Energy and enthusiasm – the fuel powering a bid effort

We need our people to bring their best work to bids, but energy and enthusiasm are finite resources that need to be carefully managed — especially when things don’t go to plan.

Last week I wrote about the importance of “five-to-niners”- the unsung heroes whose work powers a bid effort.

Many years ago, I worked on an important bid for a services organisation. There were probably at least 20 of us on the team and for six weeks we were pretty much chained inside a room. (It was a nice room, and there were pastries, and someone came to bring us coffee every now and again, but still). The team was made up of a mix of outsourced specialists, like me, and junior people from the organisation itself. It was very difficult to get the senior associates or leaders’ time and most of us didn’t have a clue what we were writing about. I felt for the internal staff — it was high-pressure work, with long hours. But they took it on enthusiastically because they hoped to work on the account, which was with a high-profile, multinational company.

I will never forget the celebration lunch that the organisation put on to reward us for our hard work. We were waiting for the senior leaders to return from lodging the bid, and expecting cheers and high fives all round. Eventually they did arrive, late, with faces like thunder. It turned out we had been asked to pull out of the bid due to a last-minute competitive conflict. It was over before it had even begun.

The energy drained out of that room faster than a sinkhole can swallow a truck. Tim, the staff member sitting next to me who had been working overtime for weeks and missed his son’s basketball final, was absolutely gutted. It was obvious that the lunch we were about to eat (mostly in silence) just wasn't enough to reward Tim for everything he had invested.

Senior leaders often feel comfortable betting big and living with the consequences, but staff usually don’t have the same appetite for risk. When asking staff to join us on a business growth journey, it’s important to recognise — and empathise — that they will be sharing the risks, as well as the rewards.

“Five-to-niners” – the unsung heroes of a successful bid effort

It takes more than just a mandate to get people to bring their best work to proposals.

What does it really take for a bid to be successful? A compelling offer? A sharp price? A great-looking proposal that is well written and interesting to read? Yes. All are important.

But each of these things is in itself highly dependent on the energy, enthusiasm and creativity our teams bring to the project. Without these, our proposal efforts can really struggle.

The other day, I was talking to Cameron, a program manager who works for one of my most successful clients. Cameron hit the nail on the head when he said, "Bids are not a nine-to-five job for me. They're a “five-to-nine” job."

Cameron isn’t complaining. In fact, he is very proud that his contribution helps his company to win work. But like many people who have an operational role and a lot of valuable knowledge, bids aren’t part of Cameron’s job description. They are something that gets done on top of everything else he needs to achieve in a day.

So spare a thought for the Camerons in your world. These are good people with a great work ethic, but their reserves of goodwill run dry eventually. When the next big thing comes up (after the last big thing) many are inwardly groaning. "Geez, another bid? I'd really like some time with my kids. I'd love to get to the gym. It’s been ages since my wife and I went out to dinner."

A simple way to maintain goodwill with your five-to-niners is to reward them for their hard work — no matter what the outcome— and always make sure there is a real celebration when you win.

And if your team could use some tactics to deliver bid-winning thinking, get in touch – I can help.

A Contract Isn't a Gift for Life!

Winning a contract is really just a licence to keep doing good work. Even when there is an option for the buyer to renew the contract, it’s dangerous to assume that the renewal will happen automatically.  Think of your contract end date as more of a “use-by” date — a hard deadline by which you need to have a compelling strategy win the customer all over again.

As consumers, most of us have contracts that we would rather not put too much effort into.  These often roll over automatically, or are renewed with very little effort on our part. I once went three months before I realised that my phone was out of plan, and therefore the handset was fully paid for. I had to call Optus to get my rate reduced and my money back. Likewise, when insurance is up for renewal, we are often happy enough just to pay the invoice, rather than researching other options.

The businesses we buy from set it up that way, and good for them – they are the ones who are really in charge.

But when you are the supplier, selling to procurement, the situation is very different. The buyer sets the contract and the terms. Even when there is an option to renew, it’s their option, not yours.

Because of the way we see contracts operating in our personal lives, we sometimes tend to assume that “renewal” means “rollover”, but this is a mistake.

Consider for a moment how you think about use-by dates on food. Do you throw out food that is past its use-by? Is the use-by date a hard deadline for you, or more of a flexible one? I was once given a gigantic Toblerone, which I was hugely excited about, at least until I bit into it. The chocolate was crumbly and awful, and it turned out that it was 18 months past its use-by.

No one really wants to test their intestinal fortitude with food that old. In effect, though, this might be what we are asking our customers to do when we treat the renewal of a contract as a given, rather than as a genuine opportunity to win their business again.

Rather than a “rollover”, a more useful way of thinking about your contract end date is that it’s an opportunity for renovation, redevelopment, and reinvigoration. Competing successfully as an incumbent means working on projects that will create customer value, and this project work needs to start well before the contract use-by date.

Take More Risks and Create a Stronger Competitive Advantage

By definition, competitive advantage doesn’t mean doing exactly what everybody else is doing. But it does mean taking risks and moving away from what we know — something that is neither comfortable nor easy to do.

Have you ever seen movies where the hero swings across an impossible impasse, runs up the side of a building, or does a backflip off a dumpster? Then you’ve witnessed parkour, where adventurous types get from A to B using only their bodies and their surroundings to propel themselves. To avoid injury, parkour practitioners must look at their environment in ways that most of us can’t even imagine.

When it comes to the competitive landscape, I reckon we could learn a lot from this idea. We tend to see our market as a familiar track we have run around many times before, rather than as an exciting playground full of new things to try.

For example, in Australia, professional football is big money, and all AFL clubs are looking for an edge to win a premiership flag.

In April, The Age ran a story about Peta Searle, who gave away her job as a high school PE teacher 7 years ago to become a full-time football coach. Searle worked as assistant coach in the VFL (the amateur league), where she built the competition’s best defence back line at Port Melbourne. Port won a premiership in 2011 and came runner-up in 2012. Unfortunately, Searle was paid only $5,000 a year in the role, and needed a job with the AFL to make a decent living. Despite her outstanding track record, she couldn’t get one, and had to give away her football dream.

From a purely commercial standpoint, this is crazy. Searle is a proven performer. If she had been a bloke, her results would have started a bidding war.

Fortunately, Peta Searle’s story has a happy ending. This month, St Kilda recruited her as the AFL’s first female development coach. I’m guessing that St Kilda will have one of the best backlines in the competition before too long, and with it a sustainable competitive advantage.

If you’re pitching for a multimillion dollar contract, you will be in a competition of equals who can probably do the job just as well as you can. Often, it’s the very small things that will tip the buyer over the edge to choose a winner. What will yours be?

Manage Your Commitments, Master Your Success!

Although we all want to win new business, in truth, we are often valuing something very different when it comes to the way we are spending our time.  Woody Allen famously said that 80% of success is just showing up.  What he really meant was that 80% of success is doing the work, and then “showing up” well prepared, in the right place and ready to pitch to the right people.

“People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen,” Allen has said. “All the others struck out without ever getting that (far). They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t DO the thing. Once you do it, you are more than half way towards something good happening.”

He’s right — success starts with commitment and intention.

Something I have noticed in my Persuasive Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class— through which I’ve trained several hundred people — is that the students who are highly committed, keep promises to themselves, and do the work get huge value from the program. Students who lack commitment, or become distracted, don’t end up achieving as much as they could have. Their success has little to do with how smart they are, or what they have to offer. It’s all about how they show up.

Likewise, if you have a growth agenda, and are pursuing new business through formal bids and tenders, don’t get distracted by other things while you’re waiting for the RFT. Successful pursuits are the result of intentional positioning, and being clear about your personal commitment to the outcome.  To start with, ask yourself these questions:

• What will it mean for my business if we win, or do not win?
• What do I personally stand to gain from this?
• Have I really committed to this outcome?
• Do I know what it will take, and do I have a clear plan to get there?
• Is there space in my life and calendar?
• Do I have mentors around me who can accelerate my success and keep me accountable?
• Do I have supporters who can help me get the work done? 

Busy Is The Enemy Of Successful!

Imagine that you are speaking at a conference in 90 days. There will be a thousand people at that conference, and ten of them have the power to put you straight into your dream job. What will you do? Most likely, your subconscious will go into overdrive and you will obsess night and day about your presentation. (And freak out — a little or a lot.)

These days, it’s impossible to have a conversation with anybody in business without them mentioning at least once how busy they are. “Busy” might feel like a source of pride, a marker of how much we are doing. But busy is also an excuse. It's a conversation blocker. And often, it’s a barrier to achieving what is most important to us.

Last week, I suggested that without realising it, many of us are playing a finite game — an endgame —with our most important contracts and customers. This article was inspired by the fabulous Dr Jason Fox, an expert in motivational practice, and his new book Game Changers.

This week, I had the great pleasure of hearing Jason speak. One of the key points I took away from Jason’s presentation is that overcommitment is the noblest excuse for failure. It's an alibi that excuses us from poor performance.

In her book Mindset - How You Can Fulfil Your Potential, psychologist Carol Dweck also notes that “it’s one thing for a four-year-old to pass up a puzzle. It’s another to pass up an opportunity important to your future.” But often, by being overcommitted, that's exactly what we are doing.

No one will argue that bids take a heap of time and effort. You’ve just finish one and the next one rears its head. It’s tough to pursue new business while you’re running the business. And it can be hard to know what to do proactively, when it feels like it’s all about waiting for the RFT.

When we are speaking on a stage, we are acutely aware that all eyes are on us, but in fact bids are no different. Just because a lot of competitors are at that event does not make it any less about you. When the prospect’s rating your proposal, you are the only person they are looking at.

Great presentations happen when passion meets preparation. This is your time to shine.  So don’t wait! Start planning now. Proposals that emerge as the clear winner are really just the bid leader’s grand passion brought to life. Let me help you find yours.

Are You Playing a Finite Game with Your Most Important Contracts and Customers?

Retaining business is a game of strength and stamina, but it often doesn’t feel that way. The milestones imposed by the procurement cycle put invisible limitations on the way that we approach the job of selling, particularly to existing customers. In his new book Game Changers, Dr Jason Fox —an expert in motivation and game design for meaningful work— says there are two types of games we can play; finite games or infinite games.

Finite games are played for the purposes of winning, while infinite games have no fixed outcome — only the sense of progress.

I reckon this is a neat way of describing how we view the game of pursuing and retaining business.

Most new business pursuits are treated like finite games. We win, or we lose, and we move on. Wins are inherently motivating, while losses have the opposite effect. There is actually a third outcome that some find even more demotivating than a loss; no outcome, despite a lot of effort. I can remember two such situations. Years ago, I worked with a large professional services firm on a bid for a multinational client. At what was supposed to be a celebration dinner for the bid’s lodgement, the lead partner told us that the bid had been pulled due to competitive concerns from an international office. Two dozen faces around the table dropped like stones. On another occasion, I was working on bid with a team from the UK when my father-in-law died. Due to the deadlines, I was the only person in the family who couldn’t take time off to support my partner or help with funeral preparations. Months later, we heard that funding for the program we were bidding for had been cancelled due to a policy change. In both cases, thousands of hours of work went down the drain.

Thinking of new business pursuits as a finite game is okay up to the point where the contract is won, but what happens next? Nurturing and building relationships with an existing client is an infinite game – a game of patience, possibility and progress. But because the procurement process introduces artificial milestones — because we know we have to re-bid for the contract every three years — this makes it feel like a finite game. As a result, we spend too much time using the existence of the Request for Tender as an excuse to procrastinate, instead of making progress. This is a losing game for us and for the customer.

If the contract signing is the whistle signalling the first bounce at a football game, the first RFT is just the first quarter siren. Even when competition is tough, and change is endemic, there’s no reason your relationship with the customer can’t extend for all four quarters — more than a decade — and for years and years after that. The game of serving a customer needs to start the day the new contract is won, and it is a game that doesn’t need to end unless you want it to.

Is There a Gender Difference In The Way We Pitch for Business?

There is no question that men and women can both be very successful in sales and business development roles. However, the way that they go about it can be very different. In general, men seem comfortable with taking more risks, while women seem comfortable doing more work. 

In fact, both risk-taking and hard work are equally important to getting a result with an important bid or proposal.

• Taking risks is important, because pitching for business is very competitive and we need to find a way of coming out on top. Clear winners take risks without fear of loss, and are prepared to stand out and be different.

• Doing the work is also important, because we need to build innovation, best practice, and continual improvement so we have something to sell. Hard workers deliver on these promises, and are very good at driving bids and putting proposals together.

One way to support both these factors is to aim for gender balance in your bid team. If your team is full of guys, you might find a bias towards taking risks and generating ideas, but the actual work and follow-up might be lacking. If you have a team with many women, you might have a lot of willing workers, but they might need some encouragement to take more risks and overcome any perceived fear of failure.

It’s also a good idea look at your own preferences and make sure that you put people around you — of both genders — who can do the things that you find a challenge. If you're a risk taker and big picture person, you need detail people around you. If you are great at getting things done, and good at the detail, you might need help with the bigger picture, and encouragement to be bolder when making decisions about the opportunities to pursue.

Your Contract Delivery Team Is Your Primary Selling Team

The rise of procurement has fundamentally changed the way sales relationships are transacted. Your contract delivery team becomes your primary selling team as soon as a contract is signed. Clients are mentally marking your team on every interaction. And with so much contract communication done in writing, the risk of damaging a client relationship through poor communication is greater than ever before.

Contract delivery teams have a huge influence over how the customer sees not just your day-to-day performance, but how well you are managing customer communication, best practices and innovation over the life of the contract. Because they work at the coalface every day, team members are also in an ideal position to identify how to make more money and to reduce profit leaks.

Contract delivery teams usually contain a mix of technical and operational people, each of whom is very clever and knowledgeable in their own area of expertise. However, many of them don’t really think they can sell, or don’t see it as their job to sell.

Through working on bids and tenders with dozens of contract delivery teams in many different industries, I have seen first-hand how the lights go on when these smart people realise what an enormous contribution they can make to a winning bid. I am really passionate about seeing that effect last when they get back to their day job, and giving them the tools, the techniques and the confidence they need to not only deliver the contract with excellence, but to step up into their selling role.

How much more business could you retain, how would your reputation improve, and how much influence would you have with customers if your contract delivery teams communicated with more authority?

My Client Leadership Program gives operational, technical and front line delivery staff the confidence, clarity and communication skills to act as an effective selling team. Contact me if you would like a white paper with more information about this program.

Buyers Expect and Buy Innovation - Even in Prescriptive Markets

Last month I wrote a piece titled Why Innovation Matters to Your Most Important Customers.  While this statement is true, it doesn’t always feel that way. In some markets, where the buyer sets the KPIs, tells you what to do and how to do it, and even how much they are prepared to pay, the relationship feels prescriptive; like a boss and staff rather than customer and supplier. Service delivery teams are so focused on delivering day-to-day — and are constantly told that they can’t do anything else, because there’s no money in the contract to pay for it — that innovation feels like it’s unimportant.  This, however, couldn’t be further from the truth.

Recently the Federal government held a Red Tape Repeal Day, scrapping more than 9500 regulations and 1000 redundant pieces of legislation. In commenting on this initiative in The Age, Malcolm Maiden pointed out that not all red tape is created externally. We create our own systems and structures to deal with problems and bureaucracy, and don’t always dismantle them when they go away.

In my opinion prescriptive contracts, which contain plenty of red tape, are part of this problem.

Fortunately, buyers in some prescriptive markets are starting to realise that if they prescribe everything, they may not get what they really need — even though they will get what they have asked for.

A good example is the current recommissioning of the mental health and drug treatment sectors in Victoria, which are undergoing wide scale modification to better align service delivery with changes in community problems with drugs and alcohol.  Another is the government employment services market, which is highly prescriptive but needs to be flexible to accommodate the broader political agenda and Australia’s economic needs.

If you operate in a prescriptive market, remember that you’re competing for the attention of tired bureaucrats who are wading through dozens or maybe hundreds of submissions that all sound pretty much the same. Behavioural economics theory holds that we tend to give greater weight to highly memorable things (a concept known as vividness).  Suppliers who are innovative and who are able to paint a vivid picture of how they will provide solutions to long-standing problems are rightly seen as a breath of fresh air, and are far more likely to be rewarded than those that offer a business as usual approach.

What Does It Really Take to Win Business through Continual Innovation?

Innovation is not a one-time thing – it’s an “all the time” thing.  Individuals and teams who keep thinking and keep innovating are always going to win more business than those that don’t. Bidding to provide services, in particular, is never going to be 100% 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 — but some suppliers are still offering solutions that are well out of date. New solutions can come from anywhere; from a multinational in Texas to a small business from Australia.

For example, Birdon, a small-to-medium marine engineering company from Port Macquarie, was recently awarded a contract worth $A285m to supply the United States Army with 374 specialised boats.  Birdon won against global competitor General Dynamics in a four-year tender process. SmartCompany ran an interview with Birdon Group General Manager Iain Ramsay, in which he acknowledged innovation as the key to the bid’s success. Birdon had purchased an innovative marine propulsion system when it acquired another company, NAMJet, in 2011. Ramsay said  “Our boat design was superior to its competition… The innovation which went into it allowed us to win, even though we weren’t the cheapest on price.”

Innovation isn’t it just about the systems, products and services you build. It’s actually about having a process for continuing to generate improvement ideas.

There are formal, organisational innovation processes like the Ten Types of Innovation, and then there are things that we can each do individually to improve our ability to innovate. In an interview with emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman, Teresa Amabile — Director of Research in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School — identified the four key ingredients for continuous innovation by individuals as domain expertise; the ability to learn new things; creative thinking; and working hard. Domain expertise is about having a depth of knowledge and skill in the area you work in. Being able to learn new things — both inside and outside of what you do and know — will help with creative thinking and original ideas.  Hard work speaks for itself.

To me, this sounds like a pretty good recipe for career success. When innovation becomes a habit, you win, the team wins — and so does the customer.

Why Good Performance Isn't Enough To Retain An Important Contract

When I work with companies who are looking to re-compete for important contracts that they know will be coming up to RFT in 12 months’ time, one of the things that the bid team most often talks about is their operational performance. Of course operational performance is important. It’s what suppliers are being paid to do. But it isn't always the most important, particularly when customers are deciding whether you're worth keeping around for another contract term.

Have you ever heard of a phenomenon called “digital distraction”? Here are some startling examples that explain why looking at the thing that’s right under your nose isn’t always the best idea:

• In December last year, a Taiwanese tourist fell off the end of St. Kilda Pier in Melbourne because she was checking Facebook on her phone and not watching where she was going.  She was found by police 65 feet from the end of the pier, floating on her back in an attempt to keep her phone dry and safe — even though she couldn’t swim.
• Likewise, in August, a man drove off a bridge in Texas after sending this text message: “I need to quit texting because I could die in a car accident.”
• There have been some very serious cases of digital distraction, including a young child who drowned in the bath because the babysitter was looking at Facebook on her phone.

Of course, it’s not our mobile phones that are to blame — it’s the way we use them. It is very easy to be distracted by something that seems like it needs to be done in the here and now without looking at the bigger picture of what’s going on around us.

Likewise, operational performance is the most obvious and the easiest thing to focus on when delivering a services contract. But good performance is what we're being paid for - it's just a baseline expectation. As the RFT gets closer, the relative impact of operational performance is at its greatest and therefore maintaining performance tends to take up a lot of people’s time. There are, however, three other things that incumbents need to focus on — above and beyond operational performance — in order to retain important contracts.  And this work needs to start well before the RFT is released.

Every contract changes hands at some point. Whether it gets into your new, improved hands — or is snapped up by someone else —is really up to you. If you have an important services contract that is coming up for bid this year, contact me and let’s talk about what you and your team need to start focusing on now, over and above operational performance, to make sure you retain it.

Obsess about Your Customers, Not Your Competitors

Do you spend a lot of time watching what your competitors are doing? If so, it might be time for a re-think. It's summer time in Australia, and for many of us in business, it represents an opportunity for down-time and reflection that we don't get time for during the year. It's tempting to spend that time in contemplation of what competitors are doing — but if you do this, it will only make you crazy.

We all present the best and shiniest face of ourselves to the public. So if you're trolling competitors' websites, looking at their social media feeds and everything that they're putting out publicly, it's likely that what it looks like they're doing is a lot shinier and more impressive than what they actually are doing.

At best this is historical (and sometimes aspirational) information, and at worst it’s simply fiction — not to mention a huge waste black hole of wasted time and effort.

I've worked with companies in industries where every player focuses obsessively on their competitors, and it is a great way to get a headache, not a customer.  This makes perfect sense when you think about it. If everybody in your industry is spending time watching each other, then who is looking at what the market is struggling with or asking for?

So, if you are planning to spend this summer developing your strategy for 2014, start by looking at what your market and your customers are doing. What did they achieve last year? What are they looking to do in 2014? Where are there gaps that you can help them with?

Focus on your customers and what you can do for them — not your competitors — because that's where true competitive differentiation (and sales) actually come from.

Dear Procurement: all I want for Christmas is…

Last December I ran this letter in the Winning Pitch, and it had the highest open rates of all my newsletters in 2012. So if you missed my Christmas letter to Procurement it, here it is again, with a few amendments to bring it up to date for 2013. Unfortunately, the bad news is that not much has changed in the buyer/supplier relationship in the past twelve months. The good news is that there is still room for improvement!

Here's hoping that the New Year brings more balance for all of us in the tendering system. No matter what side of the fence you sit on, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year :-)

Dear buyers,

You need stuff done; we know how to do things.  We need each other, and we really want to work with you to do great things together.

Unfortunately, the tendering system is turning us into adversaries, not collaborators. Like us, you are probably drowning under a pile of forms and schedules, and you must be wondering if there is a better way to make buying decisions.  We think there is.  Here is how, with only a few small adjustments, we can change this system for the better.

• Let us talk to you again. A tender isn't the only way to scope the market and for complex purchases, it really isn't the best option. So let’s have a chat. Things change quickly and you might be surprised about what we can do for you now that you haven't yet heard about. And, while we’re on the subject…
• Bring back Expressions of Interest.  If you want to assess potential suppliers on paper, why not use an EOI, rather than an RFT? These are short and reasonably straightforward for us to complete. They make us feel like we’re in with chance, and not like we are jumping over a very high hurdle for a very small likelihood of return.
• Say what you mean. Years have passed since the introduction of competitive tendering, but the tenders themselves haven't changed very much in all that time. They are often hard to interpret, and the evaluation criteria don’t always match the questions. With better instructions, any supplier with a bit of common sense will be able to bid confidently. That’s good for you, and it’s good for us.
• Timetable a response period that’s reasonable. We run a pretty tight ship these days; our staff are stretched and it can be difficult to keep up with complex RFT requirements and shrinking deadlines. Crunching us for time because you’re late to market only means you get rushed, poor quality submissions. On the other hand…
• Don’t issue a timetable and then grant a last-minute extension just before the deadline. This unfairly disadvantages (and discourages) the suppliers that are prepared, and have made it a priority to respond to your RFT.
• Please, answer our questions when we ask them. We think very hard before we submit questions about an RFT, because we don’t want to waste your time. But often, we don’t get meaningful answers (or sometimes, any answers). Better information will mean better proposals for you to evaluate.  And finally…
• Have a heart - don’t drop a tender on 21 December.  We know you like to come back to a full inbox, but we would like to see our families too.

There's no doubt the tendering system could work better, and together, we have the power to make it happen. 

You know, at the end of the day, we are all just people. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. So come meet some of us; we bet you will like what you see and hear.

With hope and best wishes for a Happy New Year, Your Prospective Suppliers

Book Review - Hooked: How Leaders Connect, Engage and Inspire with Storytelling

Stories provide a human connection that is often lacking in a business context. Were accustomed to substantiating claims with facts, figures and case studies, but while these might provide justification for a particular course of action, they rarely uncover the emotional need that compel us to take it in the first place. Hooked - a new book by Gabrielle Dolan and Yamini Naidu - will show you how to articulate and use personal stories in a business context, enabling you to  better connect with others and to motivate true insight, discussion and change.

As someone who has always kept their personal and professional lives quite separate, I have found storytelling a rewarding way to share more of myself with my clients and build greater understanding of who I am and what I do.

Hooked is practical, easy to read and provides a useful methodology to create and share your stories. If you work in a sales or leadership capacity - and particularly if  you're more of a facts and figures person, and you're not getting the results you want - you must read this book. Your communication style will change forever, for the better.

Building a re-election campaign for your most important contracts

In Australia, the federal election is just about to happen.  So for the last six weeks, we have been treated to a once-in-every-three-years display of politicking designed to win our vote. OK, a confession. I’m a bit of a politics geek.  I follow election night stats the way others follow football. And I have been known to engage in a bit of heckling on behalf of causes I believe in.  (I’ll leave it up to you to guess how I'll be numbering the boxes on Saturday!).

Combine my personal interest in politics with a career in business development and you get someone who just can’t help comparing political campaigns to the campaigns we wage (or don’t wage) to win and retain important contracts.

The election campaign takes less than six weeks (though at times it feels like much, much longer). During this time, our pollies have been tweeting, Facebooking, flying around the country and appearing on any TV program that will have them.  Case in point - the TV interviews that Tom Gleeson did with Julie Bishop and Pauline Hanson in his segment “I Hate You, Change My Mind”.  (Julie Bishop’s performance in that interview really did change my mind.  Pauline’s? Not so much).

What’s most fascinating to observe in an election campaign is the way that people behave when they know it’s make-or-break time. Our politicians absolutely understand that what they do now will determine the job they get – if they get one at all - for the next three years or more. Will they be elected? If so, will they be on the winning side or the losing side? How much impact will they really be able to have for their electorate and for the causes they believe in?

There’s a lot riding on how politicians perform in this campaign - and of course, in the weeks and months that led up to it.

In contrast, think about the contracts that you have coming up for bid soon. You’ll have four weeks to respond when the RFT comes out.

What are you doing to get your agenda in front of the customer now, before the probity period locks down? What are you doing to boost performance? To innovate? To leverage your incumbency advantage, and fence off the business from competition?  In most cases, if you’re honest, the answer is probably “not as much as we should be”.

If you have an important contract that’s coming up for bid in the next 12 months, let’s make sure you have a re-election campaign to retain it.  Get in touch and let’s talk about how I can help you and your team to get ready to re-compete.

The first sale is to yourself

What goes through your mind when you’re faced with a big, juicy opportunity that you would really love to win? Requests for Tender present exactly that kind of opportunity. The pot of gold that a huge contract might bring looks as shiny and enticing as a lotto win. On the flip side, there’s sky-high anxiety when teams are forced to re-compete for business already worth millions to them – and that competitors now also have the opportunity to bid for.

Because competing for business is so stressful, pretty much everyone’s first reaction is to start babbling about themselves and why they deserve to win. Left unchecked, the proposal will reflect that kind of shallow, self-centred thinking and the underlying current of anxiety it came from. This is very off-putting to buyers, who - like the rest of us - are wired to tune out at the first sign of a sales pitch.

Jakob Nielsen, an expert in website usability, did an experiment to measure the way that writing style affects selling on the web. He concluded that “promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users, who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts. When people read a paragraph that starts ‘Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions,’ their first reaction is ‘no, it's not!’, and this thought slows them down and distracts them from using the site.”

Therefore, when you’re writing a proposal to convince a buyer, the first and most important sale is to yourself. It’s essential to take the time to define your proposal strategy - what the customer most wants, what you can best deliver, and what positions you most favourably against competitors. This gives you access to the most powerful competitive weapon you could ever have; belief in your ability to make a difference for the customer.

Despite this, most organisations don’t have a good methodology to define proposal strategy. It’s common to see less than 5% of proposal development time devoted to strategy, and this usually amounts to kicking around “our points of difference” - the output from which then gets translated into the proposal as some kind of laundry list titled “Why You Should Choose Us.”  Unfortunately, our enthusiasm for ourselves will never be as compelling as enthusiasm for what the customer wants to achieve and how we can help them to achieve it. Or as Dale Carnegie puts it in How To Win Friends and Influence People, "the only way on earth to influence others is to talk to them about what they want and show them how to get it."

The Persuasive Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class provides many valuable tools and techniques to help you to develop your proposal from the customer’s point of view. For example, you will be trained in my Bid Strategy and Purchaser Value Topics Development Methodology, which is licensed and used by organisations in very competitive industries that consistently win almost everything they bid for. Watch the video to find out more.

Nine ways to slice and dice competitors

Competition is a reality of business life. As long as there are contracts to be won, deals to be done, and money to be made, you can bet that there will be others apart from you who will be interested. Pitching for business is always a stressful exercise. Much of the stress actually comes from the fact that we are being judged against others and might be found wanting, rather than from the more obvious pressures of meeting the deadlines and the customer's requirements.

It's not always possible to know exactly how many competitors you are up against, or the strength of that competition, but one thing you can be certain of is that you won't be the only supplier in contention for the job.  When you already have the business and want to retain it, this thought can be terrifying.

So while it’s tempting to pull the covers over your head and hope they'll go away, these particular bogeymen could stand in the way of a lucrative contract. Let's shine a flashlight in those dark corners to see what might be lurking there.

When I work on bids with my clients, I’ve noticed that almost all of them think of their competitors as the firms or organisations that are the closest match to themselves – what I call “peer competitors”. Often there is a tendency to underestimate the field of competition as a result. So here are nine other ways to slice and dice potential competitors that might pose a threat to your ability to win:

1. National firms, if you are local
2. Local firms, if you are national
3. Much larger or much smaller firms
4. Firms that already work with your customers in another capacity
5. Firms with expertise in an area of current or future interest to the buyer
6. Firms with expansion plans that include your market space
7. Potential partnerships among competitors, including joint ventures and consortia
8. Offshore and multinational competitors, and
9. The buyer themselves – they might do nothing, spend their money on other priorities, or decide to do it themselves.

Spitball May podcast: The Changing Face of Competition

What do we think about in business when we say “competition”, and what does it really mean to be competitive? In this podcast, I talk to buying behaviour specialist Bri Williams and organisational development expert Hamish Riddell about some emerging issues in business competition, including:

• Sources of competition - It’s human nature to think of competitors as the firms or organisations that are the closest match to us. But does this baked-in view underestimate the field of competition, and how are businesses losing out by thinking too narrowly about competing solutions?
• Constant disruption - Competitors come from everywhere and constantly with new and interesting ways of doing things. How much time should you spend looking out at what the market is doing, and how much just running your own race?
• The rise of FREE - It seems everything new these days is free or low cost. In behavioural economics terms, “free” is actually a price on its own – so how can businesses make money from free? And what does constant price pressure mean for labour-based industries that don’t have a low-cost platform to work from?

Listen to the conversation at http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/the-changing-face-of-competition/

Is your bid pricing methodology leaving money on the table?

Join pricing consultant Greg Eyres and I for a free 30-minute webinar on Thursday 13 June 1.00pm (AEST) and find out how to use Evidence-Based Bid Pricing as a powerful strategic weapon to build more successful bids. Customers will spend if they get value in return. However, according to bid pricing specialist Greg Eyres of Inforvalue, most organisations have a bid pricing model that doesn’t consider value at all. “Your bid price speaks volumes about your company but the task of pricing is usually approached with a great deal of nervousness,” Eyres says.

Are you nervous about bid pricing? If you aren’t, maybe you should be. There’s a very good chance that your pricing methodology is losing you bids and is also leaving money on the table that could have been yours, had you advocated for it. Some of the telltale signs that your bid pricing model needs an overhaul:

• You’re making a "guesstimate" of all your costs, adding on a margin and hoping for the best.  
• You tend to leave pricing to the day before the deadline.
• You’re always revising and whittling away at your price as a result of late information.
• Your sales and finance teams constantly lock horns, with one advocating for what the customer will pay and the other insisting on cost recovery.

“Customers will pay when they perceive they get more benefit than they pay for - in other words, where the value justifies the price,” says Eyres. "A tendering environment, by its very nature, gives you the opportunity to get to these value drivers. During the tendering period, you have the ability to communicate regularly with the customer and to get a detailed understanding of their business model.  Through this, you can determine how you can affect the customer's ability to create value for its own customers and/or reduce its own costs. This not only gives you evidence to develop your pricing strategy, it also enhances the relationship you have with the customer.”

Greg and I are delivering a free webinar on Thursday June 13 where we will discuss how to use Evidence-Based Bid Pricing as a powerful strategic weapon to build more successful bids.

If you missed the webinar, contact Greg Eyres to find out more about Evidence-Based Bid Pricing.