Chris Whyatt thinks...

Bidding to Win: the Ten Critical Success Factors

Bidding for opportunities is an expensive and often unrewarding process, with low win ratios and high cost of bidding being typical across most market sectors. For example, if it costs £20,000 per opportunity to bid and your win ratio is 1 in 5, your cost of winning one opportunity is £100,000, so before you bid for an opportunity it is important to recognise the following factors:

1	If the first thing you know about an opportunity is when the tender is issued you are most likely too late because...
2	the majority of tenders are issued with a potential winner already identified because…
3	another bidder has been working with the buyer to help them define the solution, the budget, and create the tender (known as early positioning) and …
4	you have been asked to bid to create competition, and are, at best, lying second, so…
5	having the best bid team, the best bid process, and the best proposal may still not win you the business!

So what can organisations do to avoid this, maximise their chances of winning, improve their win ratio and reduce their cost of bidding? I believe that there are ten critical success factors:

1	Understand & Influence (early positioning) – As highlighted above, early positioning is critical to winning bids; so, what do you need to focus on to achieve this? As early as possible in the sales cycle, try to understand and influence the client’s underlying business need or issue; the ‘real’ requirement; the people and the politics; the procurement process; the potential competition, the risks for both parties; their budget and your win price. The key to doing this successfully is…
2	Relationships – Obviously, it is important that you get close to the client, especially the decision making unit, so that you can establish the trust and credibility needed to understand and influence them towards your organisation and your solution before any tenders are even thought about. Good relationships with potential third party vendors or supply chain partners are also vital, as they could be the key to winning the bid. If you have done both of these activities well you will be well positioned to…
3	Qualify & Invest – Before spending time and money on a bid that you may not win, consider the following questions. Why are we being asked to bid? (Does the client believe we can deliver or are we just making up the numbers?) Can we win and why? Can we make money? Why do we win opportunities like this? Why do we lose opportunities like this? How much will it cost us to bid? Do we have the time, money and resource to bid, or should we be investing time and money on better opportunities? If you know the answers to all the above and are happy with them, then you can develop your…
4	Bid Strategy & Solution – Too many organisations start answering the questions in a tender before developing their bid strategy and solution. Start with the win price, which, if you have been involved from the beginning, you will have given them! Based on this win price, you will be able to develop your organisation’s offer to meet and exceed the client’s need or issue, which again is always easier if you have been influencing that understanding from day one. Support this offer with key messages and themes that run through the proposal, making it read like a joined-up document, rather than an exercise in cut & paste. Sum all this up in a draft Management Summary, and use this as a guide to…
5	Sell your Solution & Value – Building on the four previous stages, a compelling, client centric proposal, led by a ‘killer’ Management Summary, will grab the decision maker’s attention, greatly improving your chances of winning. Including case studies of clients with similar requirements you have successfully addressed always helps. Make sure your proposal addresses the client’s needs and doesn’t just talk about your organisation; client first, supplier second. Once shortlisted, create a great presentation team, then a great presentation (using the Management Summary). Always apply....
6	Creativity & Innovation – In a ‘me too’ world it is critical to differentiate, so focusing on the client’s issues and needs, holding workshops to apply creativity and innovation to your bid strategy, your solution, your proposal and your presentation, supported by…
7	Planning & Process – When opportunities are won, the delivery aspects are managed using structured planning and processes (Prince 2 etc) to ensure a successful outcome. The same degree of planning and process needs to be applied to a bid. Start with a clear plan and a ‘living’ bid process used by everyone, clearly defining their roles and responsibilities, timescales and key milestones, including regular reviews. All this will save time and money, and create a better working environment. Also helpful are…
8	Tools & Information – Client’s always pose lots of repetitive questions, so having the information prepared, accessible, and managed under change control ensures that the right answers are found quickly, used, and always up to date. This will save time and money during the early stages of the bid, allowing more time for the creative aspects of the proposal, the activity most likely to win you the business. Now you need now is…
9	Resource & Skills – People win bids. People who can lead, people who can work as part of a holistic bid team, people who can write in persuasive business English, people who can innovate, people who can use MS Word and PowerPoint, people who can check the proposal until it is perfect, people who can sell, people who can negotiate, and people who can present. Without all these, bidding can be very time consuming, expensive and unrewarding for all concerned. Finally, whatever the outcome…
10	Review & Learn – Perhaps the area I’m most passionate about, because ‘If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got’. Regardless of the result, you must ask the client and yourselves what you did well and what you could have done better. Communicate the output to everyone involved, and use them to improve the integrity and approach to future opportunities, applying the lessons learnt to deliver continual improvement.

Using our Get to Great™ Bid Capability model, our client’s have highlighted Qualify & Invest, Planning & Process and Review & Learn as the lowest scoring aspects of the 10 critical success factors in their organisations. The first and the last latter are of course linked, as the more you learn from success and failure, the easier it becomes to identify the ‘real’ opportunities, enabling you to focus on them, and decline the rest. Good Planning & Process will ensure that you manage the ‘real’ opportunities effectively and efficiently, delivering a real return on investment, improved win ratios and reduce the cost of bidding, which is where this article started out.

Hopefully this short article will help you to start winning more bids. If you want more help, please contact the author on +44(0)777 929 7401 or via email at chris@gettogreat.co.uk

Is your organisation ‘sales ready’?

Successfully selling your company’s capabilities to customers depends on many factors.  I have spent a lifetime looking at this subject, focusing on what many people call sales readiness.  Sales readiness underpins everything that sales and marketing does, including people, processes, and information.  To help consider where you stand, I have broken it down into 5 segments and 13 key elements...

1. Getting ready

Fundamental to sales readiness is understanding your market; sounds simple doesn’t it, but these days ‘your market’ changes by the day, or even the hour.  If you were dependant on the automotive industry six months ago you will be hurting now.  When did your senior management team last spend a day reviewing their target market, its wants / needs, and what it will pay, as well as considering the ever changing competitive threat?  If they haven’t done it in 2009 they are almost certainly out of touch. 

If they do understand their market, they can be sure that what they sell and what they charge for it (aligned capability and pricing) are 100% aligned to that market, maximising their chances of making a sale, and a profit.  If you don’t believe me, just look at the companies that have failed in the last year, and the way prices have dropped with so many types of products and services – market forces at work.  An example of a company who have looked at their market and changed accordingly is Computacenter – almost unrecognisable from 5 years ago and adapting very well.

Now, to me, it all seems completely obvious and totally logical; but still companies don’t do it at all, or don’t do it very well, and pay the price on a daily basis.  Why? Because it is easier to bury your head in the sand and just hope that things will right themselves on autopilot! As they say, if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

Experience shows that a structured approach, or sales process, greatly improves consistency of sales execution and outcomes.  People who use the process improve their individual performance and effectiveness, and deliver results for the business.  Sadly, many people believe that sales is an ‘art’ that doesn’t require structure, rather than a ‘craft’ that does; they are wrong.  Just look at the world’s major corporations of the last 20 years, Nestle, BA, and IBM for example, and see what ‘structure’ did for them.

2. Finding business

Having established a solid foundation, you need to Identify opportunities to fill the pipeline.  Demand generation has many sources; from major marketing campaigns to picking up the ‘phone and cold calling, but whichever your route of choice, it must be highly proactive, as it’s currently a buyer’s market.  In today’s market ‘sweating’ your network of contacts, old and new, is a good place to start.

The continual qualification of opportunities is the next big area where we see huge scope for improvement on a daily basis; the more accurately this can be achieved, the lower the cost of sale or sales ‘overhead’.  The big issue with qualification is that it is often subjective, whereas it should be applying logic, objectivity and historical information from your CRM system.  Sadly, most sales organisations ignore the value of historical information, often not even capturing it; imagine Manchester United ignoring the video of last week’s performance when picking this week’s team – it would never happen.  In my recent memory I can only think of one or two companies doing this even half decently, whereas it should be a top priority for everyone.

3. Winning business

Winning the business depends on developing a great win strategy, including the win price and your key differentiators, a ‘process’ made easier by the quality of relationship with the prospective customer.  How many sales people could articulate a win strategy if put on the spot by their boss?  Why is this?  I believe that poor qualification causes sales people to be overloaded.  If they could qualify harder and faster and create time to develop better win strategies, they would greatly improve their win ratio and reduce your cost of sale as a result. 

At some point in the sale, prospective customers nearly always require proposals and/or presentations as a way of taking things forward, and these need to be customer focused, short, sharp and compelling.  However, what we see is recycling in its worst possible form, in that sales people more often than not just resort to old proposals and presentations.  The customer should rightly feel offended by this approach, as it is always obvious when it happens.  It doesn’t take long to make the customer feel that the proposal or presentation was written for them, so why don’t you do just that?

Many sales organisations place a lot of emphasis on the negotiating and closing element of the sales process, and rightly so, as this is your chance to maximise profit and minimise risk.  This can be best achieved by recognising a buyer’s personal wins, and doing some give and take, or trading variables, i.e.  if you can I will etc.  So why do sales people often give in so easily at the first sign of resistance? Probably one of two reasons; fear of losing credibility for underperformance or because their incentive scheme is revenue not margin focused.  As they say, motivation drives behaviour.

4. Learning lessons

A few paragraphs ago I highlighted the criticality of historical information, and the issue arises again here.  The single biggest point of failure we see in sales readiness is not capturing and applying the lessons learned from deals won and lost.  This provides intelligence to inform every aspect of your approach to sales, marketing, product development and short, medium and long term business planning and strategy.   If you take one thing from this article and apply it to your business, make it this.

One big beef we often hear from sales is that they are often ‘let down’ by their company when it comes to delivering the promise sold to the customer.  Failure to meet expectations has a huge impact on costs, reputation, referenceability, and the opportunity for more sales.  The solution lies in a better working relationship between sales and delivery, including shared access to pipeline information, of which more later.  Many years ago a factory manager showed me a faxed order he had just received from a sales person for twenty high value machines.  Great news says I, bad news says he – nobody had told him it was coming and on Friday before he had laid off all the people capable of making them as well as returning all the unused sub-components to the manufacturers!  Now the sales person was blaming HIM for failure to deliver the promise.

5. Measuring success

Underpinning sales readiness are the management information and reporting systems and processes that enable customer and pipeline data to be captured and utilised to the benefit of the business, both short, medium and long term.  The term CRM is often used in this context, and rightly so, however, CRM is NOT just an IT system, but a way of life for organisations who want structure and control of their sales engine.

If sales readiness had bookends they would be understanding your market and defining, communicating and measuring success; which means how well an organisations defines what success looks like at an individual, team and company level, and how well this is communicated, understood, applied and measured – a big ask, but mission critical.   Do you understand where your company is going, what your role is in that journey, how you can contribute, and how you will be rewarded?  If not, I suggest you ask.

 
In this article I have explained the 13 elements of Sales Readiness.  How well do you measure up? If you want more help, please contact the author on +44(0)777 929 7401 or via email at chris@gettogreat.co.uk

Writing persuasive and effective customer proposals

As someone who has spent ten years helping people produce high quality, persuasive proposals, and who is frequently asked to do the same to win business for my company, I strongly identify with the results of a recent survey highlighting the level of discomfort experienced by people when ‘writing a document (like a proposal, sales letter or brochure) which is designed to persuade people to buy you, and your products / services.’

However, we all recognise that one of the critical success factors in winning new business and developing existing customers is how effectively and persuasively you articulate (in a proposal or a pitch) your understanding of their requirements, your corresponding solution, and why they should spend their money with you, not someone else. How do we go about this daunting task?

Guiding principals

The purpose of any proposal is to persuade. There is a well known quotation from Cicero, the Roman philosopher who died circa 106 BC which states “If you want to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words”, so the writer must try and get inside the head of the customer to achieve this, or risk failing to ‘persuade’.

Plan before you write

Imagine that you have just seen a prospective customer and they say ‘Sounds great, send me a proposal and I will take it to the board for consideration’. Everything rests on that document and all you have to start with is a blank sheet of paper.

Before you start to write, I would advise a short period of reflection, analysis and planning. APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) research several years ago identified that the primary reason customer’s selected one proposal over another was that they demonstrated the ‘best understanding of the requirement’. So, make sure you have a thorough understanding of the prospective customer’s requirements, making you ideally placed to ‘create’ an aligned solution.

Writing styles

Some people find writing comes naturally, whereas others find it difficult. If you fall into the first group, writing a proposal should not be too difficult, but if you fall into the second, seek help from an experienced colleague. Whichever the case, the language used in proposals should be less formal that contractual legalese, but more formal than emails, being informative and conversational, demonstrating insight into the customer’s business and the issues to be resolved.

Starting to write

Having analysed the prospective customer’s requirements, created an aligned solution, you are ready to start writing; but what, and how?  I would suggest you start by making some bullet point notes covering your answers to the following questions:

1	What is the purpose of your proposal? Tell them why they are reading it.
2	What is the background to your proposal? Tell them what led to it being produced, such as meetings and previous projects / engagements.
3	What is the customer’s business requirement, pain or issue? Focus on them, without mentioning your business.
4	What is the solution that they are looking for to meet this requirement? Once again, it’s about them, not you.
5	What are they looking to achieve from this solution? Talk about outcomes, results, benefits, ROI etc.
6	What is your proposed solution? Tell them who will do what, where, when and how. Keep it short, talk about the alignment of your proposed solution with their requirement.
7	Why should they buy it from you? Only tell them facts that are relevant to their requirements; global reach is irrelevant if the requirement is for their Croydon office.
8	What are the proposed fees, timescales and assumptions? The all important piece, made easier if you know what they are prepared to spend.
9	What will happen next? What is the call to action?

Take these points and expand into sentences and paragraphs. Try to avoid marketing statements at all costs; focusing on their requirements, making them feel that the proposal was specifically written for them. Additional information such as case studies, customer testimonials etc, should be consigned to the appendices and cross-referenced in the main proposal.

Guidelines

There are 10 simple guidelines that will improve the final document and the outcomes:

1	So what? – Test everything you write be asking yourself ‘so what?’ and making sure the answer is relevant to the customer and positive.  If you don’t, they will.
2	Prove it! – Back up any claims you make with facts, figures and/or testimonials.
3	Be brief – Say just enough but never too much – remember, less is more!
4	What do they want hear? – Write what the customer wants to hear, not what you want to write.  Leave your corporate ego at home, and focus on the customer.
5	Make it self-contained – Make sure it stands on its own and needs no verbal explanation, as it may be read by a wide audience.
6	Check it yourself – Find somewhere quiet and read the document out loud; this always highlights mistakes.
7	Get someone else to check it – Spell checker in Word is dangerous, as it checks that the words you have used are spelt correctly, not that they are the right words. For example ‘moth’ and ‘month’ are similar, valid words, but mean very different things.
8	Customer focus – Use replace in Word to replace the customer name with itself, and note the word count, repeating the exercise with your company name, noting the word count again, ensuring that the emphasis is as much if not more on them than you.
9	Test with your customer – If at all possible, ask to test it with your prime contact (without details of fees), prior to final submission, but only if you have a good and trusted relationship. This gives the customer the opportunity to ask for changes without the fear of causing offence. Withholding the fee details prevents the customer from expecting the revised proposal to have the same fee!
10	Deliver by hand – When you are totally satisfied with the final document, make an appointment with the prospective customer and walk them through it, face to face.

Hopefully this short article will have given you enough basic information to start producing better proposal, and win and/or retain more business as a result. If you want more help, please contact the author on +44(0)777 929 7401 or via email at chris@gettogreat.co.uk

Overcoming the barriers to change...

The need for change

There are numerous books and famous speeches on the subject of change and the need to change is universally recognised as essential, if ‘things’ are to improve. To quote Albert Einstein, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So why is change so difficult to achieve; and what are the barriers?

The barriers to change

The barriers to change are numerous and are open to never-ending debate; however, it is widely agreed that these are the headline issues:

1.    Getting the people involved to agree what the problem / issue is, and that is important enough to warrant action and investment, as we often live with things because they are not seen as serious enough to justify changing.

2.    Agreeing the actions to effect change, who is responsible for making them happen, and the timescales in which they must be implemented.

3.    Ensuring that the actions are implemented and the required change actually happens.

4.    Measuring success, outcomes, benefits and return on investment.

Examples of change in action

Britain’s most successful golfer is one Sir Nick Faldo MBE, who, after failing to win two major titles by ‘collapsing’ in the last round, decided to undertake a complete overhaul of his swing. He enlisted the help of the leading coach David Leadbetter and after thousands of hours on the practice ground and several years of greatly reduced income, Faldo won 6 major golf titles and was No. 1 in the world rankings for 98 weeks; which by any measure was a magnificent achievement and a great return on investment.  What Faldo did were the four things listed above; he recognised his swing was not good enough, worked with a recognised coach to remodel it, set time and money aside to achieve it and as the record books show, reaped the rewards.

In business terms, some readers may be familiar with an IT company called Computacenter.  They started out selling computer hardware in the days when the margins were high and the economy was strong, but over time margins reduced year on year and they recognised the need to change in order to be profitable and survive.  Their business model needed to change to a services led approach, which, although more profitable, involved a more complex, time consuming and expensive sales process. This was not the cheap option, however, profitability has improved year on year since 2005; when a severe profit dip highlighted the need the change. Improved processes and systems plus better trained and more effective people made this change possible. 

Overcoming the barriers to change

Earlier we talked about the barriers to change; agreeing the problem, the actions, the owners, the timescales, then implementing the actions and achieving the desired outcomes, benefits and return on investment. We use a proven methodology known as Get to Great™ to overcome these barriers. Get to Great™ uses the following approach:

1.     Agreeing the problem

Get to Great™ uses a series of facilitated workshops supported by ‘best practice’ competency models.  Each competency model tackles a specific subject, for example sales performance or leadership, and breaks the subject down into about a dozen ‘chunks’, each with five levels of performance, making the diagnosis process simpler and more effective. Using the chosen model, the first part of the workshop allows stakeholders to define their own view of their organisations current and desired performance level, followed by facilitated debate to achieve consensus in each ‘chunk’.  The output is three-fold:

Firstly, a one page prioritised scorecard showing the consensus view of the current and desired performance levels. Secondly, notes that capture the reasons why you are where you are, for use in the second part of the workshop.  Finally, and most importantly, a group of people who agree what the problem is, and what ‘better’ looks like, which is the key to achieving effective and sustainable change. 

2.     Agreeing the actions, the owner and the timescales

The second part of the facilitated workshop focuses on producing action plans for the high priority areas identified in the scorecard, using the ‘reasons why’ to underpin the process of agreeing the actions. Each action plan is captured on one page, clearly defining the actions, owners and timescales. Most importantly, the owners ‘commit’ to the plans in front of their peers, helping to ensure they are implemented.

3.     Ensuring the actions are implemented

Having committed to the action plans, owners will receive support from agreed resources, both internal and external, as well as participating in scheduled monthly calls with the wider team, facilitated by us.  This ensures that any blockers are addressed with minimal delay.

4.     Measuring success, outcomes, benefits and return on investment

As previously mentioned, Get to Great™ uses a series of facilitated workshops to continually benchmarking progress against the competency levels in the chosen model, enabling organisations to measure success, outcomes, benefits and return on investment, typically five-fold or better.

Typical outcomes and benefits

Outcomes and benefits vary from model to model and fall into hard and soft areas.

In the area of sales performance, better processes and systems, and better equipped and trained sales people, led to improved sales effectiveness; typically accelerated revenues, improved margin, higher win rates and a lower cost of sale.  In one customer we were able to reduce time to revenue from seven months to four months with a team of 20 sales people, effectively giving them a 5 man-year improvement.  On the softer side, sales morale improves, as does communication, activity levels and attrition rates.

In terms of Leadership, the impact can be seen in both personal and organisational measures. Leaders can transform their team’s performance through improved decision making, delegation ad personal impact. This is turn generates clearer goals for teams, better staff motivation ad higher productivity. Results include better use of resources, faster project implementation, lower operational costs and better staff retention. All these have significant bottom line impact. A recent client project showed clear return on investment in direct cost savings, cross-selling improvements and higher staff utilisation.

Hopefully this short article will prove to be informative. If you want more help, please contact the author on +44(0)777 929 7401 or via email at chris@gettogreat.co.uk

Poachers, gamekeepers and that prized contract is up for renewal!

Background

It is a long established fact that sales people fall into (at least) two groups; ‘poachers’ and ‘gamekeepers’.  The ‘poachers’ win the big new contracts, and then the accounts are often handed over to ‘gamekeepers’ to manage - with the poacher going off to chase more new business.

The scenario works well - until the contract is up for renewal.  It is an industry acknowledged statistic that 70% of contracts are re-awarded to the incumbent; which means that 30% are lost to new suppliers.  It is also recognised that the longer a contract runs, the better chance there is of making money, so a renewal will move a contract to new levels of profitability. 

At the contract renewal stage, the incumbent supplier has to defend its position against teams of ‘poachers’ from competing suppliers, whilst depending upon the ‘gamekeeper’ to be the lead sales person.  Whilst the gamekeeper is making lots of assumptions (and we know what they do for you and me!), the poachers are out asking all the right questions.  The gamekeeper also has to do his day job of continuing to deliver service to the levels demanded by the SLA, agreed several years ago, whilst all the poacher has to do is concentrate on winning, with no accountability to the customer what so ever.  The result is an uneven battle for a valued contract, which results in a 30% win rate for the poacher.

So how do incumbent suppliers overcome this problem?  

There are a number of ways, some better than others:

Firstly, they could engage a ‘poacher’ for the duration of the bid – but this creates the issue of two sales people working one account.  It can also cause issues with the customer unless it is managed well.

Secondly, for the duration of the bid they could engage a senior Bid Manager with no previous experience of the customer.  This would overcome the danger of assumptions, whilst complementing and supporting the efforts of the ‘gamekeeper’, rather than competing.  This Bid Manager need not necessarily be from within the incumbent organisation, as excellent people are available on a freelance basis for a short or long as you require them.

A third approach, and the one recommended by the author, is a combination of the previous option and introducing a ‘health check’ of the existing service.  This is best achieved by engaging an independent third party several months prior to contract renewal.  By giving this third party a clear and opened remit to meet with key customer representatives in the account on your behalf, they can establish a clear view on the quality of service currently being provided.  This view should cover performance against SLA, relationship and contractual issues, plus other key information that will be vital in renewing this valued contract.  The Bid Manager and the ‘gamekeeper’ could then use this information to shape a sales campaign and a proposal that is fresh, imaginative and consultative, rather than assumptive and potentially dull.

Proof Point

This approach worked well for me with a major UK bank several years ago.  I was introduced to the account by one of two incumbent suppliers (they had a 40% share of the support contract), and promptly visited four key managers, armed only with a pen, an empty notepad and an open mind!  They told me about all their concerns; how we had failed, what we had to do to fix it, and how long we had to achieve it – three months.  I wrote to them all, told them what we intended to do, how and when by; and then set about ensuring we delivered, not selling to them until they agreed that we were back on track.  Eventually they came to the market with an Invitation to Tender (ITT), which I managed whilst the ‘gamekeeper’ concentrated on her job of managing the account and the customers day to day expectations.  After a long and tortuous process we won 100% of the business, knocking out our co-incumbent, and beating off an army of ‘poachers’ in the process.

In hindsight, we realised that as the incumbent we had stopped listening to the customer, communications had dried up, and we were at an impasse, which luckily we managed to break by adopting the approach outlined in this article.

Conclusions and Recommendations

It is often the case that customers don’t realise what a good job the incumbent is doing until they get a chance to review the service with a third party, and are often lured by the promises of ‘poachers’ with nothing to worry about other than winning.  But once a customer has been lured away and realises what he has bought, he will rarely admit his mistake and return to his original supplier.

By adopting this approach, suppliers will create a situation that combines the advantage gained from being the incumbent, an independent view of your performance, and a ‘poachers’ attitude to the bid to renew, thereby maximising your chances of winning.

If you want more help, please contact the author on +44(0)777 929 7401 or via email at chris@gettogreat.co.uk