Leadership lessons from the Boov

Dreamworks’ new animation feature Home stars Jim Parsons from Big Bang Theory as Oh, an accident-prone alien who believes “Oh” must be his name, as it’s what his fellow Boov say every time he enters the room.

The Boov are a tribe of intergalactic scaredy-cats who turn yellow when they’re afraid (often) and are experts in running away from their problems. After invading Earth and relocating all the humans to Australia – the most remote place the Hollywood scriptwriters could probably think of – their leader, Captain Smek (Steve Martin) is stumped as to what to do next.

Smek is a textbook example of every bad boss you’ve ever had. Bereft of ideas himself, he straps his fellow Boov to machines and orders them to come up with some. The ideas he likes, he takes as his own. Those he doesn't like, earn the thinker a clunk on the head with his prize possession, a scepter called the “shusher”, which Smek stole from the Boov's greatest enemies the Gorg (the scary-looking dudes the Boov are running away from, and also the reason why they’re chasing him).

Steve Martin plays Captain Smek for laughs, but we can empathise with him. Smek has a lot on his plate, and we all grab for the “shusher” when we are under pressure.

For a leader responsible for a big project like a major bid or pursuit, the pressure to win or retain millions of dollars worth of revenue and hundreds of jobs is daunting, unrelenting and sometimes toxic. Under this kind of stress, we sometimes shut down a team member who has something important to say. We might inadvertently hijack an idea that actually came from someone else. It’s easy to rush in with our own ideas at the expense of someone else’s.

None of us can control what customers decide to buy. We can’t control what competitors do. It’s hard to let go of the little control we DO have over a competitive process. But trying to do it all ourselves can cost us – big time.

In an important bid, the energy and enthusiasm of your team is your most precious asset.

Preserve it by engaging an external facilitator to help you develop your bid strategy. You’ll get to contribute your valuable knowledge, support your team’s energy, nurture their great ideas, and have a sounding board to develop your own. And you get to retire the shusher.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Five drivers that inspire new business pursuits

Talk long enough to any smart professional and you'll find that their goal is to do meaningful work that gives them a creative charge. Responding to tenders is the opposite of this. As a manager, this is why it can be so hard to get your professional staff to work on tenders - no matter how great the project on offer might seem to you.

As Drake Baer wrote in a career development piece for Fastcompany, there are five things that drive us in our working life:

1.     Cultivating craftsmanship or “mastery”;

2.     Uncovering a vocation (or purpose);

3.     Finding personal and professional alignment;

4.     Sculpting a lifestyle; and

5.     Identifying our ethic (or values).

If you want to engage your team with the idea of pitching for a project, here are some questions that leverage these career drivers and will help each individual to make a personal connection with the work on offer.

Career driver 1: cultivating craftsmanship or “mastery”. 

Questions to ask your team: what do you want to be the best at? How could this project help you develop that? What would need to happen for you to get the maximum career benefit out of this project?

Career driver 2: uncovering a vocation (or purpose).

Questions to ask your team: why did you decide to do what you do? How does that relate to what the client really wants here? How could this project help you to make that difference to them, and be commercially smart for us?

Career driver 3: Finding personal and professional alignment

Questions to ask your team: What did you love about working on (past/current) project? What is it about that assignment that made you feel like you were doing your best work? Does this project feel good to you too? If not, why?

Career driver 4: Sculpting a lifestyle

Questions to ask your team: Offer a list of benefits that might be possible from working on this project and see which ones your team members respond to. Does the project offer opportunities for travel and adventure? Autonomy? Connecting with other experts? Publishing findings that will influence peers?

Career driver 5: Identifying your ethic

Questions to ask your team: what do you think the client is trying to achieve here? Is this something you would aspire to achieve personally? Are there any aspects of this project that worry you or don’t feel like a good “fit” for us?

How do I know these questions are necessary? I’ll let you in on a little secret. I don’t love bids and tenders either! (Weird, right?!). The creative charge I get from MY work results from seeing smart, capable professionals light up at the prospect of solving a problem that is meaningful to THEM.

So if you have clever people who "don't do” business development, try this approach. You might be surprised at the results.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Why buyers make the wrong decision

Competitive tenders don't always result in the best decision. Buyers go for what LOOKS like the best decision - on paper – which sometimes proves to be the wrong one.

If you've ever lost a bid you were certain you would win, been shocked by who the buyer actually DID choose instead of you, and seen that supplier go on to deliver (predictably) inferior work and results, you are definitely not alone. 

Professionals are often uncomfortable about parading their wares for money, and that’s what a tender can feel like.  In an ideal world, buyers would offer you an alternative way to show them what you can do – one that actually helps you demonstrate your best work.

For instance, if you’re an architect, how much more comfortable would you be if you were allowed to let your work speak for itself in a design competition, rather than preparing a 100 page tender response?

But of course, buyers often choose the easier option and run a tender instead.

Competitive tenders are an unnatural, artificial and uncomfortable way for professionals to sell themselves. Unfortunately, they are a reality, so we need to find a way to do our best work within them.

It all starts with your business development culture. The most successful business development culture for a services firm is one that feels natural and comfortable; supports how your smart people think best; and gets them energised and excited by the opportunity first.

When you do have to prepare a tender, think about creative ways to bring out the best in what you can do. Include infographics, use interesting case studies, and offer the buyer a taste of the great things that happen to people who make the smart choice to work with you. You'll win more business, more often, and have more fun doing it.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Five ways to write proposals that win business

For the last few weeks we’ve been looking at what NOT to do if you want to avoid losing a competitive tender. One thing all these behaviours have in common is that they are keeping you inwardly focused – on yourself and your firm.

To leapfrog the line between winning and losing, start to turn your attention outwards, to the customer and the opportunity.

The first thing to focus on is compliance. Achieve this, and you’ll be seen as a thoughtful, competent supplier. There are five hurdles to achieving compliance:

1.     Compliance with threshold requirements. If you need quality accreditations such as ISO9001 or ISO4801 and don’t have them, it’s rare to win against competitors that do.  Non-compliance is an easy reason for a buyer to exclude your bid.

2.  Compliance with any mandatory requirements. In the Request for Tender document, look for the words “must” to indicate what’s mandatory.

3.    Compliance with the specifications or scope of works. Can you do everything that the buyer is asking for? That’s important. As the expert, you may have ideas about how things could be done better (I’d certainly hope so, if you want to win). But always submit a complying bid, even if you think your alternative offer is stronger. By the time they have reached a competitive tender, some buyers have already made up their mind.

4.    Contract compliance. This is one area where buyers definitely prefer no changes. Some will even go so far as to specify that you can’t vary the contract terms.

5.  Finally, make sure your tender responses (written answers) are compliant. Analyse the questions properly to make sure that you’re answering every part, and understand why the buyer is asking each question. Include enough qualitative and quantitative evidence to give you a high evaluation score.

While the first four are usually OK, the last can be a challenge without advice and guidance. If you need a leg up and over the final hurdle, my Master Class Program will get your team compliant and see you landing on the "yes" list more often.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

The risk of choosing style over substance

In a competitive tender, the evaluation panel needs to give your submission a score. What you will be evaluated on is the commercial value of your offer and the evidence you provide to support your claims – and not how nice your proposals look and sound.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about how to sidestep common mistakes that will prevent you from winning the business you really deserve to win.

The first step is to stop the bid sweatshop, and the second is to make sure your team is primed to do the right job – not just do the job right.

If you’ve taken these steps, but still aren’t winning, it’s time to make a bigger investment in your success. At this point, most people will bring in marketing experts to write standardised proposal copy and to design templates so that proposals look and sound better, and speak with a unified, on-brand voice.

Does this result in more wins? Unfortunately, no.

Scratch the surface of these “new and improved” proposals, and really they are just glorified brochures.

I understand why people feel the need to do this. Branding and marketing help to build a successful business that supports premium-priced services. However, branding isn’t a cure-all for everything, and bids and tender responses are not a marketing exercise.

A colleague who works on government evaluation panels once told me that her team of evaluators was briefed to be wary of over-elaborate design and copywriting, as these are devices that less qualified suppliers sometimes use as a way to try to bluff their way through the process. Ouch.

Remember that proposals are a one-on-one conversation with someone who is ready to buy. Worry less about the image your proposal is portraying, and more about how convincing the message actually is. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Do the right job – then do the job right

Last week I explained how bidding less can actually help you to win more. While being more selective helps position you to be more successful, it’s not enough by itself. It is also important that the people who are writing your proposals are true subject matter experts – people who really have the knowledge and experience to really understand what the customer is asking for.

When professional services firms want to grow and win more work, they’ll usually assign a team of proposal writers to produce bids. These teams are often made up of administrative staff and junior consultants who don't yet have a great deal of field experience and might otherwise be underemployed.

While this approach might save money, or be more efficient, it certainly isn’t effective. Proposals lack depth of knowledge, and are a signal to clients that your firm really just sees bids and tenders as paperwork, and not as an opportunity to be of service to them.

To win, you need to convince the customer you’ll do the RIGHT JOB; not just do the job right. That’s why the subject matter experts in your firm will always be your best proposal writers. However, they do need support to do this. Their comfort zone is writing reports, not proposals. They have day jobs to do as well, under significant time pressures.

And let's not forget that your experts are rarely in it for the money. To be more successful, inspire them with the intrinsic rewards they'll achieve by winning work they really want to win – don't just make proposals an extra task they have to do. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Stop the bid sweatshop!

Energy and enthusiasm are the currency of winning bids, and producing large numbers of proposals spends that currency fast. It’s like feeding a pile of coins into a slot machine – the odds don’t get any better as your cash supply goes down.

Professional services firms that bid on projects, rather than contracts, usually want to win as much business as they possibly can. As a result, many go for too many tenders they have very little chance of winning. Proposals are a carbon copy of one another, despite the fact that the projects and clients are very, very different. As a result, they miss the point and are the first to go on the “no” pile. 

Bidding for business involves a series of sprints, backed up against one another. Wins beget more wins, but losses drag you down. So if you’re chasing a lot of business, but not winning any, spare a thought for your bid team - they are probably burned out, jaded, and disillusioned. This isn't good for anybody. It's not good for you commercially, and it's not good for your staff and their mental health.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. If you’re bidding, but not winning, then something needs to change.

Over the past five years, researchers Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull surveyed 7,600 managers in 262 companies to learn why strategy execution fails. They concluded that many managers lack strategic discipline when deciding which new opportunities to pursue, and that “unless managers screen opportunities against company strategy, they will waste time and effort on peripheral initiatives and deprive the most promising ones of the resources they need to win big.”

At the moment, I'm putting the finishing touches to an online mini-course to help people make better decisions to bid. This is a module I’ve been running as part of my Master Class for some time but will shortly be made available more widely. If you'd like to register for the opportunity to preview this program free of charge, please contact me.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Five signals that your customer relationship is running out of road

Customer relationships aren’t just about people anymore. We are moving away from an environment where personal relationships had a lot of power, to one where ideas and innovation are the primary currency that drives customer relationships.

 When I speak to senior people who are in charge of important customer relationships, there are two things they always tell me. The first is that they’re doing a good job. The second is that they have a “good relationship” with the customer.

Last week, I wrote about the risk of being a one-hit wonder; a supplier that isn’t invited back for a second contract term. Sure, you might think, that could happen – but never to me.

 So let’s dig a little bit deeper. How can we define a “good” customer relationship? What does it really look like? How do you know if you have one, or not?

 A good customer relationship is one where both parties are receiving equal benefit, and have equal interest in continuing. Here are five signals that your customer relationship may not be as good as you think it is, and is in fact at risk of running out of road:

 1.     You set regular performance review meetings with the customer, but they keep pushing them out or cancelling.

2.     Your service delivery plan looks exactly the same as the day the contract started.

3.     You're hitting all your targets or key performance indicators (KPIs) easily.

4.     You hear that competitors are in there pitching new ideas.

5.     There are changes coming up in the customer's business that you don’t know about, haven't thought about, or haven't developed a strategy to help them with.

These risks are easily avoided if you have a plan. You can call this anything you like; a retention plan, a growth plan, or a client service plan. I call it a “Ready to Re-compete” Plan.

What's important is that you actually HAVE a plan for change, and that you're not just delivering on the baseline of what the contract and the customer originally asked you to do. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Don't be a one hit wonder!

It’s easy to lose sight of the REAL advantage of being an incumbent – the opportunity to delight a captive audience who has already chosen to buy from you.

Music industry charts are full of one-hit wonders; remember Soft Cell (Tainted Love), Dexys Midnight Runners (Come On Eileen), Nena (99 Luftballoons) and The Knack (My Sharona)? All of these artists produced plenty of other music, it’s just that none of it made the big time quite like these monster hits managed to do. There are many others too, who worked very, very hard for years and years to get their big break, rode on the crest of their one hit single for quite a while, but just couldn’t crack the top of the charts a second time.

Likewise, business-to-business markets are littered with incumbents who didn’t make it past the first contract term.

When you already have the business, it’s easy to get comfortable, and lose sight of the most important thing that's going to help you keep it.

One your biggest advantages as an incumbent supplier is ACCESS – you can get in front of the customer more easily, and go deeper inside the organisation with new ideas in a way that competitors would find very difficult to replicate.

As the incumbent, you worked hard to get to where you are. Let’s make sure you stay there.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Is your new idea meaningful for your customer?

Customers aren’t always rational in the way they buy things. Before we get too excited about our new, innovative offering, it is important to think first about the customer’s goals, pressing problems and their appetite for change.

Meaningful innovation resonates with your customer’s goals and solves one or more of their big, gnarly problems – particularly problems that no one else has been able to solve yet. New ideas that focus on opportunity creation can also be useful, but are harder to sell, unless you have a growth-minded customer and the potential of a big payoff or return.

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, suggests: “We will do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure.” Most people are therefore much more motivated to resolve an issue that is keeping them up at night than they are to take a risk on a bright shiny opportunity that may or may not be better than their current reality.

For example, my family gave up its old ‘fatback’ analogue television only a month before the digital television switchover. We even took this 60kg TV with us to our new (two storey) place, where it was installed upstairs. Not long after, we found out that the analogue signal in our area was about to be switched off forever, rendering the TV useless. So we had to hire the removalists back to lug it down the stairs and take it away again!

As it turned out, my family wasn’t really that interested in buying a new TV to watch all the extra channels offered by digital TV (the bright shiny opportunity). We didn’t change over our old TV set until we were faced with the prospect of a black screen (big gnarly problem).

Before you rush out to talk to a customer about your bright, shiny offering, remember that while customers do expect innovation from their incumbent suppliers, no one wants change simply for the sake of change. 

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Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers.

Incumbency + innovation = guaranteed return on investment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more about it here.

Go wide for new ideas

When it comes to developing new ideas that will be meaningful to your most important customers, breakthrough insights can come from anywhere. Some evolve by thinking more laterally about what’s right in front of us. But others come from educating ourselves in ideas and disciplines that are outside our core area of expertise, our industry, or our life experience.

For example, one of the ways Steve Jobs came up with new ideas was to maintain a lifelong interest in learning and new experiences. While in college, Jobs took a course in calligraphy, which at the time had no practical application to his work. What he experienced came to life later in the Macintosh computer, the first of its kind to prioritise typeface, fonts and calligraphy.

When considering your team’s professional development needs, try to think more broadly than technical training that further entrenches the status quo. Technical training is an important way to keep staff qualifications up-to-date, but mostly maintains the baseline and isn’t the best way to deliver new thinking – especially when all your competitors are doing the same programs.

So help your team to learn more laterally. They can learn leadership from an explorer who has spent time leading a team in Antarctica, or learn better ways to relate to colleagues and customers by talking to a social worker who helps people navigate very complex personal or family issues.

Innovating in a long-term business relationship is fascinating and inspiring, but it’s also time consuming and difficult. New projects take time to deliver results and give us tangible evidence to talk to the customer about. Going wide for new ideas helps keep the fun in the game for your team, and ensure that innovation actually happens.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers. Read more here. 

Help your most important customers to build their future

Identifying how we can solve a customer’s big gnarly problems forces us to think beyond our own self-interest. In doing so, we are engaging in an activity that is highly correlated with long-term customer partnerships: delivering meaningful innovation.

When you deliver complex services, and do so through long-term contracts, what you are striving for is just as important to the customer as where you are today. After all, they are buying where you’ll be in three years’ time (or more). And if you’ve already been working together for a while, your customer will probably also need help to navigate problems in their business or market that didn’t exist at the start of your working relationship. As procurement expert Adel Salman pointed out when we spoke for my new book, Winning Again: “suppliers need to put forward a solution that addresses what we are becoming, not what we were in the past when you initially secured the business.”

You are the expert, and the customer expects you to be able to build a picture of how their future will look if they continue to work with you. However, innovating with the customer in mind is different to innovating for yourself. Here, you are acting as a ‘tastemaker’ – an expert who knows what the customer wants before they do.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Apple’s Steve Jobs are all tastemakers who became famous for their innovations. In a long-term customer partnership, the role of a tastemaker is to innovate AND collaborate. You’re still the expert, but the process you follow is more like taking a friend to your favourite restaurant and guiding them through the menu. To do this without straining the friendship requires consideration of their preferences, and compassion for their point of view, and of course the conviction that your expertise will guide them towards a good result.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

Answer this question to avoid losing an important contract or customer

Everyone likes to win, and no one likes to lose. Yet we all lose business sometimes. Losses can be difficult to handle, but many are preventable, as long as we do the work and thinking that really builds long-term customer relationships.

This week, I read a very raw and personal story about a major account loss written by Aureus Asset Management CEO Karen Firestone. Here’s how she felt from the time her client requested an unscheduled meeting, until she got the news.

“In my purgatory hours, I reviewed the client’s holdings, their performance, our previous correspondence, and notes from our meetings; I found nothing alarming, but nothing particularly calming either. The phone rang at exactly 2:30 (and he) got straight to the point. It took less than a minute for him to fire us from the account, very matter-of-factly, with little attempt to acknowledge the eight-year relationship that had seemed (we thought, obviously, in error) to be very positive. (He) explained that they had hired another manager with a very strong track record who required a high minimum investment; they were redeeming from several other managers to meet that threshold. ….By the time I got off the phone and looked at my screen, the transfer information was already there.”

If you have ever lost an important contract or customer, I really feel for you. 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 creativity, energy and enthusiasm — the very things that we need the most when we need to compete for the business again.

The good news is that it doesn’t need to come to this. If you have an important contract or customer in your care, show them that you REALLY care about them by bringing them new ideas today to help them operate or do business better. Here’s a simple question to spark some ideas: “What’s the one thing that would make us look like heroes to this customer, if we could achieve it?”

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

Competition is coming

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

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

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

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

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

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

Why procurement and service businesses are natural allies

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

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

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

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

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

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business won through formal bids, tenders and proposals. She is the author of two books on proposals and sales, including Winning Again: a retention game plan for your most important contracts and customers http://www.winningwords.com.au/winning-again/

Five characteristics of clear winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why gratitude wins business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 wishes on my Christmas list for Procurement

As thoughts turn to the Christmas holidays and what Santa might bring the kids, my Christmas letter asks for something a little bigger.

On behalf of the wonderful supplier organisations I have worked with on bids, tenders and proposals during the year, here are 7 things I’d like to see Procurement deliver to all of us this festive season.

“Dear Procurement, all we want for Christmas is….

1.  Let suppliers talk to you again. A Request for 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…
2. Bring back Expressions of Interest, which seem to be disappearing faster than the Antarctic ice shelf.If you want to assess potential suppliers on paper, why not use an EOI, rather than an RFT? These are short and straightforward, and make us feel like we’re in with chance.
3. Say what you mean.Tender documents 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 everyone.
4. Timetable a response period that’s fair and reasonable. We run a pretty tight ship these days; our staff are stretched and it can be difficult to keep up with complex tender 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…
5. Don’t issue a timetable only to 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 request.
6. Please, answer our questions. We don’t ask many. But often, we don’t get meaningful answers (or any answers). Giving us better information will mean better proposals for you to evaluate. And finally…
7. Have a heart – please don’t drop a tender on Christmas Eve. We know you like to come back in January to a full inbox, but we would like to see our families too.”

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, and a successful and prosperous 2015!

Why a contract is not a gift for life

Every service delivery contract changes hands at some point. Whether that’s into your new and improved hands, or someone else’s hands, is really up to you.

In our personal lives, 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 was therefore still paying for a handset that was fully paid for. I had to call my phone provider 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 consumer businesses we buy from understand this and set things up that way. Good for them – they are the ones in charge.

But when you are the supplier and 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.

Procurement has an obligation to go to market; not necessarily every time a contract expires, but regularly enough that they understand what the market is able to offer. Things change rapidly, and buyers are responsible for getting the best deal for their organisation.

For incumbent suppliers, winning again means accepting that we need to continually improve our service delivery models.

Think of your contract end date as a “use-by” date – a hard deadline to deliver a compelling strategy that will win the customer all over 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/