Nine ways to re-think the competition

Most of us tend to think of our competitors as the firms or organisations that are the closest match to ourselves – what I call ‘peer competitors’. This is a dangerous assumption, particularly as an incumbent supplier, because we don’t want to underestimate the field of competition and the other options the customer could be considering. 

In my practice, and in delivering my Persuasive Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class, I’ve read and provided feedback to hundreds of people about their past proposals and tender responses. I look for evidence that the writer has thought about what competitors might be offering, and come up with ways to better promote their own strengths and combat the strengths of competitors.

In fact, very few proposals adequately address the issue of competition.

We are not selling in a vacuum, and in a competitive tender the buyer will consider many proposals along with than yours – maybe a handful, or maybe hundreds.

Getting your head around what others might be offering is also a good way to test the validity of your own offer and ideas.

Aside from peer competitors, here are some ways to think about potential competitors that might pose a threat to your ability to win. Start by making a list of all the competitors you can think of, and consult your team to make sure you have covered them all.

Where could your competition come from?

1.     National organisations, if you are local.

2.     Local organisations, if you are national.

3.     Much larger or much smaller organisations.

4.     Organisations that already work with your customers in another capacity.

5.     Organisations with expertise in an area of current or future interest to the buyer.

6.     Organisations with expansion plans that include your market space.

7.     Potential partnerships among competitors, including joint ventures and consortia.

8.     Offshore and multinational organisations.

9.     The customer – they might do nothing, spend their money on other priorities, or decide to do the work in-house.

It’s essential to analyse competitors regularly, and even more important when you have a contract you don’t want to lose. This work will give you some good insights into where are placed in the market, and where you may need to improve your offer to win again.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Five universal buyer wants

Every buyer is different, but they share similar wants and desires. A commercially powerful bid strategy represents what the customer most wants, what we can best deliver and what positions us best against competitors at the time we make our bid.

Bid strategy is articulated through ‘win themes’, which I deliberately refer to as ‘purchaser value topics’. It's a subtle difference, but an important one. When we put time into thinking about what the purchaser will value, our ideas tend to be creative and generous, and more likely to help us win. The opposite of winning is, of course, losing, and when we use the language of ‘win themes’ we actually encourage thinking based on loss and scarcity.

Here are five universal buyer wants to consider when developing your bid strategy. How can your proposal deliver on these?

1.     Low risk, no risk, or reduction of risk. Risk comes in many forms – to reputation, to the success of a project, to costs, to people and even to the client’s business or operations. Identify as many risks as you can, and show you have a plan to minimise them.

2.     Innovation. Buyers like to know that you have ways to do things better or create better outcomes. Innovation usually needs to come with as little risk as possible.

3.     Good governance. Giving over control to a supplier can make buyers nervous. Instead of just showing your quality assurance status, be explicit in how you will measure and control performance and outcomes.

4.     Technology. All businesses, including government businesses, want to capitalise on available technology to make things faster, more connected and more transparent. If you have a technology solution that delivers this, make the most of it.

5.     Value for money. This doesn't just mean the cost of what they’re buying, but how useful it is. Emphasise the inherent value in what you already do and offer, as well as any specific cost savings you’ve developed for them. Value-adds, while they’re nice to have, are less commercially powerful.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

How to focus your time to win tenders and proposals

When developing bids, proposals and tender responses, most people spend almost all of their time on the “grunt work” of responding and finishing. In contrast, clear winners spend 60 per cent of their time on the “brain work” of selling and convincing. Here are some tips for focusing your energy and effort where they are most needed – on what will help you win.

As soon as a Request for Tender is released, you will only have a short period of time - most commonly, four weeks - to put your entire submission together.

Due to the size of the job, most people jump straight into writing, but this is a mistake.

There are four steps in the successful development of a bid, proposal or tender response:

1. Selling – developing your strategy and Purchaser Value Topics
2. Convincing – planning content and evidence to support them
3. Responding - writing to the questions/requirements, and
4. Finishing - pre-submission polishing and review.

Most people who write tender bids spends 95% of their time on Responding and Finishing, with only 5% on “Selling” – and this mostly involves kicking around the reasons “why they should choose us”. That’s hardly compelling, given that almost everyone else is going to do the same.

In contrast, clear winners spend 60% of their time up-front on Selling and Convincing, and only 40% on Responding and Finishing.

A tender document sets out what the buyer is looking for. In their heads, they’ve already bought that, and are really hoping for something better.

So your job is to give them something MUCH better than what they were expecting. By working first on Selling and Convincing, it is possible to shift perceptions so that you are the only ones in contention.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

How to “game” change

There are two types of change – change that is imposed externally, and the change we choose to make ourselves. Both can be difficult, but only one is inevitable.

In business, we have change imposed on us all the time. Company restructures, legislative change and compulsory competitive tenders are all examples of externally imposed change. This kind of change can shake us up in unpleasant ways and make us feel exposed and vulnerable.

The opposite of change is inertia. In physics, an “inert” object continues in its existing state, unless that state is changed by an external force. In other words, when something pushes us, we have no choice but to go with it.

Self-imposed change, however, requires US to do the pushing. This makes it elusive and harder to achieve – even when it is essential.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, authors of Immunity to Change, found that desire and motivation aren't enough on their own to create change, and that change remains maddeningly elusive even when it's literally a matter of life or death. For example, they note that even when doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don't change their habits, only one in seven will be able to follow through and make the change successfully.

Inertia can trap us into under-performing, even when we think we are working hard and doing the right thing.

In Who Moved My Cheese? - one of the world’s best-selling change management books - Spencer Johnson suggests that most of us spend far too much time looking after our “existing cheese” (what we have now) and not going in search of “new cheese” (what we could have, if we only got off our butts and went looking for it). “Movement in a new direction helps find new cheese,” concludes Johnson.  “Life moves on, and so should we.”

The most successful suppliers know they need to overcome inertia to avoid being left behind. They aren’t content with just doing what the customer or contract says they should do, and are always looking for ways to add more value. In contrast, others – who have more of a “set and forget” mentality – don’t realise that they are setting them up to lose.

The good news is that you get to decide today which one you are going to be.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Five business development behaviours that sabotage long-term success

Do you spend more energy getting new clients than servicing the ones you already have? Praise and heavily reward new business wins? Would you rather start a new job with a new customer than fix a problem with an existing one?

Our prevailing business development culture tends to measure and reward new business success over everything else. 

But this could be costing more than you think.

A study by Bain and Company (cited by Harvard Business School) found that the high cost of acquiring customers means that many customer relationships are initially unprofitable. However, this changes when the cost of serving loyal customers falls and the volume of their purchases rises. 

The same study found that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%.

Add to this the Gartner Group’s assertion that 80% of a company’s future profits will come from just 20% of its existing customers, and it’s clear that investing in the business we already have makes logical commercial sense. And yet, in many cases, this investment just doesn’t happen. 

Here are five business development beliefs and behaviours that sabotage our long-term success.

1. Focusing too much on revenue. Most BD metrics focus heavily on the revenue line. New customers push that line up much faster than incremental growth in existing accounts ever could, and what gets measured gets rewarded.
2. Believing customer satisfaction will result in customer loyalty. Most organisations run annual customer satisfaction surveys. Unfortunately, satisfaction measures are not a good predictor of loyalty OR of future behavior. I hold customer interviews as part of my pre-work for the retention programs I facilitate for clients. On more than one occasion, a customer who at one point reported themselves “highly satisfied” has turned out to be angry, disengaged and/or preparing to walk.
3. Performing well, but becoming complacent. When we’re hitting all our KPIs, it’s easy to forget that good work is what we get paid for, and not a selling point.
4. Shying away from the hard work. Let’s face it, some large customers are demanding and hard to deal with, and the relationship can become strained and tense over time. It can be easier to get excited about a new customer than to dig in and turn around a difficult one.
5. Being seduced by bright, shiny objects. It’s fun and exciting to pursue new business, with all its promise and possibility. In contrast, re-competing for customers you already have feels like applying for your own job. It’s hard, and confronting, and there is much, much more at stake.

Customer retention pays enormous dividends when we get it right. While the probability of converting a prospect can be less than 25%, we should be odds-on favourite with an existing customer. 

But incumbency is only an advantage if you choose to use it. Request the white paper and learn more about Getting Ready to Recompete For Your Most Important Contracts and Customers.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in competitive bids and tenders. Are you part-way through a contract term with a big customer? Have an important piece of business coming up for renewal or re-tender in the next 12 months? Join Robyn’s one-day workshop “How to Retain Your Most Important Contracts and Customers” and develop a Ready to Re-compete plan for the business you can’t afford to lose - http://www.robynhaydon.com/workshops/

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

The gift that just stopped giving

In an environment where business is subject to competitive tender, giving and receiving gifts and hospitality is fraught with problems. It’s a fine line from appreciation to bribery, and it just got even finer. 

Last week The Age newspaper ran a story investigating gifts, benefits, and hospitality offered to buyers in Victoria’s Government-owned water corporations.

According to the Auditor General, there had been a 40% increase in gifts and hospitality to water corporations in a single year. Staff at City West Water received more than $90,000 over a two-year period, and at Southeast Water it was almost $70,000 over five years.

While the water corporations apparently refused to release their gifts registers at the time of the Auditor General's report, and details only emerged following a freedom of information request by the newspaper, it was not good news for suppliers. 

The Age article mentioned at least a dozen suppliers by name alongside the gifts they had given to their customers, including $5,542 for a conference in Florida, $3,700 for conference tickets in San Francisco, $500 in shopping vouchers and gifts cards and large amounts spent on Australian Open tennis tickets, AFL Grand Final tickets, and many other types of hospitality.

Due to concerns about the appearance of impropriety, independent auditor RSM Bird Cameron was asked to investigate. In this case, they found no correlation between the gifts, benefits, and hospitality offered and the results of tenders.

However, Victoria's water minister has now asked all of Victoria’s 19 water corporations to review and update their policies so that any gift or hospitality worth $100 or more is declared and approval sought before it is accepted. Introducing a new culture around gifts and hospitality is going to be one of the first tasks of the new boards at all water corporations from October.

If gifts and entertaining have always taken the lion’s share of your marketing budget, it’s time to re-think your strategy. While modest gifts and hospitality, will always have a role to play in showing appreciation to customers, what they really value is what’s inside your head.

Business development is still all about relationships, the way those relationships are transacted have fundamentally changed. We’ve moved from a time when people and personal relationships had a lot of power, to one where it’s ideas and innovation that are driving the customer relationship.

Invest in continually bringing your customers insights into how they can compete better, do business better, or move closer to their goals. That is truly the best gift you can give them.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

The momentum of continual improvement

The most successful suppliers fall quickly into a pattern of continual improvement as soon as they win a contract or customer. Unfortunately, others – who are really just doing no more than keeping up with the basic requirements – are probably setting themselves up to lose.

Newton’s first law of motion – the law of inertia – tells us that “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

When it comes to important contracts and customers, the procurement process is the “unbalanced force” – something outside ourselves that propels suppliers into a kind of recurrent stop-start motion.

Bid, deliver, and then bid again.

But that doesn’t make this a pattern for suppliers to aspire to.

For incumbent suppliers, what happens in the delivery phase – which is usually the longest and most significant in the relationship – is what sets the stage for winning again.

What customers usually see from a supplier is this.

There’s the initial flurry of excitement when competing for the business, followed (usually) by a short lull while the customer makes up their mind. When we win, it’s a steep climb to get everything set up right, and then we settle back into a comfortable level of delivery until we need to compete again.

But what they EXPECT from us is this:

Choosing the path of continual improvement is what really helps to sustain a customer relationship over the long term.

That’s because not everything is within our control.  We can’t control how customers choose to buy, and we can’t control what competitors do either.

But we CAN choose our own state of mind.

We do get to decide how much of our energy, enthusiasm and ideas – in short, how much of ourselves - we’re prepared to commit to making sure our work gets better and better. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Could you fall victim to the Recency Effect?

Human beings have pretty selective memories. It turns out that we judge much of our life experience not on the totality, the average, or a glance back over the highlights, but on the basis of the last few minutes.

Have you ever walked into a customer’s office expecting to make a presentation about performance over the last month or quarter, and spent the whole meeting talking about last week’s non-delivery or a stuff-up that happened yesterday instead?

Welcome to the Recency Effect, which tells us that the most recently presented items or experiences will most likely be remembered best.

In Change Anything, a New York Times bestseller about the science of personal success, the authors conclude that much of what we feel about our daily relationships stems from only a few moments that overwhelmingly colour our perception.

The book relates a study by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who asked colonoscopy patients to rate their level of discomfort during an unanaesthetised procedure. (Australians, give thanks that we don’t do things that way here. Ouch).

Not surprisingly, none of the test subjects gave glowing reports of their colonoscopy, but the comfort levels they reported had almost nothing to do with the total amount of pain that they felt during the awkward and uncomfortable procedure.

The only thing that mattered was how painful it was right at the end.

What do colonoscopies have in common with contract or service delivery? Maybe more than you think. For a customer, giving over control of part of their business to a supplier, it really CAN feel like being operated on without an anaesthetic.

Your job is to make whatever you do for them as pain-free as possible. And no matter how well you’re doing generally, take extra care for at least three months before you need to compete again.

This will make sure that one or two mistakes don’t derail your good work forever.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

What Choppergate can teach us about customer expectations

Choppergate is a timely reminder that no matter how well documented and well-understood our work practices may be to us, customers could have very different ideas about what’s acceptable.

Recently the Federal Government in Australia was rocked by an expenses scandal known as “Choppergate”. While scrutiny over the spending of taxpayer money is nothing new, Choppergate has uncovered a systemic mismatch between what the voting public thinks is an acceptable use of public money and the internal policies and practices of the government that is spending it.

If you’re not in Australia, have been living in the outback or doing a digital detox for the last couple of weeks, here’s what has been happening:

• Federal Parliament Speaker Bronwyn Bishop, a member of the governing Liberal Party, has been condemned for spending an excessive amount of money on charter flights, the most contentious of which involved flying the 100km between Melbourne and Geelong to attend a party fund-raising event.
• While this was not considered official business, and the money has been repaid, other examples of Bishop’s prolific use of charter flights do apparently fall within the “rules”.
• According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Bishop spent $139,196.01 on charter flights while a junior minister from January ‘98 to December ‘01, almost seven times the amount spent by Tony Abbott (now Prime Minster) and Joe Hockey (now Federal Treasurer).

The Choppergate scandal has inspired hundreds of memes on social media, including my personal favourite:

(Source: http://mobile.news.com.au/national/politics/internet-skewers-bronwyn-bishop-over-choppergate-scandal/story)

Within important contracts and customer relationships, we have a set of external KPIs and contract conditions that we need to adhere to. Outside this, though, exist a whole raft of internal work practices and policies that may conflict with or contradict the intention of our customer agreements (whether they’re formalised or not). For example, I once worked with an organisation that had a small contract with a large government body and was seeking to win a bigger slice of their (substantial) business. However, despite their good work in meeting KPIs they were getting resistance from the customer that the management team couldn’t explain.

While unpacking their work practices, we discovered that their contract delivery team was sending 100 emails a week to the customer’s organisation – all of which required an answer. It’s no wonder the customer was getting frustrated, and management was getting stonewalled when they tried to ask for the new business they felt should be a natural consequence of their good performance.

What’s normal practice for us may come as a shock to customers, and could be the hidden barrier that stands in the way of doing more and better business together. Want to know if you’re vulnerable, and how to fix it? Join me at How To Retain Your Most Important Contracts and Customers in Melbourne on August 6 – I’d love to have you there. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Hard worker or clear winner?

There's a lot of joy that accompanies winning a new contact or customer. The hard work is over, and finally, we get a chance to do what we really want to do – the work itself.

For most people in the services business, no matter whether you're in commercial services, human services, or professional services, “the work” is what you actually signed up to do when you chose your career. You want to get out there. You want to deliver your knowledge and expertise. You want to get stuff done and to help people.

And when you’ve won the business, it’s easy to assume that doing good work is all you need to do to keep the relationship humming.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Good work is an expectation: it’s what we get paid to do. So what more do we need to do to keep business that’s important to us, apart from doing good work? That’s surprisingly simple.

There is a distinct difference between the hard workers, who do good work but don’t always retain it, and the clear winners who do both.

Hard workers tend to treat the customer transactionally, obsess about the work, and are only comfortable working with what’s comfortable and absolute.

Clear winners, on the other hand, treat the customer strategically, obsess about the customer’s business (not just the work), deliver what the customer doesn’t yet know they need, and are comfortable working in a space that’s conceptual and abstract.

When it comes to winning again, the way we THINK about our important contracts and customers is even more important than what we do for them.

If you are you part-way through a contract term with a big customer, or faced with a renewal or re-tender process in the next 12 months, join me on August 6 and find out how to get ready to re-compete. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Three things that successful crowdfunders can teach us

Crowdfunding offers a model of audience engagement that contract bidders — who often believe we are talking to an audience of one, that’s already sold on what we do — can learn a lot from.

Crowdfunding is a social media phenomenon that combines networking with raising money.  According to Forbes, the crowdfunding industry now raises more than $5.1 billion a year worldwide. Some of the sites operating in Australia include Kickstarter, Pozible and Chip In (for non-profit organisations).

In the world of getting funding to do things, there is a definite hierarchy at work.

At the top of this are essential services, which governments or private businesses are ready to fund through contracts and agreements.  The buyer’s briefing is usually quite prescriptive and can take the form of a Request for Tender or Proposal.

In the middle there are grants, where hopefuls showcase their ideas and projects to a funding body, - generally a large corporation, charitable foundation or private donor - who may be prepared to fund something that piques their interest. The buyer's briefing here is far less prescriptive - more like a set of principles that need to be fulfilled. Because of this, grants are a bit like a beauty pageant. There may be money on offer, but it's harder to get, and difficult to predict who will get it.

Crowdfunding is at the very bottom of this hierarchy. Here, there is no buyer briefing at all. Crowdfunders put their project out to a wide audience that has no firm intention of giving money to anything. Therefore, a crowdfunder’s job is to inspire people to put their hand in their wallet and pull out their credit card.

Here are three things that anyone who sells through contracts and grants can learn from successful crowdfunders.

1. Reinforce what’s great about your offer. In crowdfunding, this means multiple follow-ups after someone expresses interest in the project. In contract and grant proposals, make sure to spin your most compelling points in different ways; don’t just bury them on page 47 and 53 where they could easily be missed.
2. Bring it to life. On the major crowdfunding platforms, projects that are supported by engaging video and visuals outsell other projects two to one. In contract and grant proposals, visuals are absolutely mandatory for conveying complex concepts, and to illustrate any kind of methodology.
3. Be hot AND cool. When you’re sitting alone in your office putting together a grant or tender submission, it’s easy to forget that you’re actually battling for attention in a crowded marketplace. Crowdfunding is the very DEFINITION of crowded, so successful projects gazump the competition by being really, really hot right now. For example, Patient Zero raised $230,000 to stage real life zombie battles, twenty times more than the $10,000 it was originally asking for. You may not be pitching zombie battles, but there’s got to be something cool about what you’re offering. Grab hold of the zeitgeist, tap into needs the customer didn’t know they had, and show them a compelling vision of their future working with you. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Five ways to get your business promoted

By the time you're the CEO, General Manager or leader of a business, you may have already reached the level of promotion you hoped for as an individual. So self-promotion is probably not something that occupies your mind every day.

Yet the advice that helped you to get where you are today can be applied to promoting your business to your customers, in much the same way as it helped you to rise through the ranks in your career. Here are five principles to look at in a whole new way.

1.     “Volunteer for extra projects”. Take a look at what's going on inside your customer's business. What would they love to do, if only they had the expertise or time? Volunteering to take on an extra project that helps the customer to achieve their goals shows what you can do, as well as a willingness to work and to learn.

2.     “Get experience outside your job role”. People who work in other industries for a period of time usually come back with great ideas and transferable skills. Where else are you working already, and where else could you go, to bring fresh insights to the customer?

3.     “Come with a solution, not a problem”. Listen to what’s going on for your customer, and find people who can help in areas that you (and they) don’t have expertise. Don’t try to do everything: you’ll be more highly regarded for your own expertise if you can introduce complementary (not competing) experts too.

4.     “Make your achievements visible”. Promotions are often won by the employees who are best at “selling” their results, not necessarily delivering the best results. The same applies here. How are you using your access to the customer to tell them about the great things that you're doing for them, and for other customers?

5.     “Be indispensable, but not overbearing”. Not every great idea of yours is going to meet with a welcome reception. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Maybe it's not the right time, or there is something else that's competing with it. Avoid the worst of this by understanding what the customer’s 12 month calendar looks like - what's going on inside their business, what’s a high priority and when. Understanding when to introduce your argument is the key to having it land with a receptive audience. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Why “ticking all the boxes” often isn’t enough to make the sale

Imagine how much productivity is lost in businesses, and how many problems remain unsolved, just because buyers don’t have the balls to make a decision and sellers don’t push a solution when they actually have one.

Ever poured your heart and soul into a huge tender or proposal that went nowhere? Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. And it’s not just sellers whose time is wasted: it’s buyers’ too. A loss to “no decision” wastes everyone’s time and energy.

Indecision and waste are everywhere in complex sales. And not just in business.

Take real estate for example.

Escape to the Country is a British reality-TV show that helps hassled Londoners to buy property in the picturesque English countryside.

It’s highly aspirational, but not very practical, as very little property actually changes hands on the show. Most of the time it’s a lovely tour through some beautiful homes accompanied by tinkly music and a soothing voiceover.

While I like a good property stickybeak as much as the next person, I find Escape to the Country frustrating, as so few people actually BUY the gorgeous homes they look at.  Instead, they wander off “still searching for their dream home”, while the poor home owners trying to sell the place are left polishing the andirons in their inglenook fireplaces.

Why don’t these property buyers, seemingly so keen to escape to the country, actually buy? I reckon it’s because many come on the show with a massive laundry list of likes and dislikes. They are shown three homes, and the first two tick all their boxes. Ironically, it’s often the third house - the “mystery house” - that gets the best reception, as it challenges the buyers’ preconceptions and gives them something different (and better) than what they asked for.

Business buyers are exactly the same. They think they know what they want, but they don’t REALLY know until they see it.

So don’t just tick the boxes. Use your expertise, and offer them something that will surprise and delight them. That’s how you will emerge as the clear winner.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Heroes, hard work and hope

Change is hard, and enforced change that is beyond our control is the hardest of all. But nature abhors a vacuum. Something else will eventually take the place of what was there before, and you never know, it could be even better.

I was very moved to read about the story of Detroit recently.

Detroit has lost half its population in the past 50 years, fuelled by a sharp decline in automotive manufacturing, the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler, and a huge wave of mortgage foreclosures during the global financial crisis. When people could no longer afford to stay in their homes, they simply left them; one-fifth of the central municipal area is returning to nature, in neighbourhoods now known as “urban prairie”.  In 2013, Detroit experienced the USA’s largest municipal bankruptcy with $18 billion in debt.

But some in Detroit aren’t going to sit by and see their city crumble.

National Geographic magazine tells the story of Erika Boyd and Kirsten Ussery-Boyd, who invested $45,000 to open successful restaurant Vegan Soul on one Detroit’s many deserted streets, seeing an opportunity in a city with a huge obesity problem.

Financial services entrepreneur John Hantz has spent $4m buying 1,700 properties, clearing 500 lots and planting 15,000 trees – an investment that he says pays him back in “psychic income”.

Now new businesses are opening in Detroit every day, fuelled by a wave of young people priced out of other US cities and excited by the opportunity to own property and build a future there.

“Most people wanna save Detroit”, says former graffiti tagger Antonio “Shades” Agee, whose street art now adorns the buildings of Reebok, Quicken and Fiat Chrysler. “But you can’t save Detroit. You gotta BE Detroit”.

Slowly, Detroit is reinventing itself. It won’t be easy. But it already has the makings of a great comeback story.

We all have that opportunity. Loss is part of life, and is not always preventable. But we can choose not to let the loss define us, and making that choice generates its own power. 

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

The challenge of comprehension

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant who helps helps service-based businesses that compete through bids and tenders to articulate the value in what they do, command a price premium, and build an offer that buyers can’t refuse. Don’t let others dictate how far and how fast your business can grow – take your power back! Email robyn@robynhaydon.com to request the white paper for the Beyond Ticking Boxes program.

Take your power back!

For those of us old enough to remember, the golden age of selling in business-to-business markets was at least 20 or 30 years ago.  Back then, business was done on a handshake, relationships were king and suppliers had a lot of power. If you were running a business or doing any selling back then, you probably felt like you were in control.

Fast forward to today, and business of any size and scale is done through bids and tenders, procurement is king, and suppliers don’t seem to know what to do any more.

The world of sales has fundamentally changed. But some of us are still selling like it’s 1985, Wham is at the top of the charts and we are jamming out “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” on the Sony Walkman wearing our Choose Life t-shirts and fluoro cut-off gloves.

OK, maybe that was just me, but you get the picture. It’s chaos, it’s not pretty (truly) and it’s not working. Something has to change.

What’s really going on here is that we feel like we have lost our power.

It’s fair to say that not everything we’d like to control is within our control. We can’t control how customers buy. We can’t control what competitors do and say. And we can’t control how we feel about any of these things. But we can control how we exercise our CHOICE. And we can choose to think more broadly, to feel differently and to act despite our fears and challenges.

I reckon it’s an exciting time to be in business. Our world is full of possibility and potential. But this is underpinned by rapid and unrelenting change that brings many challenges.

Customers have these challenges too. So we’ve moved from a time where people and personal relationships had a lot of power, to one where ideas and innovation are the primary currency that drives customer relationships.

According to a recent study by TEC (The Executive Connection), a global network of company CEOs, the five issues keeping CEOs up at night are talent management and the need for cultural fit; the role of technology in re-shaping existing business models and creating new opportunities; the globalisation of markets; embedding an innovation mindset; and the perennial need to make good decisions. (Read the full report here) 

Do you have a solution for one of these? Prospects and customers want to hear about it.  

It’s time to take your power back, show them what they don’t know (but should) and build your customer’s future. This is what creates real and lasting customer partnerships.

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.

What’s your business development style?

There is no one “best” way to do business development. We all have a natural business development style that we are drawn to.  This is not based on any external methodology that helps us get the job done, but on internal preferences shaped by our personality and environment.

Your business development style sits at the intersection of your natural decision-making horizon - whether you focus short-term or long term - and your natural way of thinking, meaning whether you’re more comfortable dealing with abstract concepts or concrete facts.

There are four primary business development styles:

1.         The Dealmaker, with a short-term concrete focus. Dealmakers pride themselves on being good operators who make commercially smart decisions and are great at cutting through mental clutter to get to a result. To a Dealmaker, there’s no problem with a customer that can’t be fixed by sweetening the deal.

2.         The Ideator, with a short-term conceptual focus. Ideators love to come up with creative and innovative ways to change the world for their customers. Ideators sidestep roadblocks and problems by thinking up new ways to get others excited about the future. 

3.         The Producer, with a long-term concrete focus.  Producers are great at what they do, get brilliant results, and love to work on interesting projects that fit their expertise. Producers solve problems best when  “putting their heads together” with a team of like-minded experts.

4.         The Nurturer, with a long-term conceptual focus. Nurturers are great with people; they put in tireless effort behind the scenes and often pull deals out of the hat like magic due to their strategic, long-term work on customer relationships. Nurturers are good at collaboratively solving problems, with a knack for helping customers see past the immediate issue to the long-term goal. 

Within your team, aim for a diversity of styles to create stronger arguments and better business development outcomes.

Team members who share a thinking style (whether concrete or conceptual) will tend to gravitate towards each other as allies – Dealmakers to Producers, and Ideators to Nurturers.

Likewise, team members who share a similar decision-making horizon but differ in their thinking style can be useful creative partners to help each other fill in the gaps and point out what the other might have missed – Dealmakers with Ideators, and Producers with Nurturers. 

Those who think completely differently and have opposing reference timeframes are natural challengers able to point out the flaws and risks in each others’ arguments (and probably have a few, while they’re at it). Expect a robust debate between Ideators and Producers, and Dealmakers and Nurturers.

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.

Learn to love the competition!

Nobody likes to think about competitors. We all want to believe that we are the only ones in the running. And when we actually ARE running, that's a good thing. Not so much beforehand, when taking an objective look at competitors - how they are likely to run their race - can actually help make ours better.

In developing a strategy to win business, we need to identify what the customer most wants, what we can best deliver, and what will position us most favourably against competitors.

The discussion about competitors is usually the most challenging one for us to have. Most of us don't really want to entertain the idea that we might have competition. It makes us defensive, uncomfortable, dismissive, fearful and sometimes angry. 

I totally understand where this comes from. Obsessing about competitors isn't most people’s happy place. (It’s not mine either.) But in fact, understanding competitors helps us to judge what they might do or say. This can pay big dividends when we are under pressure.

For example, imagine you're sitting on stage taking part in a public debate. Your opposition has just made a fantastic point and the audience is cheering hard. You have 10 seconds to get on your feet to respond. Would you feel more confident having anticipated that point the night before, and having a response ready, or being forced to think on your feet?

Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has campaigned against apartheid, poverty, AIDS and non-democratic government, has seen more than his fair share of pressure in public debate and has some good advice to offer.

"Don't raise your voice," Tutu says. "Improve your argument."

Understanding competitors helps us to improve our arguments. In a formal bid or tender, the customer is actively seeking many points of view. Ours is just one of them. By understanding what others might do or say, and having a plan to combat this, we are giving our own arguments their best chance to shine.

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 DNA of a successful bid team

A bid team is a living organism – a group of smart people who come together to apply their skills and knowledge to developing a functional solution that will win or retain an important contract or customer.

The most successful teams share a particular type of DNA. In very simple terms, DNA is a blueprint for how to build a living organism: it gives instructions to our cells about how they should grow and function.

Likewise, bid teams need the right mix of customer and technical experts, balanced by a Bid Leader with the authority to make commercial decisions, and the skills to draw out the best ideas and drive the organisational change necessary to win.

What often happens, though, is that it’s left up to the customer experts – the sales team – to run bids on their own. Customers have expectations and the sales team knows all about them: they will happily tell you what they are. Without the leadership and authority to implement these expectations, or the technical know-how to configure the systems and processes of the organisation to suit the customer, this knowledge remains under-used.

Building your team with the right mix of people creates a meeting of minds that will help you win. As you can start to see from this diagram, it’s at the intersection of these specialities that the magic truly happens. Customer experts provide information about customer expectations, which the commercial experts use to provide leadership to the technical people, who can configure a solution for the customer.

Figure 1: The DNA of a successful bid team contains the right mix of specialists with commercial, technical and customer expertise

Avoid letting senior leaders outside your team hijack the bid strategy, particularly if they don’t know the customer well or haven’t worked at the coalface for a long time. Often these people dominate the discussion with commercial concerns and big-picture competitive strategy, at the expense of valuable customer and technical insights, and can make disastrous decisions that undermine the good work of the people who really know what is going on. 

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

Proposals are a game of SHOW, not just tell!

A convincing proposal is one that makes the buyer sit up and take notice. Once you’ve proven you can do everything that the buyer is asking for, you’ll want to explain how things could be done better. This, however, is easier said than done.

As early as 1981, Prof. Valerie Zeithaml of Texas A&M University identified professional services as existing “on the extreme intangibility end of the tangibility spectrum. Their ‘product’ is the result of many years of specialised study and training and clients have difficulty evaluating these ‘products’”.  

Your team will often be pitching to customers who have a much lower level of technical expertise than they do themselves.

For proposals to be convincing, proposal leaders and subject matter experts need to be able to work together to illustrate and translate their technical knowledge into commercial insights that will resonate with the customer.

They also need to go beyond the brief, address the customer’s concerns and issues, and show a thoughtful approach to the work that sells your firm’s expertise (particularly innovative ways to achieve technical outcomes), all the while reassuring them of your experience (strong credentials in similar engagements or projects).

The poster child that sells your firm's expertise is the way you present your methodology. In professional services, this is often the major proof that a firm can do the job.

It's not enough to present methodologies in words only; you need good quality visuals to illustrate complex concepts and help the buyer understand the journey you will take them on. Do this better than competitors, and you’ll get much closer to the mark.

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.