Proposal positioning tip: how to retain important contracts

In contract retention projects, the stakes are very high.  Often there are millions of dollars and many peoples’ livelihoods on the line. My specialty is working on critical bids for contracts that are strategically important to the growth or stability of the clients I work with.  This means I often work on retention projects with incumbent suppliers who are seeking to retain their biggest clients. In one extreme case, I was asked to work with a new client on a tender that represented 100% of their business.  No pressure, then!

In my experience, there are many traps for incumbents, not the least of which involves working with a lot of nervous people who are relying on you.  So if you already have the business, and need to retain it, here’s what to do.

• Sit down with everyone in your organisation that interacts with the customer and ask them a very simple question – ‘If it were in your power to improve only one thing about (customer’s) business, what would it be’?  Really LISTEN to the people at the coal face.  They are your eyes and ears on the ground and they usually have the best ideas about what the customer really wants.  They will also know which of your competitors is talking to them– and the ideas the customer is listening to.
• Approach the proposal like it’s your very first pitch to the customer.  Incumbents get unseated because they lose the fire and the passion for the business.  Prove to them that you’ve still got it.
• Use your proposal to paint a picture of the future, not to talk about the past.  Relying on past successes is a classic mistake that loses business for even the most worthy suppliers. When leading an incumbency pitch, your job is to get the customer excited about why they should sign with you for the next three years and beyond – not tell them what you’ve done for them for the past three years (or thirty).
• Spell out the risks of losing your know-how, your proprietary systems, your people - whatever it takes to make them think long and hard about what it will really mean if they go elsewhere.

What to do when prospective customers won’t take meetings

One of the biggest complaints that I hear consistently from suppliers is that buyers won't take meetings any more. This trend has been growing for a long time, and now that professional procurement processes are firmly established in most organisations, it’s something that all of us are going to have to learn to live with. Suppliers in complex industries with drawn out sales cycles have long understood the value of content marketing; providing information to buyers when they need it to narrow down the field of potential suppliers and help them make their buying decision.

With direct contact with buyers proving more and more difficult to obtain, businesses of all sizes are now turning to content marketing to generate pre-sales activity.

In September this year, IDG Enterprise, a publishing company specialising in the IT market (titles include CIO, Computerworld and Network World) shared its recent study on pre-sales customer engagement.

What they found is that during the IT purchase process, IT decision makers download an average of eight pieces of content to help guide their purchase decision, ranging from product reviews, product demos and literature to feature articles and video. The study showed that video is becoming increasingly important at the beginning of the purchase process, and that these decision makers are watching interviews with industry experts and on the technology itself.

On the downside, the study showed that 82% of IT decision makers find it difficult to locate high quality and trusted content, and felt that much of the content they are consuming contains too much marketing hype and too many buzzwords. The study found that that independent, unbiased, and specific information elevates a supplier’s message and potentially results in their content being shared.

If you are finding it difficult to engage face-to-face with buyers, there is a message here to take notice of. Buyers are still out there looking for information about you —they're just looking in different places, and for different things, to what you're probably accustomed to.

Think about how you can equip your sales force with good quality videos, infographics, white papers, and other content to help drive the pre-sales process, and the optimum amount of content that a buyer will need to consume before they are amenable to direct contact from you.

Read more about the IDG study at http://www.idgenterprise.com/press/video-and-social-media-use-growing-in-connecting-it-buyers-and-vendors#CUSENG2013

Proposal Positioning: Is Your Expert Really An Expert?

Given my background in sales and marketing, I still have a keen interest in what the advertising and marketing industry is doing. One of my favourite things to watch on TV is Gruen Planet, one of the many versions of The Gruen franchise produced by Andrew Denton. I love the way the panellists on Gruen Planet try to get inside the head of what advertisers are thinking when they put certain messages forward. Sometimes those messages can seem very strange indeed.

Recently I saw an ad that - while it wasn’t funny enough for Gruen Planet - certainly struck me as very strange. It's an ad for Sensodyne Toothpaste, and it’s presented by an attractive young woman talking about the benefits of Sensodyne Toothpaste for “sensitive teeth patients”, I think she called them.

The thing that’s really strange about this ad is that this woman is the Marketing Manager for Sensodyne, and they actually say so in the copy. Since when have people trusted the marketing manager’s views as an expert on what makes a good toothpaste? Where have all the dentists gone?

For me, this served as a reminder to be careful about who we put forward as experts in our proposal. Sure, the ideas our experts talk about are generally concocted by a team of people, which may of course include the sales and marketing people. But customers want to hear from experts - the people who have the training and the knowledge to make such pronouncements. I’d be happy to hear the marketing manager talk about marketing, which is what she’s trained and experienced to do.  But when it comes to the benefits of toothpaste, give me a dentist any day.

Context vs content - using your proposal to fill in both sides of the sales conversation

When you speak to a buyer in person, you can tell by their body language and expression whether or not your message has actually landed.  In a proposal, you can’t – and that’s pretty scary. Like it or not, a large part of the sales relationship is transacted through formal RFTs these days, without the opportunity for a feedback loop.  This means your proposal needs to work extra hard to fill in both sides of the conversation – just as if the buyer were in the room asking questions and getting information from you.

Content is what you say in your proposal; it’s your message.  Context is what gives meaning to your message.  Content without context is easily misunderstood.

For example, let’s say you have arrived back in your office after two days on the road presenting new construction techniques to a major client.  Your boss buzzes you and says abruptly “Steve, come and see me right now.”  As you hang up you think “The client called, they hated my presentation, and I’m going to get my butt kicked.”

But imagine if your boss had instead said “Welcome back Steve!  ABC Developments called, and they loved your presentation. Their engineers have raised some questions about the logistics of the new concrete panels.  It’s not a big deal but we need to work it out and get back to them by the end of the week.  Please come and see me now so we can throw around some options.”

What a difference this would make.  Instead of thinking you’re about to get hauled over the coals, you’re straight away thinking about how to answer the client's questions.

Presenting content without context in a proposal is a bit like walking up to an attractive stranger at a party and talking about yourself for 15 minutes without pausing for breath. It's not a great way to start a relationship.

As the expert, you have all this knowledge in your head that the customer doesn't have access to. The buyer doesn’t know what you know; you have to explain it to them. Think of context as a carry-bag for content – context holds your content together and helps it make sense. Part of the work of writing a proposal is to anticipate the questions you are raising for the buyer, and make sure your proposal answers them.

Proposal positioning tip: the tricycle for triplets

The other day I was walking around my neighbourhood when I saw something surprising - three identical 18-month-olds sitting on a tricycle that had clearly been built specifically for triplets. What a great idea! Our customers' businesses are full of opportunities like this; things that they need built to solve problems that they deal with every day, in this case how to manage three toddlers who all want to get on a bike at the same time.

What are the little niggles that your customers have, and that you can provide a solution for?

Not only will they love you for it, this is a great way to build competitive advantage by providing remarkable customer value.

Spitball podcast: the changing face of positioning value

With so much competition out there, it’s no longer enough to simply keep providing a good level of service. Customers will always be looking for more - and unless you are going the extra mile to differentiate and to position yourself as the as the clear winner, you will find your competitors are pipping you at the post. As a business development consultant working on large bids and tender responses, I’ve seen first-hand the uphill battle faced by suppliers who haven’t put in the necessary work to position against highly motivated and methodical competitors. Unless you take the time to distill down your knowledge about your customer to what they actually need and value, your proposal or RFT response will be just another heavy tome to add to the pile.

In our latest Spitball podcast, Hamish Riddell, Bri Williams and I discuss “The Changing Face of Positioning Value".  Find out why we think that challenging the status quo and nudging the customer to step outside of what they know is a good thing - http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/

Proposal writing tip: should I use italics, underlining and bold text?

When you're making a pitch to a customer with a limited attention span, it's best not to do anything that is going to distract them from the point you are trying to make. Sprinkling italics, underlining and bold text throughout your narrative may seem appealing as a way to garner attention, but can actually end up breaking the flow of narrative.

If you want a piece of text to stand out, try using headlines, bullet points, or breakout boxes instead.

What contract bidders can learn from crowdfunding – Part 2

Crowdfunding offers a new model of audience engagement that contract bidders can learn a lot from.  Here are my top four lessons from the most successful crowdfunders.

1. Keep reminding the customer of what’s great about your offer. In crowdfunding, this means up to seven email follow-ups. In your proposal, this means reiterating your most compelling points and spinning them in different ways, not just burying them in the Executive Summary.
2. Make it real. Crowdfunding projects that are supported by engaging video and visuals outsell other projects by a factor of 10 to 1. Successful crowdfunder Chris Thomas, who raised $110,000 through Kickstarter against a target of $10,000 to bring “sleep earmuffs” to market (yes, really), says that there is a direct correlation between “the quality of the video and the bids, and what you end up raising”. Think about how you can elevate your pitch above the usual boring wasteland of uninterrupted words.
3. Make it stand out. In crowdfunding, successful projects tap into needs that customers didn’t even know they had. For example, Patient Zero raised $230,000 through Pozible to stage real life zombie battles, 23 times more than the $10,000 it was originally asking for. In a bid, you’re battling for attention in a crowded marketplace; if everyone can tick all the boxes in the RFT then what makes you any different? Be bold, be an expert, and show the customer a compelling vision of their future working with you.
4. Give something extra. Crowdfunding isn’t charity, and successful crowdfunders recognise that people want to get something back to their investment. A while back, I invested $100 through Pozible in a community project that eventually raised its target of $10,000. In return, I was offered email updates, an invitation to the launch, and my name on the sponsor’s ‘roll of honour’. Rewards don’t have to relate to the project at hand; offer to share your expertise for free on another issue that you know the client is struggling with.

What contract bidders can learn from crowdfunding - Part 1

Crowdfunding offers a new model of audience engagement that contract bidders — who often believe we are talking to an audience that is already sold on what we do — could learn a lot from. Crowdfunding is a social media platform through which millions of dollars have been raised for projects as diverse as a Parma and pot at the local pub ($259 against a target of $20) to millions of dollars of fan funding for a movie version of the TV series Veronica Mars. In the crowdfunding world, the only measure of a project’s worth is whether people will stump up money for it. Most crowdfunding goes to projects that it would be difficult - if not impossible - to get traditional funding for.

There is definite hierarchy in the business of raising money to do stuff.

At the top are products and services that are deemed essential to corporate or public life.  These are funded by governments or businesses through contracts and agreements.

In the middle are traditional grants, where hopefuls parade their wares in front of an entity that has money and is prepared to give some of it away (generally a large corporation, charitable foundation or private donor).

Crowdfunding is at the very bottom of this pyramid.  This is a very interesting place to be, in that crowdfunders are talking to a very wide audience that may or may not have any money - and even if they do, have no intention at the moment of giving any of it away. This forces crowdfunders to put their project in front of everyone they know in a way that is so inspiring that it will prompt them to immediately pull out their credit card.

Check out Part 2 of this article for my top four lessons for contract bidders from the most successful crowdfunders.