When writing proposals, begin with the end in mind

I was recently working with a local client, doing some Deal Coaching to help them prepare to win a large opportunity. My client’s customer had recently finalised their Request For Proposal, and I’d been called in to help with the proposal and pitch in response.

“I’d usually just jump in and start writing,” one of the sales leaders said, “and see what comes out.”

I wasn’t surprised: I see this a lot. But it was a good opportunity to make the case for stepping back, thinking and planning, and, only then, writing with the end in mind.

Why not just start writing?

The key reason not to start without knowing where you are going is that it tends to be an inefficient use of time. With only a vague sense of where your key advantages or opportunities to create value might be, you’re likely to spend more time overall in writing, and produce a less impactful document. You tend to wander around somewhat aimlessly, making points here and there. Your thinking might not be consistent. Ideas won’t build upon each other as well. And you might lack the clarity and simplicity that really helps to “sell ideas”.

Business writing in general, and proposal writing in particular, is rarely a purely creative process. In creative writing, the process of “just jumping in and seeing where it goes” may well lead to a desirable outcome. In proposal writing it generally wastes time. “You think you’re saving time because you are immediately working, creating page after page,” an old sales manager once said, “But it is a false economy: you end up spending much more time on it.”

The other problem is that once you put effort into writing parts of the proposal, you become attached to them. Even if your previous work no longer has very much relevance to your current thinking, it is hard to let it go. This struggle links to a concept in Behavioural Economics called “LossAversion”, which I’ll summarise as “not wanting to waste (or lose) your previous investment of time and effort.” Because your mind does not want to let go of the work you’ve done, you try to shoe-horn it in someplace, often to the detriment of your ideas.

So what SHOULD you do?

The best way to invest your time at the start of the proposal writing process – aside from all the time engaging and influencing key stakeholders and other topics I’ve discussed before – is to *think*. Step back and consider how you are actually going to position yourself to win this business.

In our practice, we use specific tools to help our clients identify the Value Winners, Value Killers, and Value Sleeper that will power their pitch or proposal strategy. But no matter what methodology you use, even if you don’t use one*, the value of planning is significant.

One of the consulting firms with which I do work allocates 10% of every project to upfront planning. This means that, even before they get started on the work, they step back and really understand what they are trying to achieve. Another firm actually creates the end presentation they’d LIKE to give, then goes back to fill in the details and data that they go out and find. Both of these firms are much more effective in winning business than our typical clients.

Begin with the end in mind. If you start writing knowing where you are going, your output will be more powerful, more defined, and likely more compelling. Or, to quote my client, “I’d already be halfway done with the writing by now, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as this is going to be now. And I reckon I’ll finish it more quickly!”

Sales Manager toolkit:

Things to do to encourage your team to avoid the pitfalls of “jumping in”:

• ·         Challenge your team to identify the specific Winners, Killers and Sleepers (or whatever terminology you might use) before they start.
• ·         Structure a planning/brainstorming session, involving multiple people, as early as possible.
• ·         Once the key themes are identified, ask your team if each section of the document supports those themes, or should be discarded. 

Use your client's org chart to generate insight and new opportunities

I have been spending a lot of time lately with clients on the challenge of Opportunity Identification within both accounts and prospects. The challenge often boils down to “How do we identify interesting conversations with key account stakeholders that can result in eventual sales?” And, of course, how can we do this in a customer-centric way?

There are a number of strategies that I have putting in place at our accounts, but one consistent theme emerges across most of my client engagements: Org Chart Insight. Often salespeople use a client’s organisation chart to think about who might be involved in a decision. This is obviously important, and if you’re not doing this you need to be.

But true Org Chart Insight requires another step: it requires the salesperson to really consider each function within the org chart, and what they care about. If the sales team can genuinely put themselves in the shoes of each function within the client organisation, then they can generate insights as to how the selling organisation might be able to help.

Start by mapping out all of the functions in the organisation. This can be a trick, because often we don’t think beyond the one or two functions that we traditionally sell to. Try to get them all out. This might include Purchasing, Market Research, Sales, Distribution, Manufacturing, and more. These will vary by company (and, more broadly, by sector).  

Then step back and think about what a person in each function really cares about. Here’s where a lot of salespeople struggle: this is not about your product or service, or even what that role thinks about your product or service. To gain real insight you need to think about what the role really cares about on a day-to-day basis. Consider the following questions to inspire you:

•           How is someone in that role measured? What are their Key Performance Indicators?
•           In their annual review with their own manager, what data do they bring to prove their performance? What achievements would they point to?
•           What internal challenges do they face, day to day?
•           What key opportunities are they tasked with pursuing?
•           What big projects are ongoing within the function?

Notice that these issues are all about the client function and what they are trying to achieve. It is NOT about how they might use your solution. Also notice that you may need to take some educated guesses in some places. It is a good idea to socialise your thinking internally and externally to validate your first pass.

Once you get a sense of what matters to the various functions within the account, THEN we can try to map our products, solutions, capabilities, experiences, etc onto those issues. For each of the issues, metrics, and challenges that the contact faces, consider how your solutions might help the function address them. The ideas might be very different from how you help your typical buying within an account – that is part of what makes this process insightful. Generate as many ideas as you can – these are the potential conversations that might create value, and generate sales. 

Use your analysis to translate your ideas and solutions into a language that reflect what each function cares about. If you can’t translate your ideas into something that matters, you’ll likely destroy value if you go in to talk to them. At the very least, you are likely to waste their time!

We will talk more in the future about how to approach individuals and how to start those conversations, but if you use Org Chart Insight you will have more, and better, opportunities to discuss with your accounts!

What should you do

• Map out your account's Org Chart. Ask your existing account contacts for information, though sometimes you have to start with educated guesses.
• For each function in the Org Chart, consider what they really care about. This will get harder the further you get from the functions that you typically sell into.
• Challenge your sales team with the questions above. Make sure they are really thinking about what matters to their account.
• Get the language right. Use the Org Chart Insights to coach your team to get the positioning right: it’s all about the account.  

Coming soon: Quick dip research about sales manager coaching in Australia

A lot of client conversations in the past week or so have ended up coming back to the role of the sales manager in creating change within a sales force. That’s a good thing: the role of the sales manager is absolutely critical to the process. They will need to walk the talk, reinforce new ideas, role-model behaviours, celebrate early wins, translate the ideas to make them relevant to their team, etc. But the most important thing is that they will need to be coaching their team members.

Because of the criticality of the role of the sales manager in driving sales results, as well as in building sales capability, through coaching, I am going to launch a piece of small scale research into current practice in Australia. I want to get a sense of what is happening out there, how sales managers are delivering coaching, how sales people are receiving it, and how organisations are supporting it.

At this point, it will be small scale, as I want to be able to bring results to share with the Australian sales community as soon as possible. It is likely that I’ll launch periodic small-scale research to follow-up on specific areas that come out of our initial quick dip.

I’ll be posting information soon about how to participate in the research, with both a qualitative and quantitative component.

SURVEY LINK: 

Here's a link to the quantitative survey. It is a VERY short survey that should take less than 5 minutes to complete. 

This is ONLY for business-to-business salespeople who have received coaching from their Sales Manager. 

http://svy.mk/11arMqj

Feel free to share this link with your peers, colleagues and friends! 

Building a proactive salesforce

A few years ago we were entering a large engagement for a business process outsourcing company. As part of the engagement, we did a number of interviews with their customers, key contacts in significant accounts. One of the interviews revealed a very interesting insight about our account, but also about what is expected of the modern supplier (or “trusted advisor” or whatever).

“They are terrific,” our account’s customer said, “Whatever I ask them to do, they do it flawlessly.” This is going well, I thought to myself. Clearly, our account is a great and much-loved supplier to this company. He had more to say, though.

“But, you know,“ he added, after I had given him some silence in which to think further about the situation, “in the seven years we’ve been working with them, they have never brought a new idea to me. By now, they know our processes better than I do. So they should be able to point out where I could do things better, more cheaply, etc. They haven’t done that.”

What started out as a very complimentary comment, one that you’d be tempted to put on your website as a reference, ended up as a consistent theme in our consulting work: just doing good work is not enough.

Today’s customers expect a supplier to be proactive, evaluating their business and coming up with ideas for how to improve it. And whether you call it being proactive, challenging, “creativating”, or any other term, that result is the same: if you don’t bring new ideas to your accounts, you’re letting them down.

Being proactive can be a little bit tricky, though. It is critical to maintain your core customer-centric sales philosophy: it should be about *them* and not about you. Any ideas should be focused on solving one of their business challenges, taking advantage of their opportunity, etc. To be successful, you must not be pushing your own product or your own agenda.

Proactivity comes naturally to some salespeople, but it can also be developed. Creating a structure can be useful, encouraging salespeople to be proactive, and even creative, in a structured and organised way. I’ve discussed in other blog posts specific tools that facilitate creative idea generation, and I’m sure I will in future posts as well. So, for now, we’ll those tools aside.

So what should YOU do?

How do you build a proactive sales team? Here’s a few ideas that I’ve seen work well.

•      If you have regular meetings with your existing accounts, include one agenda item that is outside the current project or process. Even if the meeting is a progress meeting, you can add one point at the end of the discussion that is focused on “Additional ideas” or similar. One client suggests that each quarterly review meeting must include at least one new business idea.
•      Schedule a regular meeting that is NOT about current work. One of our accounts requires its sales team to schedule one “Agendaless Meeting” per year. This doesn’t mean that there is no preparation, of course. But it signals to the account that the conversation is wide open, new ideas, and new opportunities. During the meeting, try to defer discussions about current work until the regular meetings.
•      Make sure that the internal team is meeting periodically, and include as many parts of the organisation as possible. Brainstorming with account teams is a great idea, and you will often find that your own team brings up ideas that you’ve not thought of for the account. Involve as many people who touch the account as possible, as they are more likely to bring new ideas. One of our office product accounts created a whole new business opportunity when a service person, who had been onsite to fix a hardware problem, noticed client personnel going through a tortuous series of steps to complete a process. It turned into a new service, and relieved a lot of pain of which the organisation wasn’t even aware.
•      Share new ideas internally. Those of you that know me know that I am not a fan of generic ideas or scripted solutions for customers. However, there is a lot to be learnt from good ideas that succeed at other accounts, and good ideas should be leveraged. When you bring the idea to another account, though, don’t forget to tailor it!

Encouraging a salesperson to be proactive can be tricky. As I said before, some just do it naturally. But with a bit of coaching and a bit of structure, even those who do not can start be a proactive, value adding partner to their accounts.

Does anyone else have ideas for how to increase proactivity – particularly in bringing new business ideas to accounts – in your sales team? 

Avoid generic sales presentations

Presentations. Oh dear. So often sales presentations stumble severely, focusing too much on the supplier and not enough on the customer.

I’ve seen numerous examples of companies forcing their sales teams to use the same presentation template for all of their accounts. At the heart of the concept is a good idea: customers *should* have a consistent experience of dealing with your organisation. There *should* be a distinct feel to your team, as differentiated from your competition.

However, what tends to happen is these good intentions disintegrate into a generic, self-oriented document that gives little thought to the specific needs of the actual client in question.

Last week I had an interesting conversation with one of our clients, who wanted to make sure that his salespeople were presenting solutions in a consistent way to all of their accounts. This makes some sense, of course. But the execution was terrible, and I’ve seen this before.

The *required*presentation deck ran something like:

• A cover page featuring their branding, their logo, their colours, and a small mention of the client
• Their business, their background, and where they are based
• A history of the brand, including the evolution of the logo (!)
• A map showing their sales offices around the world
• A map showing their production facilities around the world
• A photograph of their heritage-listed corporate headquarters building
• Etc…

In this standard deck, it was at least 8 pages before it got to the key business issues facing the account. Even worse, the client had been running training programmes to make sure that everyone delivered the first 8 pages exactly the same way!

While consistency is clearly important, you need to make sure that your salespeople are starting with the situation from the *customer* perspective. This is especially true if you have senior people in the audience. In the example above, you will have lost your senior attendees well before you even got close to the value that you can bring to them.

To be successful, start with the situation, and the business impact it creates. If your audience wants to talk about you – and they probably don’t – you can include your history, locations and a photo of your offices in the Appendix, in case it comes up.

Oh – and I’ll comment on this specific issue in later posts – you also need to *trust* (and upskill!) your sales team enough that they don’t need a script. It is possible to be both customer-centric AND consistent to the brand, but you need your team to be capable of executing.

So what should YOU do? 

• Make sure that all presentations, proposals, agendas, etc. start with the customer issue, not your organisation. From *their* perspective, what is the issue? Why should *they* care?
• Push your sales team to tailor the standard content to address the specific needs that have come up in conversations and research to date. If parts of the standard discussion aren’t relevant, allow your teams to not over them. 
• Coach your teams to focus on the things that really matter to the *account*, not to you. 
• Practice the core components and elements of the sales presentation so that it feels natural, and feels like something that you would say. You shouldn't be reciting a script! 

Create competitive advantage by splitting one buying criterion into TWO criteria

Recently I was doing a deal coaching session with a global market research company, strategising around a current opportunity for them. It was a competitive situation, where they were hoping to win the customer's business in a tight field of three other agencies. We frequently work with our accounts to build strategies to help them win important deals in situations like these.

In competitive situations, it is important to understand exactly the criteria that your prospect is going to use to evaluate the options. This may sound obvious, but it requires having actual conversations with the account; don’t assume you know what they are thinking. 

In this specific case, an interesting situation arose. We were looking at one specific buying criterion that was very important to the account, but where there was little difference between the competing suppliers. No one supplier could deliver that area more effectively than the others.

However, as I probed a bit, we discovered that, while it was true that all competitors were mostly equal, there was a small part of the process where our account had a distinct advantage. This sub-process would deliver better and more reliable results from the research, but it was an issue that the customer did not think of as a separate component.

For instance (and this is a made-up example) let’s say that one key buying criterion was the ability to Source Research Participants that matched the profile of the research. The customer felt that all the suppliers could do this effectively. However, let’s say that our account has developed a proprietary step in the process of finding participants that tends to yield participants that both match the profile AND are likely to Complete all of the Steps required by the research. In terms of Sourcing, there was no advantage, but in terms of “Completion” there was. The problem was their customer didn't think of that as a separate issue, and they lumped it all into Sourcing.

So we helped out our account to create a strategy for how they would split the issue into two criteria. They would acknowledge that all players in the field were best practice on Sourcing. But then they would emphasise Completion as a critical sub-component of that process, demonstrating both how important it is and proof of their expertise. They emphasised that Completion should be considered as a separate issue, not rolled up into Sourcing. Importantly, they emphasised not just their proprietary capabilities, but the business impact that would result – in this case better and more reliable results over the long term.

By splitting the one issue into two issues, they effectively introduced a new consideration in the buying process, one that was “hidden” within something that the customer was already asking for. This yielded a significant competitive advantage, even though the capabilities of the competitors were very similar.

What should YOU do?

•  -  Coach your teams to make sure that they really understand the criteria that your customer will be using. Validate that they are not just using assumptions, past experience or gut feel, but are actually having conversations with key contacts at the account.
•     Even where there seems to be no real competitive advantage, dig deeper to see if there is some sub-issue that you can deliver better than the competition.
•     Where there is competitive parity, split criteria into two issues, graciously acknowledging the parity in one of them, but emphasising a true competitive advantage and customer benefit in the other.

Building pain, before jumping to gain, when selling

I spent last week with one of our clients (I wish I could tell you who!), a business-to-business sales organisation that relies heavily on cold-calling (or at least lukewarm calling) as the front end of their engagement strategy.  I’m not here to comment on the merits or pitfalls of cold-calling. But my time with them did remind me of some key ideas that lead to successful selling, whether over the phone or face-to-face, whether transactionally or consultatively.

Organisations in this situation, like our client, often spend a lot of time and energy trying to hone the perfect pitch. In the old days, this often meant training the team to list off benefits of your solution, and to educate accounts as to why your solution was the best. In other words, lots of telling. If your key approach rests on these issues, stop here. You’ll need to reorganise your thinking to focus on your account, not you.

More modern organisations focus on identifying a potential client’s key Pain Points (or similar terminology), and then defining a way to explain how their product or service exactly addresses those. This is a huge step in the right direction – being customer-focused – and it was the situation we found at our client.

But this refinement still misses the mark for a successful customer-centric sales methodology: it is still fundamentally telling them about us. Ideally, sales people need to get their customers talking, and thinking, about their business, their needs, how they could change or revolutionise their process, etc. Even if you’ve been told to “challenge” your accounts, you need to get them to talk, to internalise, and to challenge their assumptions. You'll get there through questioning. 

Last week we focused on Pain Questions as a big part of the missing solution.  Sales teams were already asking about Pain Points, but then they jumped right into telling the account about their solutions. Anyone who’s ever been sold to by a persistent, overly assumptive sales person can tell you that this kind of telling is rarely successful.  

Pain Questions dig into the implications of the current situation, before moving on to the Gain or reward of fixing it. This can often help to build discomfort around the current situation by uncovering – and building – the consequences of not acting. This is done by asking questions, not by telling them, in order to help amplify the current situation. Use questions like, “What are the implications of that?” “How often does that happen?” “What’s the customer experience like in those situations?” etc.

We found, almost immediately, that the impact and effectiveness of the calls improved. Instead of telling the account why their solution was better, they listened to the specific issues facing the person on the phone, they asked questions that probed and built up the situation, and then they tailored future comments to address the specific issues and pains that they had just magnified.

So the key here is to make sure that selling organisations are digging deeper to uncover the key issues and the true implications behind them. Often, the really good question is the follow-up question. For instance:

Sales: “You mentioned that invoicing is an issue, how often are you finding that there are invoicing errors?”

Client: “About 10% of the time.”

Sales: “OK. And what is the experience, from a customer perspective, when that happens?”

The first question was a good one, and revealed useful information that can be used to help sell in our solutions. But the second one can really start to build pain – in this case strategic pain - for the account.

So what should you do with your team?

• -    Listen in to their calls to see your team is asking about the implications, costs, or consequences of the current situation, as opposed to just the existence or non-existence of certain situations. Coach them to ask questions and dig more deeply before jumping to the solution.
• -   At your next team meeting, get people to think about what questions might build pain at their contacts, instead of just checking to see if it is there. If they can pause long enough to build pain, their solutions will be much more intriguing.