Start fast to finish first

Last week we talked about thinking more, and writing less, to win more proposals. This week, I’m going to show you exactly how to plan your schedule so you will have the time you need to think, and to plan your proposal, even when you are stretched with other priorities.

A typical competitive tender schedule (the time from when the tender is released, to when it’s due) is four weeks. This goes by faster than you'd think.

Parkinson’s law says that “work expands to fill the time available to complete it.” If you think that all you need to do is write the proposal, four weeks probably sounds like a generous amount of time.  Add strategy, content and evidence planning into the mix, though – the things you’ll need to do to be convincing, compelling and emerge as the clear winner – and it suddenly doesn’t sound like such an easy run after all.

It’s pretty common to see people “sit” on tender requests for days, or weeks, while they are deciding whether or not it’s worth going for, waiting for feedback from others, or just working on other things.

Unfortunately, time lost at the start of the bid schedule has a compounding, negative effect on your chances of winning. Lose a week, and your strategy will suffer. Lose two weeks, and you will also miss key pieces of evidence to support your claims and maximise your evaluation score.

When you’re leading a proposal, aim to spend most of your time on strategy and planning. This minimises the time you will need to write, review and polish.

Here’s how to spend each day in those four weeks to give yourself the best chance of success:

Week 1 – Circulate the briefing to your team as soon as it is released. Give them a day to read it. Then run your strategy session. Once you have your bid strategy and Purchaser Value Topics ready, write a draft of your Executive Summary. Get agreement in principle to the strategy and key messages.

Week 2 – with your bid strategy and Purchaser Value Topics agreed, now you can get stuck into planning your response. Analyse the tender questions; really pull them apart. Figure out what they are really asking for. What is the buyer’s motivation for asking? Is there a question behind the question? What do they want to expect to hear? Plan evidence to substantiate all your claims. Circulate your content plan with instructions to any other writers.

Week 3 – gather all your content and start shaping it into a proposal. Circulate the first draft for comment and review.

Week 4 – Make final changes, format the proposal and get internal sign-off.  Submit it at least one day before the customer’s deadline.

Why honesty is the best policy in a proposal

When writing a proposal, it can be tempting to ignore the areas where you know you’re going to come up short. What if you have less experience than competitors, or a less than stellar track record with a customer you are desperate to retain? Unfortunately, glossing over the issue isn't going to work.

A study by John Paul MacDuffie of Pennsylvania University, published in the Journal of International Business Studies in 2011, identified three types of trust in business relationships:

1.     Contractual trust;

2.     Trust in competence, and

3.     Goodwill.

Competitive tendering is built on the idea of “contractual trust”. In other words, as a buyer, I trust you if you meet my minimum standards; are prepared to sign a contract that binds you to these standards; and where I have legal redress if you don’t perform.

The other types of trust – competence and goodwill – are harder to establish, because they are based on how you operate on the job. While presenting past performance data does go some way towards establishing trust in your competence, it’s harder to foster goodwill in a proposal, particularly if you have no prior track record with the customer.

But there is a way to do it.

Recently the business media was all hot and bothered about a 22 year old intern from San Diego called Matthew Ross, who the Wall Street investment banking fraternity were falling all over themselves to hire. What was so special about Ross, who was just as inexperienced as the thousands of other American undergraduates that apply for internships? Here is how he sold himself:

"I won't waste your time inflating my credentials, throwing around exaggerated job titles, or feeding you a line of crap about how my past experiences and skill set align perfectly for an investment banking partnership.

The truth is, I have no unbelievably special skills...but I do have a near perfect GPA (grade point average) and will work hard for you. I have no qualms about fetching coffee, shining shoes or picking up laundry, and will work for next to nothing."

A proposal is a lot like a job application. Any time your proposal is not congruent with who you are and what you can do, it’s like an instant red flag that will send the buyer searching for other holes. There's a good chance you will spook them and never know why they suddenly went cold on you.

I know incumbents who have lost business simply because they haven't owned up to problems that are obvious to everyone.

Likewise, I have seen long shots win by being up-front and honest about their shortcomings, and by demonstrating a willingness to work and learn (just like Matthew Ross did).

Selling is a kind of energy exchange; it is always about people and what they believe about you.

Customers will expect you to have the right skills, products and services, but they place a higher value on attitude than you might think.

That’s because nothing is ever perfect. When things go wrong in the job, or the relationship - as they inevitably will - they want to know you're the kind of person they can work with to find a solution. 

This is tip no. 2 in my most popular e-book, 10 Easy Ways To Write A Better Proposal Today.

Three reasons why incumbents are more at risk than they think

I have a confession to make – I’m tragically addicted to politics. Elections are my kind of competition. Some people live for the AFL Grand Final. Others obsess over Eurovision or MasterChef. Me, I’m an election groupie.

Every three years, when the Federal election rolls around, I stalk proudly through the gaggle of political party volunteers at the local polling booth – accepting one or two how-to-vote leaflets and loudly refusing others – to place my very important vote.

As soon as the vote count starts, I settle in with snacks for a nice long stretch of channel surfing, shouting at the commentators and throwing things at the TV when the count doesn’t go my way. I love the process, but what I’m really hanging out for is the end result, and the leaders’ concession and victory speeches. 

This year, I stayed up for a very long time. Maybe you did too. And wasn’t it frustrating? We didn’t get a victory speech that night, or even the next morning. We were left hanging for a week before we knew the likely outcome of the election – the government returned to office by the narrowest of margins.

We were told the election would be close, but not so close that it would eventually come down to week’s worth of postal votes.

What happened?

Incumbents are more vulnerable than they think. This is true whether you’re a political party or a contractor selling commercial goods and services.

Here are three things that every incumbent can learn from the very close result of the Australian Federal election – a result that could easily have gone another way.

1. Incumbents are always vulnerable to a protest vote. The customer, in this case the electorate, had already seen what this government could do and many of them weren’t happy about it. With only a single term under their belts, we also still remember the alternative, and it seems we weren't happy with them either, resulting in a large rise in votes for Independents and for the Greens. By Monday, with 80% of the vote counted, nearly a quarter of Australians had given their votes to an independent or minor party, with the Coalition registering a primary vote of only 42.1 percent - its fourth lowest result for the past 60 years.
2.  An incumbent’s team listens only to the good news, and blocks out everything else. In this election, it has been suggested that the Coalition was so enamoured of its own internal polling – which optimistically predicted that the party would be returned to government by a large margin - that it even convinced the majority of the media this was a foregone conclusion. The result was much closer than the Coalition’s polling anticipated, and the fallout and recriminations have been difficult for its leadership to handle.

1. An incumbent's program of work and track record are visible and open to scrutiny. Like it or not, this makes it very easy for an opponent to find the patterns, holes and gaps and to mount an effective attack, as Labor did with the Medicare, or “Mediscare”, campaign.

What can we learn from these results?

• The time to start campaigning again to win an election is the day you form a government.
• The time to start campaigning to retain a customer is the day you sign the contract.

Incumbents ignore this, and believe their own hype, at their peril.

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.

Five ways to win more tenders

Last week I caught up with a client whose team did some tender and proposal writing training with me a few years ago. She told me they are having a lot of success with competitive tenders now, and that their business has grown exponentially over the last few years. She also said the feedback they get now about the quality of their tender responses is very positive. At one debriefing meeting recently, the buyer even told her that her company’s tender was the best they had ever seen.

If you’re not yet getting that kind of success, or feedback, about your tenders there are some things you can do to improve. Here are five of the most effective.

1.     Make sure you have a strategy to win the business that translates into two or three compelling messages that are easy for the buyer to remember. I call these Purchaser Value Topics, and they are basically evaluation criteria that you suggest to the buyer that go over and above simply complying with theirs.

2.     Provide insights that transcend their briefing. Anyone can regurgitate the tender document back to the buyer, and it takes a smart cookie to tell them what they don't know - but should.

3.     Really analyse everything they’re asking for, and answer the ‘question behind the question’. Why did they ask this question? What do they want to know? How will the answer affect their decision-making process? Many tender questions are made up of more than one part, so don't just skim the surface. You'll miss something, and this could count against you.

4.     Don't dumb down what you do to fit the briefing. The client I mentioned earlier is in a complex industry that buyers often don’t understand. Her company’s tender responses generate a lot of discussion with buyers, because they shed light on things that the buyer simply hadn’t considered.

5.     Make sure you present it beautifully. These days, when people are selling their home, they'll often spend thousands on staging and furniture to show it off to potential buyers and to achieve the best price. Think of your tender response like that. It’s the only chance you’ll get to make a first impression.

Doing well in a competitive tendering environment isn't easy, but it can be done, and successful tender writing and presentation is a skill that you can learn.

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.

Is your proposal really a proposal?

When your proposals aren’t successful, it can be hard to figure out why. Trying to fix this problem on your own is like trying to fix a car when you’re not a mechanic. You can tinker and try things, but it’s hit-and-miss, frustrating and slow.

So let’s start with defining what a proposal really is.

A proposal is a commercial document whose purpose is to influence the customer to say "yes" to you. To achieve this, proposals need a combination of style, substance and relevance.

• Style is the way the proposal looks and sounds, and how it makes the reader feel.
• Substance is the content of the proposal, which outlines the offer that you are making to the buyer.
• Relevance is the “fit” between the offer and the problems and aspirations of the customer.

Problems occur when any one of these elements is missing; the “proposal” becomes a brochure, a report, or a presentation. All of these are interesting in their own right, but none are likely to get you hired.

When there’s style and substance, but no relevance to the customer, your proposal becomes a Brochure. This is a generic document that looks and sounds great, but could apply to anyone. Studies show that brochures are useful in consumer businesses, particularly retail trade and in tourism. If you’re selling to business and government, not so much.

When there’s substance and relevance, but a lack of style, customers read the proposal as if it’s a Report. Proposals are about selling the job; reports are about doing the job.

Customers are trained to read reports as a set of recommendations - not all of which may be adopted.

Where there is style and relevance, you’ve got a Presentation. In his book Pitch Anything, Oren Klaff, a venture capital consultant who pitches multi-million dollar deals for a living, says that customers often see sales presentations as “the morning’s entertainment” - a pleasant enough way to spend an hour, maybe even to learn something new, but probably not to buy anything.

So, is your proposal really a proposal? Or is it something else? Identifying the problem is the start of the solution.

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 makes a great Executive Summary?

The purpose of an Executive Summary is to convince the buyer to say “yes” to your proposal. Unfortunately, many fall far short of this aim.

Here’s what an Executive Summary is not:

·      It’s not an “introduction” to the proposal.

·      It’s not a summary of the technical solution.

·      And it’s definitely not all about you – and nothing about the buyer.

A good Executive Summary sets out your commercial argument for the business in a clear and confident tone. A great executive summary does even more than this; it connects the buyer emotionally with your offering and your vision, and sets out an exciting future that they couldn’t possibly say no to.

Here’s how to distinguish an average Executive Summary from really great ones that will win you business:

Average Executive Summaries…	Great Executive Summaries…
Show how you will do the job	Show how you will deliver value
Talk about you and your credentials	Talk about them and their future
Make you sound like every other supplier	Make you sound like the only people they would want to work with
Are professional, detached, and a bit of a dull read	Are conversational, enthusiastic and interesting to read
Look like the one that was in the last proposal	Look fresh and exciting; are written specifically for each new opportunity
Sound like they are talking to no one in particular	Are a conversation at the highest level; as if your CEO was talking directly to the buyer

Next time, try writing your Executive Summary before you write your proposal. This will help you to get clear on your strategy, identify gaps and holes in the evidence you have to support the strategy, and build your team’s connection to the vision.

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.

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.

Three ways to create curiosity in customers and prospects

We all like to buy low, and sell high; to make a good investment and do a good deal. But investing in potential comes with risk, which big companies and government, in particular, aren’t too keen on. Their risk-averse behaviour is what coined the old adage, "No-one ever got fired by hiring IBM"; in other words, that it is safer to hire a firm with a proven track record, even if it does prove more costly (both in dollars and lost potential for innovation) to do so.

The need to mitigate a customer’s risk aversion is one reason why, when trying to sell a customer on something new, we will almost always revert to our past achievements as justification.

Tender request documents issued by buyers also exaggerate the importance of credentials, by giving us points for explaining our experience in similar work.

But this isn't what customers are really buying. Solid credentials may be the price of entry to a competition, but what customers are really interested in is what is coming next.

In To Sell is Human, Dan Pink suggests that we are more likely to buy into something or someone "with potential" - that is, yet to reach their peak. Among other research, he cites a test of two Facebook ads for a comedian, Kevin Shea. The first ad said Shea "could be the next big thing", while the second described him as "the next big thing." The first ad, hinting at Shea's potential, generated far more click-throughs and likes than the second.

Curiosity creates possibility. Here are three ways to create curiosity about your potential, with the aim of expanding the conversations you’re having with customers or prospects.

1. Describe new developments in your field.
2. Talk about something you're tinkering with, or a pilot program you are trialling.

Disclose some of the new thinking you and your team are developing, and explain how this might offer new and improved ways to deliver results.

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.

The challenge of comprehension

To be successful in competitive tenders, we need to skillfully communicate a message that goes only one way. So comprehension is the first hurdle. Does the buyer get it? Can they explain it? Could they sell it to someone else if they had to? The barriers we face here are surprisingly high.

Reading skills are foundational to the comprehension of long documents like proposals.

According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Centre, nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. The University of Copenhagan suggests that multi-tasking with technology, like checking email while watching TV, is rewiring our brains and shortening attention spans – and 80% of us do this regularly. Add to this Australia’s significant problem with literacy and numeracy - - the 2006/7 Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey found that 46%- 70% of us have “poor” or “very poor” skills in prose literacy, document literacy and problem-solving – and you’ve got a recipe for misunderstanding and disinterest.

Our proposal will end up on a pile with many others. Reading every one of these is a daunting, difficult job – made even more difficult if reading isn’t the buyer’s strong suit. The way we write proposals doesn’t help either. If we are not yet sold on what we’re offering, proposals can come off sounding stilted, awkward and full of incomprehensible jargon.

One of my favourite clients has a wonderful expression for incomprehensible proposal writing – he calls it “guff”. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, guff means “foolish nonsense”. Harsh. But true. (Want to know if guff is poisoning your company’s proposals? Check out Bullfighter – a Word-compatible program that gives documents a Bull score based on how much jargon is in them.)

What happens when you combine a buyer who isn’t a great reader, with an offer that isn’t a great read? No deal. Comprehension is the first test of a winning offer. Get it focused, make it clear, and you’re on your way to getting it sold.

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.

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.

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.

Incumbency + innovation = guaranteed return on investment

Are you pursuing new ideas SPECIFICALLY to benefit your major customers?

If you are in a service business that is accustomed to getting paid for things before it will even contemplate doing them, chances are, you might not be.

Typically, we pitch for a contract and do the work later. The contract defines the scope and the performance measures, and everyone’s attention is focused on meeting these. In this environment, the thought of positioning new ideas and investing cash without a “guaranteed return” is often difficult for business development leaders get their heads around.

However, no matter how good your performance is, the biggest risk of losing a customer or contract is to do no more than focus on the day-to-day.

In my book Winning Again, procurement expert Neil Hubbard sums up the buyer’s perspective beautifully. “Don't wait until it's time to do a tender”, he says. “As soon as you're awarded the contract, your time starts. Be very conscious that in three years’ time, your contract will come up. Start working on innovation that will bring cost savings or benefits to our business and start telling us what you're going to do now.”

When you’re innovating in a way that is designed to help a major customer grow their business or to do business better, you ARE guaranteed a return: a better reputation and relationship with the customer that will help you to win again.

And there is another benefit too. When you start to think this way, you’ll find there are many people working in your business who would love to have an opportunity to do more for your major customers – provided that the leadership culture will support them.

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.

Competition is coming

No matter where you are in the procurement cycle, one thing that you can be sure of is competition. Whether it's from the customer putting your business out to tender again, or from competitors pushing their own agenda, competition never really goes away.

Yet the way we approach the certainty of competition says a lot about our likelihood of future success.

In her book Mindset, psychologist Dr Carol Dweck explains the difference between fixed and growth mindsets. Those with a growth mindset, like champion athlete Michael Jordan, find success through learning and improving. Others with a more fixed mindset regard success as “establishing their superiority”. As a result, while growth-minded athletes see setbacks as a motivating wake-up call, those with more fixed mindsets give up because they are scared to lose.

One way our mindset is evident in business is in how we engage with customers over the life of a contract. Suppliers with a fixed mindset are full of nervous energy when submitting the tender response, in a flurry of activity when getting the contract set up and hit a flat line of delivery over the course of the contract until the Request for Tender arrives again. On the other hand, suppliers with a growth mindset are always bringing new ideas to the customer – not just when they’re obliged to.

As we end the month of January and are about to run full tilt into the rest of the year, it’s time to engage your growth mindset. What do you know about your most important customers' plans for 2015? What big items do they have on their agenda this year? How can you help them achieve success with these? How can you be ready for events that are going to shape and change their business? When you already have the business, these are not challenges to be fearful of – they are exciting opportunities that will help you win again.

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 http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

Why procurement and service businesses are natural allies

Selling services is never going to be completely transactional and all about price. It is always about something more. Buyers need help to navigate complex problems that weren’t conceived of a year ago – let alone 10 years ago – and service providers can help them.

Unfortunately, many people find selling to procurement complex, adversarial and intimidating. It doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, if you sell services you will actually benefit from cultivating a relationship with procurement.

According to procurement expert Adel Salman, procurement doesn’t “own” services expenditure (although they are responsible for raw materials) and has to satisfy many other stakeholders who are actually using the service and paying for it. Therefore, it is part of procurement’s job to engage good service providers and help them deliver exceptional performance.

Increasing expectations of the procurement function are also driving this trend. A survey of 70 chief executive officers by brain.net revealed that CEOs expect much more from procurement departments in areas like innovation. In his book Selling To Procurement, Christopher Provines says that “…increasingly, particularly for more mature organisations, procurement is being asked to help the company grow.” He explains that innovation needs to be thought of in the broadest sense – process/business model innovation and product innovation – and that often, suppliers can contribute significantly to both.

Provines cites a survey of more than 300 chief purchasing officers by CAPS Research, a supply chain research firm, which revealed that about 60 per cent saw innovation from suppliers as “extremely important”. This is encouraging news for suppliers, and especially for suppliers of complex services.

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 http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

Five characteristics of clear winners

It’s no longer enough just to be a good supplier. We must strive to become great suppliers, and this doesn’t just mean being great at what we already do for our customers.

Something that I’ve noticed over many years of working with incumbent suppliers in many different industries is that the most successful ones share a very clear and focused pattern of behaviour that helps them retain existing their contracts, while others are setting themselves up to lose. The most successful suppliers are those that I call the ‘clear winners’.

For me, the term clear winner describes the mindset of the business development leader as well as the course of action that the organisation follows to win and retain business.

Here are five ways that business development leaders demonstrate the mindset of a clear winner.

1. Clear winners love what they do and speak eloquently about their business and its opportunities.
2. Clear winners have great ideas with the potential to deliver genuine value for their customers. They focus on serving their customers first and themselves second.
3. Clear winners are truly excited about the opportunity to work with customers. They see this as a privilege and not just a ‘numbers game’.
4. Clear winners believe that there is always a better way of doing things, even when there are already great at what they do.
5. Clear winners have a lot on (like everyone else) but always seem to manage to focus on just the right thing. You’ll never hear them complain about being ‘busy’ – instead, they are energised by the work they’re doing.

Clear winners may seem lucky – like they are 'on a roll' – but they know the real story; to achieve at this level takes courage, investment and hard work.

This is an extract from Robyn’s new book Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. To order your copy, go to http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

Why gratitude wins business

When we first win a customer or contract, it’s natural to be on a high and very excited – a bit like the first flush of love. But when business as usual kicks in, it doesn't take long before we are taking the customer (our partner) for granted. In doing so, we tend to forget what a risk it was for them to choose us in the first place, and the gratitude we felt during the honeymoon period.

Last year one of my clients was bidding for an important government contract. The Department in question was looking to reform this part of the market, so we had several bids in place and the team was braced to expect change. The first call we received was to notify us that we had lost our (small) current contract. The CEO, always gracious under pressure, was genuine in thanking the Department rep for the opportunity to participate and assured him that she understood the reasons for the loss. He was grateful and surprised to receive such a reaction, having made similar calls to other unsuccessful suppliers and been given a much more aggressive and angry reception.

Not long afterwards, our team got better news. We had won a much larger contract that not only replaced the revenue (and jobs) of the first one, but increased both exponentially.

No matter what business you’re in, long-term contracts are a game of strategic relationships.

When there is a setback, think carefully about the future and don’t burn your bridges.

Expressing true gratitude for the opportunities we've already been given in business actually helps us to win even more. We never know what lies ahead, and we can achieve so much more with the customer’s backing and support.

This is an extract from Robyn’s new book Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. To order your copy, go to http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

The role of a Bid Leader

When you’re in charge of a bid for an important piece of business, you are an important role model for your team and your organisation.

The amount of energy and enthusiasm they will display for the bid is directly correlated to how you feel about it yourself. Is this something you really want to win? What will it mean for your role, your team or your business if you win? What about if you don't? What are the great things that will happen if you win? What are the consequences of a loss?

Bid Leadership is an active project leadership role where it is important to lead by example.

When leading a bid, you are neither a figurehead nor a task master. You need to be right in there, actively working with your team, and supporting them when they need it most.

When you do, you will find that your energy and enthusiasm are contagious.

Make sure that you share what you are doing among the informal power networks inside your organisation so there is a groundswell of support. Enlist the help of other line managers, if you need to, to get help with your projects and extra resources to cover for you and your team while you are deep in delivery of the bid.

It’s fine to ask your team to work longer hours on project delivery or bid delivery, as long as you are doing this yourself. Use the opportunity to give your people extra responsibility and make sure they are rewarded for it.

Own your role as Bid Leader, and you will own the bid’s success as well.