Building a bid is like building a house

Building a bid is like building a house. I’ve been lucky enough to build my own home twice in my life. It’s both the best experience you’ll ever have and one of the most challenging, in much the same way that bidding for business is.

Everything that everybody says about building a house is true. It’s time consuming, it’s stressful, and things will go wrong. Things will be built the wrong way and you will have to make compromises.

One of the major reasons why home building and bid building are both so stressful is because people just don’t follow the damn instructions.

I was walking past a building site in my area recently and overheard a group of five or six builders debating how to put something together on the home that they were working on. An older man, who might have been their supervisor or foreman, was standing back from the argument. Eventually he spoke up and he said, “Guys, why don’t we look at the plan.” All of the builders laughed uproariously and one of them actually said, “The plan! That’s for losers.”

This is pretty much the way that many incumbent suppliers feel when the Request for Tender comes out. It’s your account – you live it and own it – but the RFT is the customer’s plan, not yours. And it’s the customer’s instructions that you’re having to work through, just like everyone else. This can be frustrating and difficult.

Despite this, it’s important to produce a bid that is respectful of the instructions. At the same time, avoid focusing too much on compliance, particularly if this comes at the expense of your story and strategy – these are key to winning again.

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/

3 lessons from the Victorian election about winning again

If you have an important contract you can’t afford to lose, don't bury your head in the sand. Incumbency is no guarantee of victory, and winning again is too important to leave to chance.

In Victoria, our State government has changed hands after a single three-year term – a phenomenon last seen in 1955.

My own electorate, Bentleigh, was the most marginal seat in this election, and it was said that whoever won Bentleigh would win government. We were bombarded with political messages over the week prior to polling day – everything from flyers, letters, and annoying recorded phone calls to a flying visit from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. Every school fence in the district was plastered with pictures of the sitting member’s face.

It seems this was all to no avail. At time of writing, there was a swing of 2.1% against the government in this pivotal seat, indicating a probably loss to the opposition (along with the rest of the State, where the opposition has convincingly claimed victory).

My mother-in-law, a softly spoken former hospital pharmacist not normally given to violent outbursts of opinion, is very vocal in her dislike of our local MP. Several times, she tried to meet with her to raise concerns about the local hospital. Each time, she was fobbed off by a junior staffer until she was eventually told "(The member) doesn't meet with constituents".

It doesn't take much to lose an election. A swing of a few percentage points. A local issue that trumps a national one. A member who just isn't present enough to the concerns of the electorate.

During the election night coverage, political commentator Peter Costello - a representative of the outgoing party - said: "This (result) shows that there can be one-term governments." Political journalist Laurie Oakes added: "The idea that (incumbent) governments always get a second chance has gone out the window."

It's the same when we bid to retain business. To win again, you need to be the next big thing. Incumbency is no guarantee of victory, and assumption is a dangerous strategy.

Robyn's new book Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers can be purchased from http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

Why incumbents must bid like challengers

When you are the incumbent supplier, even when you have done great work all along, it is dangerous to assume that the evaluators know who you are, or that they will advocate on your behalf. Sometimes, they are under strict instructions not to.

For example, Richard is a partner in a professional services firm that operates in a very specialised market. Richard and I met socially, and when he heard about the work I do, he shared a wonderful success story. It turned out that just recently, one of the largest customers in Richard’s market (for whom his firm was one small supplier among many) had put its work out to tender. The customer wanted a single firm to manage all its work, including all its existing and new business.

This was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and Richard and his firm badly wanted to win. They devoted a team of eight senior people, including partners, to the bid for six weeks – the first time they had ever fielded such a large bid team. Richard and his team did not take the customer for granted. They thought hard about what they could offer and devised an innovative way to structure their service delivery model and their fees to offer value for money. Their bid was successful and they won all the business.

In the debriefing interview, Richard discovered that the buyer had made a very deliberate decision to not consider previous relationships and to award the work based solely on what was presented in the tender. This worked in Richard’s favour, while it left other, more complacent suppliers out in the cold.

Buyers expect a great deal from their incumbent suppliers. Don’t take them for granted, and expect to work even harder when you want to win again.

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/

Developing a custodian mindset – Part 2

Last week I explained that there are direct parallels between the way bad tenants behave, and the way bad suppliers behave when they get to the end of the contract and are threatened with losing it.

Damage control is only a last resort, and you don’t want to get to this point when you have an important contract or customer in your care.

In contrast to tenants paying for temporary use of a property, owners of properties often see themselves as custodians.

If you’ve ever watched renovation shows on TV – particularly the ones where someone falls in love with an old manor house and spends an extortionate amount of money conserving it – you’ve seen the custodianship mindset in action.

Every piece of business changes hands at some point. Whether into your new and improved hands, or someone else’s, is really up to you.

As the incumbent supplier, you are either building something or doing something for the customer. Most likely, this is just one of many things they do in their business. Your job is to add to their business and improve it in some way.

When we treat the relationship like a tenancy – when we do the minimum required of us –we’re no better than any other supplier, and it’s unlikely that we will get the opportunity to continue. Our relationship is simply transactional.

When we act like custodians though, it’s easy for the customer to see our investment of time, energy and enthusiasm as a true strategic partnership in their business.

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/

Developing a custodian mindset – Part 1

When you have an important contract or customer and you plan to work with them for a long time, something that helps to get your head in the right space is to think of yourself as the custodian of that piece of business.

In practical terms, this means establishing sustained and effective engagement over the course of the contract, not lumpy and ineffective engagement that is artificially tied to the procurement cycle.

The way we engage with the customer is often haphazard. There’s the initial fever-pitch nervous energy when submitting the Request for Tender, a flurry of work when getting the contract set up, and then a flat line of delivery over the course of the contract until the fever of the Request for Tender hits again.

Of course, some people will argue that the procurement environment sets things up that way. Bid, deliver and bid again. That might be what the cycle looks like, but it doesn’t mean you have to buy into it. In fact, if you want to retain the work, it is essential that you don’t.

So, you have temporary ownership of a customer or contract. Do you and your team think more like tenants or custodians of the business?

If you’ve ever rented a property, then you’ve been a tenant – signed a contract and exchanged some cash for a place to live or work.

I’ve rented properties and been a landlord myself. One tenant was constantly delinquent on his rent, to the point that our agent had to send him a legal letter every month. The tenant always paid the day before it went to court, causing everybody unnecessary stress. When we finally issued a notice to vacate, we received a letter from him saying how much he loved the property and felt like it was his home, and please could he be allowed to stay!

There are direct parallels between the way bad tenants like this one behave, and the way bad suppliers behave when they get to the end of the contract and are threatened with losing it.

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/

Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers

This week I am delighted to announce the launch of my new book, Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. As a subscriber to The Winning Pitch, I wanted you to be the first to know it’s coming, and have the opportunity to get your hands on a copy hot off the presses.

When you win business through a formal bid or tender, you will need to retain it that way too. But only about 50% of incumbent contract holders actually keep their contracts when it comes time to re-compete.

And the reason might surprise you.

It’s not always because the incumbent is doing a poor job with the contract. In fact, they’re often doing quite a good job. The reason is that they’re still doing the SAME job. And this just doesn’t meet a buyer’s expectations any more.

Incumbency is only an advantage if you choose to use it.

Winning Again will show you how to leverage your incumbency advantage to build a program of new ideas and fresh thinking to put in front of your most important contracts and customers.

It includes case studies and interviews with experts on both sides of the fence – procurement experts who have worked with some of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers, as well as business development leaders who are responsible for bringing in annual revenues from $26 million to more than $100 million in highly competitive sectors including information communications technology, construction and engineering, and community services.

If you’re a CEO, business owner or senior manager with revenue responsibility, Winning Again will help you to retain the business you simply can’t afford to lose.

And if you’re up for that, I’d love to have a hand in helping you to achieve it.

Failure is not an option, but it is a reality

This is a truth rarely acknowledged in the world of sales and business development, where the only conversation you will ever hear is the one about winning and success.

Yet the prospect of loss is the ugly spectre that hangs over everything we do, and past losses we haven’t grieved for and learned from can actually prevent us from doing our best work with the customers we have today.

In my line of work I have spent years up close and personal with people while they grapple with the anxiety-inducing task of re-competing for business that they already have.

This anxiety presents in many ways that mask what it really is: fear that derives from a sense of powerlessness, in this case because the customer is going to market whether we like it or not.

In boardrooms and in bid team ‘war rooms’, I've seen anxiety show up as arrogance, bullying, lying, dissembling, blind faith, or bluster. While understandable, none are helpful when it comes to winning again.

There is no doubt about it – losses hurt. I have worked in this game a long time and see many people struggling with unacknowledged grief for past business losses. None of us are robots. We are people with feelings. Losing a customer or contract creates hurt and fear, both of which are huge drags on our creativity, energy and enthusiasm — the very things that we need the most when we need to compete again.

If you’ve ever lost a piece of business that was important to you, please give yourself the opportunity to grieve for it. Really feel what happened and then let it go with gratitude.

There are lessons in loss, and one of the most important is to be thankful for and work hard to retain the business that we have today.

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.

How a “pre-cation” can help you deliver a more compelling bid

Lately, I’ve been talking about the ways in which energy and enthusiasm power our bid efforts. Unfortunately the way most organisations handle bids is rapidly depleting these precious resources.

Team members need to be inspired to do their best work on proposals, and pretty much everyone is stretched and hassled and working on the bid as well as their day job. Worse still, there are no thanks or recognition for contributing to proposals. All staff really see is a mountain of thankless work that they don’t get paid for and that eats into their personal time.

If your organisation cares about its win rates, and more importantly, about employees and their wellbeing, it’s time you did something about this. Here is an idea that will definitely win you points with staff, and probably on the proposal too.

While it’s common to give time off after a bid to compensate for the extra workload, a better way to generate energy and enthusiasm is to give your team at least part of this time off in advance.

Technology employers Atlassian and 42 Floors noticed that new staff members often came into their organisation exhausted from their previous job. To solve this problem, both now offer staff a “pre-cation” (paid holiday) before they start with the company.

This is a great way to make sure that people show up for work fired up and ready, not tired and burned out. Atlassian is now considered an employer of choice in an industry where competition for talent is high, and regularly rates a mention on lists of "best places to work" in both the US and Australia.

If you’re about to start work on a must-win bid, offer your team a “pre-cation”. It could just mean the difference between a proposal that really hooks the customer, and one that lies there as lifeless and exhausted as the people who wrote it.

How Job Sculpting Can Help You Deliver a Better Proposal

Recently I explained why energy and enthusiasm are the fuel powering a bid effort.

When the people working on the bid bring the best of themselves to the job, they are more likely to do their best, most inspired and most creative work. Without their energy and enthusiasm, there is a real risk that the proposal will lack personality and be flavourless and dry.

In a Harvard Business Review piece about job sculpting, Timothy Butler and James Waldroop explain that job satisfaction depends on how well the job reflects the individual’s “deeply embedded life interests”. These are long-held, emotionally driven passions, intricately entwined with our personalities. While life interests may not determine what we are good at, they do drive what kind of activities make us happy. “At work, that happiness often translates into commitment. It keeps people engaged, and it keeps them from quitting,” Butler and Waldroop say.

Delivering job satisfaction to the bid team – as well as a winning bid – can be a challenging task for a Bid Leader.

Bid teams often operate outside traditional reporting lines and boundaries, and team members are usually stretched and hassled and working on the bid as well as their day job.

Notwithstanding this, the principles of job sculpting can help here too. If you have a person on your team with a passion for something specific, like designing a technical solution, let them get on with it. Another person, who loves seeing things done correctly, will get satisfaction from form-filling, project management and production tasks.

Knowing what people's preferences are and the jobs they would enjoy doing, as opposed to just the jobs that need to be done, is an important role for a Bid Leader. When everybody is working on what they are great at, and what they love to do, the energy and enthusiasm that the team contributes will elevate the quality of the proposal.

Using tone of voice to develop your proposal personality

Last week, I talked about the role that proposal personality plays in the unconscious decisions buyers make about whether we are worth doing business with.

When we present in person, there are many cues that show our personality. In a written proposal, however, these cues are more limited. Personality mostly comes through in the way the proposal looks and feels, and of course in the way it sounds when you read it.

Proposals are all about influencing the prospect’s thinking to your point of view, and it’s usually best to employ a combination of Approachable and Assertive tone when writing.

For example, in a tender for medical recruitment services, suppliers were asked to nominate their Preferred Supplier Agreements with other customers. It’s possible that the buyer did this because they were already thinking about conflicts of interest this might create with their competitors. However, they also might not have fully understood the implications.

My client, let’s call them Medical Recruiters, took an assertive tone on this issue as it played to one of their key competitive advantages and they needed to strongly influence the buyer’s thinking. Their answer went something like this:

Our market position, which is free of conflicts of interest, creates a compelling reason to consider Medical Recruiters as one of your preferred suppliers. Medical Recruiters does not have any Preferred Supplier Agreements with direct competitors of Pharma Co. Our only Preferred Supplier Agreement is with ZedCorp, a large multinational Medical Device company. There are real risks in appointing Preferred Suppliers of recruitment services that already hold such agreements with your direct competitors. For example, how does the recruiter decide where to send an excellent candidate, when they have two or three other clients looking for a similar person? Where potential conflicts of interest do exist, it is important you are 100% confident in the quality of the consultants who will be allocated to your account. The Best Practice in Human Resources Report (date) surveyed 5,000 professionals who changed jobs in the preceding 12 months and found that the individual consultant was the main catalyst in building their enthusiasm for the role and gaining their commitment to the employer.

The buyer was sold, and Medical Recruiters won a place on their preferred supplier panel.

What is your proposal personality?

Personality plays a large part in the unconscious decision that buyers make about whether proposals make it to the Maybe pile or the No pile. Bringing our real selves to proposals helps customers decide we are worth doing business with.

This week I met with a new client and we were talking about how they can improve their bid capability and success rates. One of the questions that came up was about presentation — what their proposals look like and the first impression that they make.

This organisation bids for business through competitive public tenders. In a competitive tender, presentation is important. It’s a crowded environment where a buyer will be assessing many tenders — sometimes a handful, and sometimes hundreds. Public tenders are a bit like a “cattle call” auditions in the entertainment business; show up on time, respect the judges, wear your biggest smile and most sparkly outfit. Sure, in a business environment, sequins may not really be appropriate, but quality presentation is still a sign of respect for the process.

Lately I've come to realise that there is another reason why we need to pay particular attention to presentation. Presentation equates to personality. When we are selling services, and our people are our prime saleable assets, we want to look and sound like people that the customer is going to want to work with. Make your proposals sound charismatic and enthusiastic, not professional and detached. Use photos of your own staff, not stock pictures. Make sure you can hear the voice of real people coming through in the way the proposal is written.

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.

How to Build Business-Winning Innovation in Your Services Business

Most service businesses sell to business customers — either exclusively, or in addition to consumers.

When you sell to other businesses or to government, and when you reach a certain level, you will be selling to procurement.

For example, Victorian government departments need three quotes for any purchase above $25,000. Above $150,000, they are required to conduct a formal tender.

Most businesses that sell at this level end up winning at least two-thirds of their business through some kind of formal submission. When you win a contract that way, you only get to keep it by competing for it again, generally, once every three years.

That’s a lot of revenue at risk through the procurement cycle.

When I talk to people who sell services, they often tell me that they are so busy working in the business that there never seems to be time to work on it. The marketplace is getting more competitive all the time, and the pace of change is so intense that it can be hard to keep up with what competitors are doing – let alone come up with new things yourself.

To make things even more challenging, there is the frustration that customers don’t really understand what you do, let alone value what you do.

There is a better way to sell services. If you’re struggling with these problems, I can help.

The Revenue Revolution: Building Business - Winning Innovation in Services Organisations is a program for owners and leaders of service businesses. Together, we will look at what your organisation knows, does, and delivers, to identify what you offer that is:

1. Extremely valuable to customers, and has the highest currency right now;
2. May be outdated, and of limited value to customers; and
3. Can be built in order to create greater value to customers over the next 6 to 12 months.

At the end of the program, you will have a blueprint to develop services that will position you as the clear winner with customers or funding bodies.

Contact me for a white paper with more information about how the Revenue Revolution Program can help you grow your services organisation.

The Revenue Revolution: How to win and retain your most important business customers

The Revenue Revolution: How to win and retain your most important business customers
FREE 30-MINUTE WEBINAR

Friday 29 August at 12.00pm (AEST)

Sponsored by Bank of Melbourne

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There is no doubt about it, selling services is tough.

Products are tangible and tactile; we can see and feel them. Services are invisible.

Products encourage two-way conversation; they can be pulled apart, debated and analysed. Services are harder to talk about.

Products usually have masses and masses of information to support them; customer research, data sheets, and product reviews. Services often don’t.

84% of Australian small businesses operate in the services sectors. Most service businesses sell to business customers, either exclusively, or in addition to consumers.

If you sell services, you have probably had at least one experience of talking to a prospective customer about what you do where you’ve been met with polite nods (at best) or blank stares (at worst). Unfortunately, the sale of services often stalls at the presentation stage.

These days, a formal bid, proposal, submission, or tender response is often the only way to win work with business customers. Customers often see only the very transactional parts of what service businesses do, and it is dangerous to keep responding to an agenda that is based on this limited knowledge.

This Friday I’m running a free 30-minute webinar for the Bank of Melbourne to help celebrate Small Business Month. If you run a service-based business, please register and come along.

The Power of Positioning

When we are in the service business, positioning is what helps us fulfil our true potential. If you do great work and want to do more of it, having people recognise your unique talent and the contribution you make to the world is an essential precursor for success.

The worldwide outpouring of love and gratitude on the passing of Robin Williams demonstrates the powerful legacy we create when we fulfil our true potential.

In an industry that loves to typecast, Robin Williams was that rarest of things — truly unique.

Williams not only had a huge talent, but was able to deploy that talent in a way that touched an astonishing number of people. If you liked comedy, Robin Williams was your man. If you liked drama, he had that covered too. Robin Williams didn't look or behave like anybody else, but he did great work —and lots of it — in a career spanning more than four decades.

When we leave the world behind, we're not going to be remembered for the boxes we ticked. We will be remembered for our uniqueness as human beings, what we contributed to the planet, and the legacy that we leave behind.

Last week I talked about the stress and pressure that many who work in service industries are feeling about the need to conform to the customer’s agenda and to be measured against what everyone else is doing (Whose Prescription Are You Filling?).

Your point of view is important —it is what makes you uniquely you. And point of view comes before point of difference.

In my experience, the service businesses that are the most successful are always those that offer something that is much better than the customer is expecting, and that break the deadlock of conformity.

So what gets you out of bed in the morning? What are you truly passionate about achieving? What are you convinced will make your customers’ lives immeasurably richer? Once you know and pursue your own agenda, you will be well on your way to winning the business you deserve and developing the positioning that will create your great work and ultimately, your legacy.

Whose prescription are you filling?

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time talking to owners of service businesses and people who work in professional services firms. Most have spent years building up their expertise and knowledge, only for prospective customers — who know a lot less about the topic than they do —to turn around and ask them to do things that they know will not deliver the best outcome. Some are feeling frustrated and even depressed about what they do as a result.

This must be what doctors feel like when patients arrive in their office having consulted Dr Google and diagnosed their ailment themselves. In most cases it takes six years to become a GP, and a further six if you plan to specialise. Doctors have to spend 10,000 hours understanding how human bodies work. But because we all have a body, we figure we can click on the search button and work it out ourselves. A 2013 study of doctors’ mental health by Beyond Blue found that doctors report substantially higher rates of psychological distress and burnout compared to other Australians (professionals and otherwise). Though the study didn’t specifically conclude that patient behaviour has contributed to the problem, it can’t be helping. Imagine how tough it would be for a GP to have to justify herself 20 times a day to patients who think they know just as much about the human body as she does.

Like doctors, many professionals — who have spent years building mastery in what they do — also feel like they're wasting their time filling someone else's prescription. This is what happens when we get trapped at the bottom of the positioning cycle, responding to the customer’s agenda rather than creating our own.

Customers often see only the very transactional parts of what service businesses do, and it is dangerous to keep responding to an agenda that is based on this limited knowledge. This is what makes us into commodities.

All service businesses need to invest in regularly reviewing their knowledge, platforms, and programs to help customers understand the value in what we do. Without this, it isn’t just our revenue that is at stake.

How to Build Business With New Markets and Customers

When it comes to winning new business in complex services markets, what got you here won't get you there. In other words, the offer that helped you win the contracts and customers you have today is not likely to be what brings in future business.

Often, lack of good ideas is not the problem. Smart, successful people in service businesses often have little difficulty in coming up with lots of options for new things that they could sell.

The issue arises when it comes time to sort those ideas into what’s going to make the biggest impact (selection) and then figure out what to do to make them actually happen (implementation).

We all have a blind spot when it comes to our own stuff, and getting someone to help you look at all your ideas and help you select the ones that are most valuable can save you hours of wasted time and effort. It’s a lot like the way that a gallery owner works with an artist. The gallery owner helps the artist to see what is most commercial about their work, and that customers will want to buy. The gallerist’s process is called “curation”. This is very similar to the process I follow with my clients when we choose the best ideas to work on.

Once we have this sorted, the way to implement projects that matter is to “fight for three”. This is an idea introduced by Peter Cook in his book The New Rules of Management, and recognises that we all have a lot to get done in our day jobs. When it comes to doing something new on top of that, we need to choose only the three projects that are most important to blasting us out of our status quo. New things are hard to find the time and energy for, and it’s easy to lose momentum. That’s where external accountability can really help get you where you want to go.

Creativity Creates Opportunity!

While it's great to have an efficient and effective business that is meeting all the obligations you have today, grasping opportunities requires new thinking. It also means bringing new ideas to your customers all the time — and not just at tender time!

You know the feeling. Business is running along pretty smoothly. You're pretty much on top of your work load. Customers are happy. All’s right with the world.

But the next day, something disturbing happens. A juicy tender comes out that should have your name all over it, but it’s asking for something completely unexpected. You go to a routine meeting with a customer, and they pepper you with questions about a competitor. You meet up with an ideal prospect, and they raise a problem that you haven’t even thought about yet.

The opposite of reaction is not “proaction” — it’s creation. Actor Ray Liotta once said “As soon as I started producing my own stuff, I started getting other roles.” Action generates energy, and energy makes stuff happen.

Lately I have been talking to senior procurement leaders as part of a project I’m working on. All express frustration that their existing suppliers don’t bring them new ideas nearly often enough — in other words, there is just not enough value creation.

The more ideas you create that are of value to customers, the better your business development results will be. What are you creating right now?