapping, cheering and dancing to Earth, Wind and Fire's September – one of my favourite songs of all time. As a pitch for the life-changing power of disco, you’ll never see anything better.

When was the last time you could honestly say that a pitch or proposal you worked on got that kind of reaction - from you, from your team, or from the customer?

Instead of offering a tantalising glimpse into a better future, many proposals feel like a slow descent into purgatory.

Something important gets lost in the translation between the vision in our heads and the words that come out on paper. That’s a real shame, because the picture in your head is often a lot more enticing and transformative than the pitch on the page.

A study of 418 executive-level buyers at companies with more than 100 employees by Forrester Research found that 74% of buyers chose vendors who have worked with them to turn a vision into a clear path to value, compared to those who simply respond to a request.

Next time you’re working on an important pitch or proposal, picture a magical place – the place that you know exists – and take your customers there, instead. Then they’ll be clapping and cheering; at least, on the inside.

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.

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.

Be the choice you want your customers to make

In deciding to do business with us, customers have to make a choice. To decide actually means to “kill off choice”. While that choice can seem like a good one in the beginning, over time, doubts and worries can start to creep in, which eventually can result in the customer making another choice; to move their business somewhere else.

Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling into Melbourne CBD on public transport three days in a row, which is not something I normally do. While the morning trips were okay, two of the evening trips back home were an absolute nightmare.

On the first evening, the trip home went of without a hitch. On the second, the screen on the platform showed my train, stopping all stations, just about to arrive, so I got on it. At the first stop, the train started to reverse a little. I thought it had just overshot the station, but no. The doors closed and it sped back towards Southern Cross, the station I had just come from. Wondering what the hell was going on, I got out and took a look at the screen. Lucky I did. Suddenly this train was headed somewhere else and not at all where it said it was going originally. Hastily, I grabbed my gear and got off again. Eventually, another train arrived and I made it home without an unplanned detour to the outer southeast.

The third and final night was the worst. Standing again on the platform at Southern Cross, the screens promised a Frankston train coming in three minutes. When those three minutes had expired, the screen changed, and that train became a Flinders Street train. This switch on the screen happened three times in a row. No announcements, no explanation. Stuck in the city, without other options to get home, I stood there without a clue of what to do.

Half an hour passed without a train arriving, and finally I was forced to ask for help. Raelene, a friendly-looking woman who had just arrived on the platform, explained that I should go to Flinders Street and wait for a Frankston train there. Grateful for the advice, I asked my new transport buddy about my train-reversing problem from the previous night, keen to see if I was in fact going crazy. Apparently not. “That kind of thing happens all the time,” Raelene said. “Last week, I was on a train that said it was going to Frankston and actually ended up in North Melbourne (completely the opposite direction). I’d had a long day at work, and with my head buried in my Kindle, just didn’t notice the wrong stations whizzing by until it was too late.”

So, our train system is unpredictable. This in itself is probably not that surprising.

What really got me, though, is that the regular commuters on the platform that day didn’t seem shocked, like I was; they were just putting up with the bad service and working around it as best they could.

Eventually though, when it comes time for the government to renew the public transport contracts, I reckon these very same people will rise up like an army to voice their dissatisfaction.

Within every long-term customer relationship, there are niggles that everyone gets used to. People stop complaining about them, but that doesn't mean they're not there, and they can seriously derail your chances of winning the business for a second time.

If you'd like to explore this issue in your business, there are still a few places left in my one-day workshop How To Retain Your Most Important Contracts and Customers in two weeks’ time. Hope to see you there.

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.

Think like a challenger

Picture your most important customer.

Now imagine a world where you don’t have them, and never did. You have other customers like them, maybe not as big or as impressive. And you really, really want them. Your business would grow exponentially if only you could land them.

In this world, you think about this prospective customer all the time. You have lots of ideas to make their world better. You even have a one-year plan. And a three-year plan. And a ten-year plan.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture.

Welcome to the world of your competitors, who are actively building exactly this kind of plan to steal the business out from under you.

Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance and helped the economy of one of the planet’s poorest nations, understands how hard it is to get people to accept change. “My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people,” he said. “Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.”

Being the incumbent supplier of a big customer is like wearing a set of beer goggles that only let us see the best-case scenario. Because there’s so much at stake, we tend to look for evidence to “prove” that what we are already doing is good enough. As a result we are often blindsided when someone comes in with a more compelling argument that we just didn't see coming. 

Picture your customer again, and imagine for a minute that you were pitching for their business for the first time.

·      Things to fix: What holes could you poke in the current service delivery? Where are the problems that you would want to magically disappear? What doesn’t work well that you could do better?

·      Things to build: What aren’t you doing that you really should be doing? What would the customer love you to do, that you’ve been resisting? If you were the customer, how would you like to see your business transform in the future, and how could you as their supplier make that happen?

Thinking like a challenger does two important things. It helps us get real about problems we don’t want to think about, and it also creates excitement about what we could achieve but haven’t yet.

So take off the beer goggles and have a good, long look at the future. It’s as bright as wechoose to make it.

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.