Winning Proposals
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discussion of tactics and a tool to help professional service or any firm to write a great proposal that give the client what they want, and wins the business.
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Winning Proposals
- 2. My Background • BA Economics Kenyon College • 20 years I.T. consulting sales & management – Founder Micro-Ingenuity Inc. – Valinor – Microsoft Solution Provider – Red Sky Interactive (Pre-Sales Dir.) – CIO magazine’s Executive Council – B2B Sales Consultant/ Contract Sales – Beacon Business Coaching 2
- 3. Proposals – Perennial Pain Point 3
- 5. The Situation • Sales Opportunities – Unqualified – Irresistible • Your prospect or contact – Under-educated and/or – Under-authorized and/or – Under-funded • You and your team – Under-resourced – Rushed – Insufficient information – Unknown expectations – Proposal process, standards and tools? 5
- 6. Loss Scenarios • Awarded to incumbent vendor • Not the right solution • Surprise decision maker • Over budget • Project cancelled or postponed 6
- 7. Conditions for a Win 7 • Objective qualification • True DM and DM process known • Proposal addresses business objectives • Know and can influence project details, scope • Know and can influence vendor selection criteria • Know and can influence budget • Others?
- 8. How To Turn Things Around? 8 PPU
- 9. 9
- 10. Key Elements of the Pre-Proposal Understanding Letter • Request for a meeting to discuss in detail. • Definition of success in business terms. • Items needing clarification. • Key deliverables. • Client inputs & responsibilities. • Target start date & timetable. • Cost/fees estimation & payment terms. • Proposal audience, format, length & date. 10
- 11. Pre-Proposal Understanding Win Conditions Addressed Request for meeting to discuss in detail. Definition of success in business terms Items Needing Clarification Key Deliverables Client inputs & responsibilities Target start date & timetable Cost/fees estimation & payment terms Proposal audience, format, length & delivery date 11 Win Conditions Objective Qualification Know and can influence budget True DM and DM process known Know and can influence project details Incumbent advantage revealed/neutralized Know and can influence vendor selection criteria Proposal addresses business objectives Costs meet client expectations
- 12. Other Gains 1. Make an informed decision whether or not to propose. 2. Demonstrates your professionalism and judgment. 3. Strengthens your consultative relationship with the prospect. 4. Gives strong indication of how it will be to work with you and your company. 12
- 13. PPU Letter Annotated Template 13
- 14. • Please complete the sheet – Request complimentary coaching session – Request to receive the PPU letter template and this PPT • Why the Golf Balls??? • DOOR PRIZE!! • Please contact me with questions, thanks! Wrap Up 14 Steve Rovniak Beacon Business Coaching 617-970-7720 www.beaconbusinesscoaching.com
Editor's Notes
- Start by collecting business cards.
- I get asked about proposal strategy and process a lot, and I talk, write and coach about it a lot because it is a common subject of frustration. It’s one the pain points in your industry, the small IT consulting firm. It is costly in hard dollars, and also in opportunity costs of time -- your team’s and especially yours. Disappointment and the work of proposals can take other tolls on your business, especially morale and passion for success. You cannot have that. Companies that are successful, with healthy earnings are good at this, and they win a high percentage of what they go after. There’s a lot to know about achieving this. Today we are going to focus on 1 particular point in the sales process. So let’s look at that first.
- Different terminology and interpretations notwithstanding, the high level b2b sales process essentially looks like this. -You have your unique selling proposition, and your target audience clearly defined -Your marketing engine gets this message out to the right people in the right formats and channels so that it generates leads -There is investigation, information gathering, solution engineering here -The proposal stage is the document or any form of a offer to provide goods and services in exchange for payment. The stage immediately following that would be working to gain confirmation from the client on selection of your firm for the project as you have proposed it. Of course there is Delivery, during which and after, you and your account reps must be - Listening and building relationships you can leverage into additional business. This is a critical skill for a business like yours. - And this feeds back into opportunities to which you can apply to the same process. (A+) One of my realizations after 20 years of doing this, and especially the last 8 years or so, is that great companies need execute with excellence across every one of these stages. It has to because of the dependencies. If you don’t have a solid USP, you will not generate good leads, if you do not investigate properly, you will not create compelling, winning proposals. Today I want to unpack what defines excellence at one particular point, the point of transition between the investigation and when you actually build your proposal. I refer to it as Pre-proposal Understanding. It is right here (click)
- OK, let’s start by looking at the situation you typically find your company in when evaluating a new business opportunity. Is this common for you? I have seen these for years, and I think some of this has increased as companies are less stable, less transparent to vendors, certainly less risk averse.
- Let’s look at the result we are trying to avoid – losing the opportunity. The reason behind a loss is rarely that you got beaten fair and square on price, solution, credentials, etc. Business isn’t that neat and tidy. There is always a story behind the decision, stories that fall into a short list of categories. Do these sound right to you. Are there others? When you have experienced one of these proposal loss scenarios, you should be able to look back at the process leading up and determine where you could have done things differently.
- In your world here are conditions I have seen for a very high proposal win percentage. How do you turn things from our loss scenario into these win conditions? How do you maximize the factors working in your favor – the WIN CONDITIONS Qualification – several dimensions Match to your firm, Client Readiness, Client responsiveness, Budget True decision maker and decision making process – this is a big one. They are all big. Sometime your contact at a company will represent themselves as the decision maker, or you can jump to that conclusion. The win condition is knowing in advance who is the ultimate decision maker or makers, other key influencers, and what they care about. And also the decision making process, Proposal addresses business objectives – goes hand in hand with the previous. Today more than ever, all buyers are being held accountable to overarching corporate goals and objectives, and tying their decisions to them in a clear way. So, what is being talked about in the C-Suite? Quick example, say you are proposing business with a hospital. Will your solution connect in any way to patient safety? Cost controls? Retention of good nurses? Well, it better. Know and can influence project details, scope – I once heard someone say “If you control the specs, you win the business” Know and can influence vendor selection criteria – at a minimum can you reveal the incumbent’s identity and their advantages? Know and can influence budget – influence in the form of educating your client about tradeoffs, phasing options. Do any others come to mind for you? Okay, makes sense, but how do you turn the typical situation of working from a disadvantage in many areas, to one where I have maximized these “Win Conditions”?
- Answer: Remember the PPU from earlier, the gold star between Investigate and Propose in the sales process? I am a strong proponent of what I call a Pre-proposal Understanding process with the client prior to your decision to pursue the opportunity, and invest the work to complete a good proposal. I have used a tool or device that helps me with this and sets myself and my firm up for success from the beginning. It’s a simple document in letter or memo form that I call the Pre-Proposal Understanding Letter. Very simple but powerful if the key ingredients are there. You can see that I have addressed this to an individual, or you can cc: committee members, and the subject is Pre-proposal confirmation, and items to discuss. Then the text states the purpose of the communication, and a clear call to action, which is to contact me to discuss or schedule a meeting. I prefer the meeting whenever possible. Now, the letter itself isn’t the key to riches. But it is a catalyst for a process that I have seen unlock huge success over and over again.
- I started using this approach at Red Sky Interactive where I led team-based proposals for 6 and 7 figure projects for Fortune 1000 companies such as Kodak and Philips-van Heusen, which were won over companies like Razorfish and Sapient. The same approach helped the CIO magazine’s fledgling Executive Council to step around Gartner and enroll 500 CIOs in an advisory service and achieve profitability in the 2nd year. And I credit it in large part to the discipline of this approach. And it works for small projects at smaller clients as well. Okay, let’s look at other key ingredients in the Proposal Understanding Letter, and how you can use it to give your firm an upper hand on the competition.
- The request for dedicated time from the client representative or representatives is the most important piece, really. If they can’t give you that, then it speaks to qualification and how it would be to work with them. Definition of Success in Business terms. And its in their terms. A good way to get at this also is to ask the client to explain how the CEO of the company might express this. Items needing clarification is somewhat self-explanatory, but this is an opportunity to absorb the details about what they are trying to accomplish so that you can speak and write in these terms moving forward. Key deliverables. Not a full list of all the deliverables as defined by your process. Client inputs and responsibilities – a great time to begin educating the client about what they will need to do to ensure success, gauge the likelihood for compliance, which goes to qualification, and tease out problem areas such as access to specific facilities or people. These may affect the scope and schedule. Target start date and timetable – gauge their commitment to move forward after proposals are received, and tease out potential delays. Fee estimate and payment terms. If possible, at least throw out a wide range to check for sticker shock, or get them to reveal what’s been discussed internally. This can lead to very beneficial discussion around things like scope, phasing and trade-offs, which can also position you as that knowledgeable trusted advisor. Proposal audience, format, length and delivery date. You may be able to buy some extra time here if you need it, and also extract information about who to write for – in other words who are the real decision makers?
- So here are those Win Conditions we saw earlier. And here are the Elements of the Preproposal Understanding letter I just talked about. I like all my tools to be flexible and adaptable. I would encourage you to tailor these to your business and experiences so far. Make sure that your Win Conditions are all addressed in your PPU letter contents. Which I have done here using color coding.
- Here are some other huge benefits of this process. Shows them you are well organized, smart, and judicious with your time and theirs.
- I have an annotated template version of this PPU letter that I am happy to share with you upon request. Let me know using the sheet in front of you and I will send it directly to you.
- Why did I set out golf balls for you? Well not everybody golfs certainly but golf is one of the ultimate leisure activities and therefore represents leisure to most people. I suspect that one of the reasons you own a business is that you wanted to be able to get control of your time, and be able to enjoy running the company, work hard when necessary, provide for your family, college retirement, but also have time and money for the finer things in life. Ultimately that is what I set out to do as a business coach,: to help business owners earn more money for themselves, and get their lives back, be it for golf, or whatever. If this sounds interesting to you, I am happy to sit down with you for a complementary coaching session. Here is what we are going to do: - Review your financial performance and identify hidden areas of profit in your business. - Look at your existing sales process, and find quick and easy ways to apply this proposal framework and other tools to immediately improve conversion rates You will come away from this session with a plan to dramatically grow your revenue, whether you decide to work with me or not. Door prize