Sant's Messages that Matter

Responding to Web-based RFPs

2010-11-01T10:50:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you do everything right but it all comes out wrong. You write a fabulous proposal and you still lose. True, it’s not fair.

That’s our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Responding to Web-based RFPs

A proposal specialist at a major health care company recently sent me a copy of an RFI (request for information) his team has to fill out. It’s a Web-based form that’s required of all health care companies who want to bid for contracts from any of the dozens of companies who have agreed to use this thing. Called eVALUE8, which is too cutesy to be tolerated in a license plate much less a business document, it’s basically a big checklist.

The document starts out, “Members of the National Business Coalition on Health (NBCH) and Watson Wyatt (WW) eValue8 group have embraced a common set of core health plan performance expectations and have worked collaboratively to develop the 2006 NBCH/WW eValue8 Request for Information (RFI).” Just reading that opening sentence, you know we’re in trouble. The sentence is 40 words long, contains three acronyms, not counting the “eValue8” thing, and uses some pretty bizarre business clichés. And how about the weird syntax? The members claim they have “embraced” a “set of core…expectations.” I’d probably buy a ticket just to watch them do that.

Anyway, lots of big companies are involved in this thing, so healthcare companies feel like they’re bullied into filling it out. It consists of page after page of tiny fields where you enter all kinds of obscure data: the percentage of your practitioners who work in a staff model or in a captivated multispecialty group, or in a captivated IPA, whatever that is. Or the number of plan members you have enrolled in a commercial HMO/POS arrangement, or in a commercial PPO, the total number of Medicare members, and so on. It goes on this way for page after page, little boxes and lots of numbers. All in all, it’s over 150 pages long!
If nothing else would do it, filling out eValue8 would make you eager to see healthcare reform in this country.

What about you? Are you getting similar RFPs and RFIs in your business? What should you do with them?

One tempting answer is to pitch them in the trash. Requiring vendors to fill out reams of data and complete spreadsheets on pricing is a lousy way to buy anything. I've always believed that this kind of granular RFI or RFP really gets in the way of making an intelligent buying decision. And there are a couple of sneaky aspects to them that make them even less palatable.

First, a checklist RFP is based on the assumption that what you and everybody else in your industry offers is a commodity. For these buyers, value has no value. They deny the relevance or importance of any value-added components, any differentiators, and any distinctions in service delivery models. They refuse to acknowledge that prior experience is a good thing. Typically, all they want is pricing data and confirmation of technical specs. With the increased power procurement groups have grabbed during the recession, we're seeing a lot more RFPs that are written this way.

Second, this kind of RFP is often written by a consultant or some other third party.
Unfortunately, it’s in the consultant’s self-interest to make the buying process as complex as possible and to minimize the meaningful differences among vendors. The consultants prefer to keep the vendors at arm’s length from the actual customer and to focus the customer’s attention mainly on the consultant’s ability to manipulate a huge amount of data. That’s why the RFPs they issue are so complex, why they give you so little room to respond, and why they focus on technical details for the most part.

So… back to our question. What do you do with this kind of RFP? Well, it really might be in your best interest to refuse to respond to them. That decision depends on a number of factors, but the volume of effort involved in responding compared to the probability of winning profitable work makes them pretty unattractive.

This is particularly true if you have received the RFP from a client with whom you’ve had no previous contact. Statistically, your chances of winning any business in that situation—you’ve never talked to them, the RFP arrives out of the blue, and it gives you no room to make a persuasive business case—is less than 1 in 20.

It’s also possible you’re being used. Maybe the company issuing the RFP already knows who they want to hire, but they have to get three other bids. Or maybe they want to beat up their current supplier on price. Any way you look at it, it’s not a very good investment of your time, is it?

But let’s suppose you have to respond to it for whatever reason. Is there any way to make your proposal stand out a bit?

Well, first of all, if there are any areas of the RFP where you are allowed to enter free-form text, make sure you write as persuasively as possible. Second, write a well-structured, persuasive executive summary and use it as the covering e-mail when you submit your completed RFP on line. Maybe nobody will read it, but it’s not that much extra work and it might help. Third, if you make it past the first stage of reviews, seek a face-to-face meeting with the client and develop an absolute killer proposal presentation, one that emphasizes your understanding of the client’s needs, the value you can deliver and the differentiators that set you apart.

I hope these form-based RFPs are a passing fad, because it doesn’t seem to me they serve the interests of either the buyers or the sellers.

One bit of good news in all this is the fact that Sant Suite can automate your response to forms, even if they’re in spreadsheets or on the Web. At least that way you’re spending a lot less time on them! You can see an interactive, Web-based demo of how it works at our site, santcorp.com.

Paper or Digital

2010-10-25T10:48:00.000-05:00

groceries: paper or plastic? I even did research on the Web to figure out which was the right choice. Talk about confusing! I finally just gave up and now I bring my own—cloth, thank you.

But there’s another choice we face with our proposals: paper or digital? We know which is greener. But which is more effective?

That’s our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Paper or Digital

Would you prefer to submit your proposal as a printed document or as a digital file? Perhaps more important, which format do your prospects prefer?

We're at a flex point in proposal writing, I think. Traditional methods have involved writing a document, printing it out, binding it and putting it between nice looking covers, and then delivering it—usually multiple copies—to the prospect.

Many RFPs still specify that you must submit hard copies. State and local government agencies often require a paper submission.

But increasingly, RFPs call for digital submissions. At the simplest level, they may require that you submit your document via e-mail or that you upload it to a Web site. At a more complex level, they may require you to fill out Web-based forms.

I believe that at some point in the next few years, proposals will be true digital documents—more like Web sites than Word docs. They will feature embedded video clips, hyperlinks, search capabilities, and other functionality that will make them interesting and easier to use. That kind of development is inevitable, I believe. But will it be a good thing? I honestly don't know.

Each of these modes of delivery has advantages and weaknesses.

Traditional paper-based proposals have the familiar form factor that all paper-based documents have. They're easy to skim, easy to flip back and forth in and easy to score. You can write notes in the margins, you can fold down the corner when you see something interesting, and you can underline or highlight stuff that you want to remember.

On the other hand, with paper-based proposals, a lot of trees have to die. Right now I have a single copy of a proposal written to the state of New York, which required paper-based submissions. The proposal consists of three volumes. Each volume contains over 500 pages of text. Each volume is bound in an elaborate three-ring binder, and each binder is housed in a slip case cover. This proposal is so big; I had to clear an area of my desk off just to house it. Reading it is pretty much a nightmare. And how much do you think it cost—both in terms of dollars and carbon footprint—to deliver multiple copies of this thing to Albany?

Digital proposals save paper, save transportation costs, and can be delivered to the prospect almost instantaneously. There's no need to make multiple copies, because the prospect can simply forward your digital version to whomever needs to see it. You're probably creating the document digitally; using Microsoft Word, so delivering it digitally eliminates an extra step in production.

But digital documents can be difficult to work with. If the proposal has been saved as a .PDF file, which it probably should be, the reader will have extreme difficulty annotating it. Skimming digital documents can be very difficult, too. And when you deliver a document in native Word format, its appearance can change (and never for the better) if the recipient has the Normal template set to something unusual. In fact, you may have problems delivering the document if the client is using an older version of Word (accepting .doc files) and you're producing your proposal in a newer version (such as a .docx file).

The next generation of digital delivery sounds pretty exciting. The ability to embed video, to create hot links to Web sites outside the proposal, and the opportunity to use advanced search technology, hyperlinks, and a more creative interface all sound pretty cool.

But there are a whole host of issues associated with the use of technology that will have to be addressed. In the public sector, it's unlikely that such submissions will be accepted for a long, long time, because they usually require the least technically advanced mode of delivery—in part to keep the playing field level and in part because that's all they can handle. Even if you're dealing with a technically sophisticated clientele, we've all had problems from time to time getting a video to open, a photograph to display, or a page to load properly. What happens if your evaluator has similar problems? Do they simply mark your submission noncompliant and move on to the next one?

What do you prefer? Would you rather produce a paper-based document or do you prefer to submit via e-mail? Or are you excited about the prospect of creating a true Web-based submission?

In the meantime, you know that whatever the future holds in terms of delivery, our tools will simplify the process. From our early days, when we first generated proposals in Word, WordPerfect, and AmiPro, until our latest versions when we can build them from components in multiple media and deliver them the same way, we have tried to take the hard work out of formatting and make your deliverables as crisp, professional, and consistent as possible.

Keeping Score

2010-10-19T10:42:00.003-05:00

The premise of open book management is that employees will make better decisions if they understand how those decisions affect profitability. In The Great Game of Business, Jack Stack argues that workers need to know what the measures of success are, should be expected to improve the numbers by taking action in their own area of responsibility, and should have a direct stake in success or failure.

It all makes sense, yet surprisingly enough many companies have no idea what their win rate is, have no idea how long it takes on average to close a deal, and don't know what their best source of leads is. If you're not tracking that stuff, you're playing shortstop with a blindfold on.

Metrics matter. That’s our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Keeping Score

For years we have claimed that our proposal automation tools increase effectiveness and improve efficiency. A recent survey of several hundred Sant clients shows that those claims were completely justified. On average, our clients' win rate improved by 33% and they reduced the time required to create a proposal an average of 42%.

Unfortunately, there were quite a few clients who were unable to participate in the survey. Why? Because they had never measured their win rate before, so they had nothing to compare it to. And they had never tracked how much time goes into creating a proposal, so they didn't know how much time they were saving.

If you want to improve your proposal process, if you want it to produce more wins and spend less time and money along the way, you have to track what you’re doing and measure the results. That’s a basic principle underlying all continuous improvement methodologies, and it applies to the proposal operation as much as it does to the factory floor. Likewise, unless proposal writers and managers know how they're doing, they won't see the need to get better. If nobody is tracking my batting average, why would I bother to take hitting practice?

One of the first steps an organization needs to take is to decide what it is they want to measure. Which measurements are truly meaningful? "Win ratio” is the obvious first answer that comes to mind, but we all know from the experience of the recent recession that win ratios can be very misleading. If you won 30% of the deals in 2008, when the economy was still pretty healthy, but only 26% last year, after it had really tanked, does that mean you had a terrible year? In reality, you might be having a terrific year in spite of the small drop in win ratio. It’s possible that because of the recession, everybody else is doing much worse.

Or, to give another reason why it’s risky to use win ratios as the only metric, what if you’re winning all of the small opportunities and none of the large ones? In that case, your win ratio would be high but the average revenue generated per proposal would be low. If you supplement win ratio tracking by measuring the percentage of dollars won compared to the total amount for which you bid, you might get an idea of how well you did overall.

Other factors might include the ratio of new business won from new opportunities compared to new business won from existing clients. If you have a high renewal rate but are struggling to win new business, that doesn't bode well for your market share over the long term.

Deciding what to measure is not necessarily as easy or intuitive as it might initially appear, but it is the first vital step.

The next step is to gather a baseline of data. After all, if you don’t know where you are, it’s pretty hard to figure out if you’re moving in the right direction. In organizations where the proposal effort is centralized, or where there are controls placed on proposals so that none of them are issued without being reviewed by legal, finance, or senior management, it's a fairly straightforward matter to start tracking results. But in organizations where sales people are able to submit proposals without any further review or approval, tracking the actual win ratio may require a crystal ball or a Ouija board.

The final step is to develop a process for tracking results going forward. Assuming that you have tweaked the system in some way, you will want to know if that tweak has improved your win ratio or reduced the time required to finish a proposal. But unless you have a systematic way of gathering the data, you'll never know for sure what's working and what isn't.

Once you have the three basics covered—you know what to measure, you have a baseline to compare it to, and you have a systematic way of capturing the data—you’re ready to start managing based on the numbers.

At Sant, we believe in measuring results. But why wouldn't we—our results have been terrific. We're happy to share references and case studies to show you just how good they've been. And you can see an interactive, Web-based demo of our software in action on our site, santcorp.com.

Lessons Lost

2010-06-23T08:21:00.001-05:00

You often hear people saying that they want to capture the “lessons learned” from an important project, such as a major proposal.

My question is what do they do with those lessons after they capture them? Because they sure seem to disappear pretty quickly, given the number of proposals that repeat the same mistakes again and again.

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Lessons Lost

Last fall I worked with a company that was in a pretty desperate situation. They hadn't won a single bid for over a year. They had survived on some large projects that generated cash, but those were winding down. If they didn't win a major opportunity—and soon—they would be forced to lay off hundreds of employees.

They had an opportunity to respond to an RFP for a huge engineering project, something that was perfect for them. They asked me to help, because they saw it as a must-win situation and somebody in their management group thought my methods might work.

I began by asking for certain kinds of content and insights into the engineering project and the government agency that was funding it that they hadn't gathered. When I arrived on site, I led a series of workshops to create client-centered and persuasive responses to each of the 20 major "questions" or topical areas in the RFP. And when we got to the section on personnel, I asked them to throw out their traditional resumes, which were long and boring, and write them in a completely different way.

For some contributors, the process was invigorating. They enjoyed doing things in a new way. For others, the process was more painful. But at the end of the process, they had a response to the RFP that was persuasive, value oriented, and client centered. And a few months later, they learned that they had won.

That was good news, obviously, and I took a large measure of pride in having helped them. But since then, I have learned that they have not incorporated a single thing we did into their standard processes. We found that doing things differently, following a different process, putting the emphasis on different areas of content, resulted in a win. You might even call those "lessons learned". But none of them were preserved. Instead, they have gone back to doing things the same old way—the way that had failed to win a single deal for over a year.

This is an extreme example, but one that's nevertheless common. In proposal operations, in spite of lip service to the contrary, lessons learned are quite often lessons lost. If you are a habitual reader of Dilbert, as I am, you may be cynical enough to simply accept the notion that senior managers would completely disregard lessons learned that produced hundreds of millions of dollars of success after months and months of failure. But I think the real cause of lessons learned becoming lessons lost has more to do with processes than with personalities.

Most proposal organizations, and indeed most sales operations as a whole, have no institutionalized process for capturing lessons learned. The argument might be that each proposal, like each sales opportunity, is unique. Each poses its own challenges. What works on one proposal may have little relevance to the next.

As you probably know, if you have read my comments over the years, I think that is nonsense. Although the specifics of each proposal vary, they vary within predictable ranges. By documenting what works, what contributes to greater success, what saves time or eliminates quality problems, we increase our ability to produce successful work in the future. Yes, the proposal itself will be different—perhaps very different—but the processes and tools we use will be very similar from one opportunity to the next, and focusing on improving those processes and tools is absolutely vital if we are to show steady improvement in both effectiveness and efficiency.

So why do so many proposal operations skip the process of gathering, documenting, and institutionalizing lessons learned? One reason is that they are immediately neck deep in the next bid effort. They believe they have no time to pause for reflection. As soon as today's proposal has been delivered, we must rush off to work on tomorrow's.

Another reason is that there is no budget set aside for this kind of effort. As a support organization, the proposal operation must be very careful to show that every minute of time and every dollar of budget is being directed toward winning business. Something that's one step removed, like capturing lessons learned, could be criticized as frivolous, so proposal managers avoid doing it.

A third reason is that in many organizations the proposal effort is decentralized. In a decentralized organization, it's extremely difficult to gather any kind of information on what's working, and it's even more difficult to learn what doesn't work. After all, who wants to volunteer to be the example of how not to do it?

Finally, lessons learned are often lost because the proposal operation and the sales organization as a whole may not have any system in place for implementing change. In an engineering or project management environment, change management is a well-defined part of the process. There are documented steps for institutionalizing a better process when you discover one. That is seldom true in sales or proposal operations.

What's to be done? The first step, I think, is to acknowledge that doing things the same way, over and over, without being open to changes that may improve results, is a recipe for stagnation and eventual failure. If you can get your organization to make that cultural shift, then here are some suggestions for capturing lessons learned and incorporating them into your standard procedures:

• Conduct regular lessons learned meetings with the sales and proposal development team. At a minimum, this should happen right after a major bid has been completed. Ask: What worked? Where were the obstacles? What workarounds or solutions did we come up with?
• For problems that come up repeatedly, create a task group to analyze the root causes. Ask: What preventative measures can be implemented? What gaps in capabilities should be closed?
• What did you do differently? Did it work? Was there anything you did that was so effective you think it should become part of your standard approach in the future? If so, document it and figure out how to make sure everybody embraces it. Training? Checklists? Tools? What's going to make this new way of working the standard way in the future?
• At least once a year, stand back from your standard processes—you're unquestioned "best practices"—and question them. What's being done simply because it's always been done? What's no longer adding value to the final deliverable? Can these steps be eliminated? Can they be changed and made more effective?
• Establish a formal process for institutionalizing change. Document the changes. Incorporate them into internal training. Modify your ProposalMaster and RFPMaster databases or the user interfaces to reinforce the changes. Begin including the use of these new methods into performance appraisals. Figure out what's going to work to convert lessons learned into accepted standard practices as quickly as possible, and then follow through.

If you would like some help in figuring out what lessons you have learned and what lessons other people learned that you can borrow, give us a call. From working with hundreds of companies in dozens of markets, we can help you jump start the process.

Profiling

2010-06-23T08:10:00.002-05:00

Profiling is not allowed in a criminal case, but it makes a lot of sense in your business case. By establishing a set of behaviors and characteristics that define your best customers, you create a pattern or profile to use in searching for new ones.

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Profiling

Can you describe your best customers? Would you recognize them if you bumped into them at a conference or on a sales call?

You may be rolling your eyes at this point. Of course I recognize my best customers! I'm in their offices eight to ten times a year! I'm more likely to recognize them than I am to pick out my spouse's cousin at a wedding!

Right. But what I'm referring to is whether or not you've created a profile of your best customers. One that identifies the nature of their business, their business model, their financial situation, key recent events, significant pending changes, their current infrastructure, and any other characteristic that helps define them.

When I developed the first version of ProposalMaster almost 20 years ago, I did it based on the observation that most of my clients had a limited number of vertical markets to which they sold their products and services. Within those markets, there were half a dozen or a dozen reasons that clients needed their products and services. There were certain options and features that were of particular interest to certain kinds of buyers. By defining the typical buyers and what motivated them, we were able to create a taxonomy of the content sales people needed to deliver persuasive proposals to the buyers they encountered most frequently.

That same thinking can be the basis of creating a comprehensive sales toolkit. Everything from cold calling scripts to negotiation strategies can be thought through in terms of the typical patterns of behavior that you and your colleagues run into. And profiling your best customers can make it easier for you to find them and connect with them. In fact, profiling your best customers should help you figure out the most effective sales process.

Here are some questions that may help you start profiling for profit:
• Do our customers' needs vary by vertical market?
• Do their needs vary by the buyer's role?
• Do needs vary based on other factors, such as:
o Size of the customer's organization?
o Geography?
o Primary source of funding?
o Their use of certain legacy systems?

• Are there certain "trigger events" or "red flags" that are strong predictors of when a customer is most likely to need our help, such as:
o Explosive growth?
o Expansion into a new market?
o Release of new products or services?
o New CEO, VP of Engineering, VP of Sales, or other senior leadership?
o Recent or pending acquisition or merger?
o Obviously broken processes (for example, high rates of product returns, poor quality, late financial filings)?
o Employee morale issues as indicated by high levels of sick time, absenteeism, accidents, workers' comp claims?
o Market share erosion?
o Loss of patent protection?
o Declining productivity?
o Declining revenues?

The specific questions you ask to profile your best customers—and more importantly, your best prospects—will be different from these, of course. But figuring out what they are and then finding the answers to them is an important step forward in creating an empirical basis for your sales process, the tools your sales people use, and the content in your proposal and presentation libraries.

It will probably come as little surprise to you to know that we can help you with that process. We conduct Structure & Strategy sessions for our clients that uncover the right answers to the right questions, which is one of the reasons that companies that implement our proposal software see a near 30 percent increase in win rates on average. Give us a call if you'd like some help profiling for profit in your business.

Overcoming the Fear of Value

2010-04-19T12:53:00.000-05:00

Why is that so many proposals contain no value proposition at all? What are those proposal writers afraid of?

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Overcoming the Fear of Value

Are you afraid of value? There's plenty of evidence that suggests most proposal writers are. For one thing, very few proposals even contain a value proposition. And for another, when I bring up the importance of putting a value proposition in your proposals, the audience pushes back—hard!

I call this reaction "value paranoia." The result is weak value propositions that do little or nothing to move a deal forward. Here's an example of a so-called value proposition born of value paranoia:

"We offer a full range of enterprise-strength, integrated technology solutions."

Pretty exciting, huh? Makes you want to grab your checkbook, right? Or how about this one:

"We are a true one-stop shop for all your financial services needs."

I'll bet that makes you want to shout YES!, doesn't it? And here's another one—one that was actually used as the value proposition for an opportunity worth over $500 million:

"We are committed to the success of the enterprise."

Good grief! These are horrible. There's just no other word to describe them. For one thing, every one of them starts with "We," even though common sense would suggest that an effective value proposition should be focused on the buyer and what they care about. And for another, they contain no promise of positive results that can be tracked or quantified. Finally, none of them are backed up by even a shred of proof. These three supposed value propositions—all of which appeared in real proposals, by the way—are little more than marketing fluff.

When I press clients to create a more compelling value propositions—"ABC Company can reduce total energy costs by 75 to 80 percent by implementing our solar energy panels"—they sometimes squirm in their seats.

"What if the client actually follows up and holds us to our promises?" they ask. "Where will we find the baseline data against which to measure our impact? How will we ever get this past our in-house lawyers?"

These are all good questions. But they are questions that can be answered by modifying your sales and implementation processes and presenting your value proposition in clear, careful language. They are not reasons to refrain from offering a meaningful value proposition.

1. What if the client actually measures our results?
It'd be great if they did, assuming your products and services are as good as you claim. Why not make that part of your implementation strategy? Tell them that you'll work with them to set up the processes necessary to track results. Getting that data should make it a lot easier for you to win the rebid or the next phase of work.

2. Where will we find the baseline data against which to measure our impact?
Ideally, you will get it from the client, but we all know that many of our clients aren't measuring current performance so they have no way to know what kind of impact our products and services have had on their operations. If the client can't provide the baseline data, how about industry associations? They often publish data that represents industry averages. Or how about getting your own baseline data by going in to a new client immediately after you have won a deal and measuring the key parameters at the outset and then measuring them again after six months? If you do this half a dozen times, you'll have your own baseline data that you can use as a starting point with customers. You'll know the average cost of processing a check in the Accounts Payable systems from half a dozen organizations that are similar to your new client. You'll know how long it takes to process a data record in a legacy system compared to what it takes once your system is in place. And so on.

3. How will we ever get this past our lawyers?
Lawyers believe that their job is to keep the company out of trouble. And they know that the primary sources of trouble are (1) clients and (2) employees. If they can just eliminate both sources, they will have done their job perfectly. Unfortunately, in the real world there must be a balance between the "excess of caution" that lawyers love to live by and the slight risk of doing business that is required to actually close a deal. By using weasel words appropriately—"this may result in…," "you could see an increase of up to 20 percent…", "based on current assumptions, we project savings of…"—you can protect the company from making promises that could come back to haunt you and yet you can still offer a meaningful value proposition.

Value propositions are the means by which we motivate the decision maker to move forward. A strong, specific value proposition that offers quantifiable improvements in a core area of performance is the key to shortening your sales cycle and winning more business. Don't let value paranoia cripple yours.

We can calculate a compelling value proposition from automating your proposal operations. Give us a call and we'll put some pretty impressive numbers in front of you—and no marketing fluff!

Why Great Proposals Lose

2010-03-09T07:57:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you do everything right but it all comes out wrong. You write a fabulous proposal and you still lose. Here’s why it happens.

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Why Great Proposals Lose

Shouldn't quality be rewarded? Shouldn't an outstanding effort be crowned with success?

Well, maybe in Hollywood, where happy endings are required, but in real life it doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes you produce a great proposal and it still loses. It's beautifully written. It has terrific graphics. The win theme is creative and strong. And what happens? Nothing. It doesn't even get down-selected to the final two or three. What's up with that?

What's up is that your seemingly great proposal might be doomed by a fatal flaw. And just as is true of those Shakespearian heroes and their fatal flaws, the consequences for your proposal are tragic. Here are some of the most common flaws that can doom your magnificent effort:

• Weak qualification of the opportunity. The proposal was well written, true, but there was never a deal there in the first place.

One of my clients in London received an RFP from a global technology firm. Overjoyed by the size and scope of the opportunity, my client assembled a top team who worked for six weeks to respond to the complex and difficult bid document. They even spent £100,000 with an outside graphics firm to create fantastic illustrations and slides. But when they arrived at the prospect's headquarters to present their proposal, they were told, "We're so delighted you chose to respond, considering that we don't actually intend to change our supplier this time around."

Ask yourself three questions: Is the client serious? Can we be competitive? Can we win? If you can't answer these questions honestly, throw up a big yellow flag. Otherwise, you may be in for a case of proposal heartbreak.

• Not understanding the business drivers. You can be 100% compliant to the RFP and 100% a loser if you don’t understand the client's real needs. The RFP almost never discusses the business problems that lie behind an opportunity. So your proposal, which does a great job of responding to the technical requirements, may be missing the point completely.

Suppose a bank discovers they have a serious problem with the security of their accounts, particularly in regard to on-line banking functions. They issue an RFP, seeking help. Do you think they will indicate exactly what the problem is, how serious it is, how many customers are at risk? No, no, and no. RFPs can quickly become public documents, so any revelations about leaky security could damage the bank's reputation, create panic among customers, and possibly send the share price plummeting.

• Failing to leverage lessons learned. Have you had previous engagements with a client? Have you received a debriefing after submitting a previous proposal? If so, you may have valuable insights that will enable you to personalize the message. Unfortunately, the so-called lessons learned often go into long-term storage and are never looked at again. It's surprising how many companies invest millions of dollars in CRM systems, but don't use them to store information or insights into decision makers, corporate culture, or other factors that could strengthen the next proposal effort.

• Pitching to people who aren't there anymore. If we have a long-standing relationship with a client or a government agency, we might find ourselves unconsciously slipping into a traditional pattern. We know what they want. We know how they like us to organize our bid. We share experiences and assumptions, so we don't bother to spell that stuff out. "They know that," we say. "We don't need to mention it." What we may fail to notice is that those people have moved on. Some of them retired. Some were replaced. Maybe a few of them transferred to new positions. And as a result our usual way of proposing may not work anymore. I recently worked on a huge proposal to a government agency, one that was deemed a "must win", and kept getting "advice" from the old timers about the way that agency liked things done. What they weren't acknowledging was that six months earlier the entire command structure in t hat agency had been replaced and the culture was totally different. Happily, we ended up pitching to the people who were there, and I got word a couple of weeks ago that the proposal won.

There are probably a few other reasons why otherwise great proposals lose. But I suppose you could argue that if a proposal was hampered by one of the fatal flaws I've listed above, it probably wasn't all that great in the first place.
If you're looking to eliminate hidden fatal flaws and produce truly great proposals, give us a call. We have the software, the training and the processes to help increase your win rate. And how great would that be?

Why Saying YES is Always More Dangerous Than NO

2010-01-06T08:39:00.001-05:00

Why Saying YES is Always More Dangerous Than NO

You don’t have to be the parent of a teenager to realize that saying YES is always potentially more dangerous than saying NO. (Although if you are the parent of a teenager, you can probably come up with plenty of examples to illustrate the point.)

The same thing is true in business. And if we’re going to sell our products or services, we have to make saying YES a little less risky.

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Why Saying YES is Always More Dangerous Than NO

It's a truism of consultative sales methodologies that there are numerous decision influencers in an opportunity who have the power to say NO to a deal, but only one person who has the authority to say YES. The person who can say YES is sometimes called the "economic buyer" (in Strategic Selling terminology) or the "center of power" or simply the "boss.” Whatever you call that person, he or she carries a heavy burden: they have the authority to commit the organization to change.

Change is risky. After all, we know how to do what we're already doing. Maybe we don't do it very well and maybe it's not producing the results we want, but at least we feel comfortable in following the process and getting things done the way we've always done them. It's not surprising, then, is it, that we might see you and your enthusiastic recommendations for change as being more than a little threatening?

In our sales process and particularly in our proposals, we can make saying YES a little less dangerous for our clients. Here are seven ideas:

• Chunk the recommendation down into bite-size pieces. If our solution involves complex products and services, significant resource commitments, extended development cycles, or a large price tag, we're probably making our decision maker feel uneasy about saying YES. Why don't we divide that big solution into several smaller ones? Maybe we can start with a simple planning or assessment project that provides a clear Go/No Go gate at the end to protect the client from becoming embroiled in a large-scale disaster.

• Avoid over-engineering the solution. Simple is always safer than complex. Easy is always less risky than difficult. Try to avoid the temptation of adding in extra elements when you are configuring your recommendation.

• Link your solution to the customer's needs. One of the best ways to overcome the tendency to say No is to make it clear that your solution addresses their key needs. We've discussed this before, but as a quick reminder, I urge you to start your presentation of the solution with a quick summary of two or three key needs that the client wants to address. For each need, show how a specific feature of your solution addresses it, what the benefit to them will be, and a quick proof statement (a reference, for example) indicating that it's likely to work. Now they see that they are in fact buying a solution. Unfortunately, most proposals contain canned descriptions of products and services that are not linked to anything. They're just information dumps and they provoke a profound desire to say NO.

• Include service level agreements or real guarantees in the contract. The client is more likely to feel protected if we've been willing to offer them a way of measuring our performance and if we're putting some of our revenue at risk.

• Avoid self-serving behavior. The flip side of putting guarantees into your offer is taking out anything that might be construed as self-serving. For example, if you require buyers to purchase an expensive support package as part of the deal, even though you have assured them that your solution is dependable and low maintenance, they are justified in thinking you're just trying to jack up your own commission. If you recommend a product that doesn't quite address their needs and they later find out you were being spiffed on that product, they're likely to question the objectivity of your recommendation.

• Provide a convincing value proposition. People will take risks when the potential payoff is big enough. Unfortunately, most proposals fail to include a value proposition. And when they do include one, it often consists of marketing fluff rather than measurable results that will have a positive impact in a key area of organizational performance.

• Tie your recommendation to an inescapable compelling event. If the client has a fixed date in the future by which something has to be done, and your solution will help them get there, make the connection obvious.

One bonus tip worth considering: create a persuasive and fully compliant proposal. We can help you with that one, because Sant Suite is designed to take away the hard parts of writing a winning proposal. That's why so many of our clients say YES to our solution!

Rhetoric: It’s Not Just for Politicians Any More

2009-12-22T10:08:00.000-05:00

Rhetoric: It’s Not Just for Politicians Any More

Rhetoric became a dirty word back in the sixties. Maybe it’s time to rehabilitate both the concept and the practice.

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Rhetoric: It’s Not Just for Politicians Any More

For some reason, the word “rhetoric” has acquired a negative meaning. It implies the misuse of language, the manipulation of arguments to mislead rather than inform, to arouse emotions rather than thought, to distort the truth rather than reveal it. Many of us would point to politicians or political pundits who make a living ranting on cable TV as examples of people who indulge in “rhetoric”.

But for more than two thousand years rhetoric was at the heart of western educational practice. Plato and Aristotle would be surprised to hear us define rhetoric in such a narrow, negative way. So would Abraham Lincoln, whose inspirational oratory is an example of rhetoric at its finest.

At the heart of traditional rhetoric is a focus on using language to motivate an audience to take action—precisely what we want to accomplish with a sales presentation or a proposal. Our goal is to combine information, evidence and informed opinion in a way that helps our customer make a decision that favors us. The action we have motivated is the decision—manifested in the client’s signature on our contract or a verbal commitment to move forward with a business deal. And the way we have motivated that action has nothing to do with misleading our audience or twisting facts or arousing false emotions.

Instead, the first rhetorical move we need to make is to ask ourselves what matters to the audience? Research into decision making suggests that what matters the most is their own pain (their needs, issues, problems, gaps in capability, and so forth), followed closely by the potential for them to achieve gain (the outcomes or results they can achieve by solving their problems or addressing their needs). Unless we focus on these two topics first, we are highly unlikely to win the client’s attention, much less arouse their motivation to act.

If you have read Persuasive Business Proposals or if you’ve been reading these Messages that Matter for awhile, you recognize that these first two moves are the basis for what I call the persuasive paradigm or the NOSE pattern for persuasive communication. (The N and O stand for Needs and Outcomes, and the S and E stand for Solutions and Evidence.)

But rhetoric includes more than the structure of our message. It also involves the clarity and effectiveness of our delivery. For example, which of these opening statements is more effective for a proposal to the US Navy?

Current limitations in scope and access are preventing the US Navy from gaining full value from satellite data intended to improve fleet situational awareness and increase combat effectiveness. Currently used legacy algorithms have the capacity to decode and process only a small percentage of the total data feed being broadcast from the satellites.

The US Navy depends on satellite data to improve fleet situational awareness and increase combat effectiveness. Unfortunately, that data is currently limited in scope and access to the data is difficult. Because processing is handled by outdated algorithms, only a portion of the data is available, a situation that is analogous to having access to a vast library of information but then being allowed to look at only one shelf.

I would argue that the two openings say the same thing, but that the second version is more effective largely for rhetorical reasons. What have we done differently?
First, we have changed the subject and verb in the first sentence from something highly abstract (“limitations…are preventing…) to something much more concrete in the second version (“The US Navy depends…”). That makes the opening sentence more interesting and more obviously relevant right away.

Second, we have broken a rather long sentence (28 words) into two shorter sentences (16 and 15 words respectively). That makes them easier to decode. It also separates two distinct concepts: how satellite data benefits the Navy and what the current problems are with that data. One concept is positive; the other is negative. Separating them gives both of them more punch.

Third, we have taken the concept of outdated algorithms and expressed it more vividly by using a metaphor. If you attended the Webinar we broadcast with Anne Miller (you can access archived webinars here) you remember the many examples Anne shared of using metaphors to make a sales message clearer and more powerful. Metaphors are a rhetorical device.

To be persuasive, we first need to organize our messages using the right structure and then use language in the right way. The combination will help our client see that what we are recommending makes sense for their situation and will motivate them to take action.

If you would like help in putting the best possible structure into your proposals or presentations or revising your content so that it delivers your message effectively, give us a call. We’re proud to admit that rhetoric is something we’re really good at.

Your Value Proposition - Creating an Impact

2009-08-24T14:57:00.003-05:00

It's great to offer the customer outstanding value. It's even better when the customer notices.

Unfortunately, many sales presentations and proposals contain no value proposition at all--even when the vendor has a good story to tell.

If we don't spell it out for the customer, they probably won't figure it out for themselves. They may not have the time, may not see how our unique products or approaches can add value, or may assume that all vendors are the same. In the attached message, we look at ways to improve the impact of your value proposition.

That is our topic this time.

Regards,

Your Value Proposition--Creating an Impact

Bringing a deal to closure can seemingly take forever. It may be even more difficult today than ever before. Think about the characteristics of selling in today's markets.

Here's a question for you: Would you rather buy customer support software that costs $10,000 or $35,000?

Everything being equal, that's not a hard choice, is it?

But what if the $35,000 package includes free training, maintenance, and upgrades. And what if it works so much more efficiently, you can reduce your customer support staff by one full-time equivalent position? Now which one is more tempting?

It's the difference between price and value. And sometimes we forget to show our customers what that difference is. We need to communicate a value proposition that equates to an advantage for our solution. The basic value proposition can be expressed like this:

(Value_s - Cost_s > (Value_a - Cost_a)

where the value of our solution (Value_s) minus its cost is greater than the value, minus cost, of any alternative.

Customers are often willing to spend a little more if they see they are getting a lot more. But if there's no compelling difference among vendors, if there's no compelling value proposition, they'll buy whatever is cheapest.

That's why it's so important to offer a value proposition. And to do it in a way that gets noticed.

Here are some tips that will help you create a big impact with your value proposition:

1. Focus on what the decision maker cares about.

A good value proposition should demonstrate impact in an area the customer cares about. If the customer is trying to reduce the cycle time involved in processing data, focusing your value proposition on reduced training costs for operators is a little bit off the mark.

2. Quantify the impact of your value whenever possible.

For most decision makers, numbers are more convincing than words. That's especially true if you've based your numbers on data the customer has shared with you. The second-best source of numbers is information published through public sources--trade associations, for example.

3. Show the impact graphically.

A study by the University of Minnesota showed that a graphic could increase the persuasiveness of a piece of text by 47%. There's probably nothing you want to be more persuasive than your value proposition, so show it in the form of a simple graphic.

4. Base your value proposition on your uniqueness factors.

What differentiates you from your competition? And how do those differentiators add value for the customer? Those are very important questions that you must be able to answer if you're going to create a value proposition that doesn't set up your competition. A value proposition based on general characteristics of your solution--characteristics that all vendors have in common--doesn't give the customer a compelling reason to buy from you.

Ask yourself: What separates us from our competitors? Name them and brainstorm the differences. Then ask how those differences add value. Second, ask yourself what you do in the customer life cycle that nobody else does, or what you do in a way that's significantly different from the way others in the industry do it. These are the two ways to find differentiation.

A final note: Don't confuse product features with differentiators. Features are usually a short-term advantage. You're better off looking for differences in the areas of systems or methods.

Shortening the Sales Cycle

2009-07-08T09:45:00.001-05:00

My favorite sales experience involved a national company based in Chicago. I got a call late one evening from a member of the sales vice president's staff. "Do you have proposal automation software?" he asked. "Would you be willing to demonstrate it to us next week?" Yes and yes.

The next week we were in Chicago. I was about fifteen minutes into the demo when the senior vice president of sales leaped up and said, "That's it! That's exactly what I envisioned. Get it." And with that he left the room. Ten days later we had a signed contract and a check.

Unfortunately, most of our sales cycles aren't that short. How about yours? If you'd like to shorten the sale cycle, this is a good message for you. It focuses on how effective follow-up communications can reduce the length of the sales process.

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Shortening the Sales Cycle

Bringing a deal to closure can seemingly take forever. It may be even more difficult today than ever before. Think about the characteristics of selling in today's markets.

Often you are selling not to an individual, but to a team. And that team is composed of people with different, sometimes conflicting views of what your solution should do and how it should be judged.

Typically, you're under severe cost pressure. And the analysis of costs goes much deeper than merely acquisition price.

Finally, you're expected to demonstrate positive business impact. Your decision team is looking for a solution that will improve their operations, their bottom line, their use of technology--all at the same time probably!

So that's a lot to handle. No wonder it takes so long to close a deal.

Here's a little secret that one of the largest high-technology companies in the world found several years ago:

Backing up sales calls with good written communication reduces the selling cycle by as much as 86%!

This is an insight that has also been offered by some of the leading sales training organizations. In fact, the Solution Selling curriculum emphasizes the importance of putting every step of the sales cycle into writing.

Why does it work? And how can you take advantage of this insight to reduce your sales cycle?

It works because good written communications eliminate ambiguity. That's very important in a situation where you're selling to a team, because people often listen with filters on their ears. They hear what they expect to hear or what they want to hear. Sending a document that summarizes the key points of a meeting, identifies responsibilities, establishes the next steps, confirms a timeline, and so forth, clarifies the content of the call and confirms the decisions the team has made.

It works because good written communications reinforce your selling message. Even if the communication is simply intended to confirm the date and time for a meeting, it gives you a chance to demonstrate competence and reliability. And you may be able to slip in a sales message, too. At the very least, a written message extends your "mind share" and helps the decision team remember you.

The best way to take advantage of the power of written communications is to automate the creation of the types of documents you need most often. Be careful not to use boilerplate text or static "templates." Those will actually do more damage than good, because they smell like complacency to the customer.

Instead, implement an automation tool that enables you to build a compound document that contains client-centered, unique content each time.

To see exciting ways to automate the creation of good written communications at each step of the sales cycle, visit santcorp.com/demo.

The Structure of Persuasion

2009-06-03T09:09:00.002-05:00

“It ain’t what you say; it’s the way that you say it.”

At least, according to the words of an old song, that’s the story. Is it true? Not entirely. A sales presentation or proposal devoid of content isn’t going to do very well, no matter how brilliantly it’s put together.

But in one respect, that line is true. There is a way to say—or write—that will create maximum impact on the audience. And it has nothing to do with using fancy words or pretty pictures. Instead, it’s a matter of using the right structure. By using the structural pattern of persuasion, you will get the customer’s head nodding a lot quicker.

That’s our subject this time: Saying the right things in the right order to get the right response.

Regards,
Tom Sant

The Structure of Persuasion

In the world of business, people write for one of three reasons—to inform, to evaluate, or to persuade. For each of these purposes there is a structural pattern which will produce the best results. Think of the structural patterns as templates for delivering content in the right order. Use the wrong pattern and you will get the wrong results. It’s like trying to drive a nail with a screwdriver—you might eventually get the job done, but it’s going to be a lot harder than it has to be.

The first and most common reason people write is to inform. They’re writing to share factual content with somebody else who needs it. The ideals of informative writing are clarity and conciseness, and to achieve those goals we should start by getting right to the point and stating the key fact that the reader will find most important. For most people, writing to inform is the easiest writing task and the one they feel most confident in handling.

The second reason business people write is to evaluate something or somebody. A performance appraisal, a competitive analysis, an appraisal of an asset—in all of these cases, simply presenting the facts is not enough. What we want to know is what you think, because we assume that you are a person of experience and training who has dealt with similar issues before. (Or we recognize that you are in a position of authority so that your opinion matters, even if it’s not terribly well informed.) To write an effective evaluation, we need to define our subject—what (or who) we are evaluating—and the criteria on which we are basing our evaluation. Then we need to present our observations and evidence. Finally we need to offer our opinion. If we follow that structural pattern, our opinion will sound logical and our evaluation will be easy to follow.

The third reason people write is to persuade. Persuasion means we are attempting to influence what somebody else thinks or feels or does. We’re trying to change our audience in some small way—to get them to support our policy, to care about an issue as we do, or to sign a contract and give us their business. Effective persuasion requires more than simply delivering a bunch of facts, and our opinion alone isn’t going to persuade a customer to buy from us. Instead, we have to structure our message so that we deliver the content in a way that produces the change in our audience’s thinking or beliefs or action that we want to produce.

There’s nothing sneaky or deceptive about the process of persuasion. Sometimes people confuse persuasion with manipulation or deception. They think it involves “tricking” the reader into doing something. Maybe negative attitudes toward advertising and political campaigns have led them to regard persuasion with suspicion. In my experience, technically oriented professionals—the same people who are most comfortable writing informatively—are very suspicious of persuasion.

In reality, persuasion is a straightforward process of identifying the reader’s needs, issues, or concerns, acknowledging their importance in terms of meaningful outcomes, then positioning your solutions in the context of the customer’s needs and outcomes, and finally presenting evidence that you can deliver the solution. That’s it.

I used to call this pattern the persuasive paradigm, but lots of my clients began calling it the NOSE pattern because the four elements of persuasive structure create the acronym NOSE. Let’s take a look at each element of persuasive structure in more depth:

NEEDS: Focusing on the customer’s needs or problems or business pains wins their attention. They’ll probably be surprised that a vendor has actually listened to them. They’ll also be less anxious to move forward.

OUTCOMES: Every business has lots of problems, most of which will be ignored. Why? Because management doesn’t see enough of a payback from solving them. You don’t want your recommendations to fall into the category of ideas that “just aren’t worth it,” so spell out clearly the outcomes or the impact on the organization that solving the problem or meeting the needs will deliver. Focusing on the customer’s pains will grab attention, but focusing on the potential gains will create motivation.

SOLUTION: Recommend specifically what you think the decision maker and his or her organization should do. Link your recommendation back to the client’s needs and desired outcomes. And actually use the words, “We recommend…” If you sound like you believe in your solution, the decision maker can feel a little more confident believing in it, too.

EVIDENCE: What makes you the right choice? How do I know you can deliver the solution you’re recommending on time and on budget? Have you thought through everything? Your goal in providing evidence is to differentiate yourself and demonstrate your competence. You might include product information, cost details, management plans, project plans, training options, documentation, delivery schedules, resumes, case studies, references, testimonials, awards your organization has won, whatever. Avoid throwing evidence in just because it’s available. If it's not clearly relevant to the deal and of interest to the decision maker, leave it out. For example, most of your prospects just won’t care about your company history beyond seeing that you’re reasonably experienced and solvent.

And that’s it. Putting your content together in terms of these four steps will produce a persuasively structured message. The important thing to remember is that persuasion doesn’t have to be a mystery. In fact, the key to effective persuasion is as obvious as the NOSE on your face. Visit santcorp.com to learn how you can automatically create persuasive proposals using Sant Suite.

The Seven Best Books on Persuasion

2009-05-18T08:54:00.003-05:00

A while ago someone alerted me to a review of my book, Persuasive Business Proposals, on Amazon.com. The anonymous reviewer called it “the best book ever on persuasion.”

Look, I’m about as arrogant and self-delusional as anybody you’re likely to meet, but even I don’t believe that. But it did get me to thinking. What are the best books on persuasion?

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

The Seven Best Books on Persuasion

Actually I first started thinking about this subject when Brian O’Connor, a friend and client who manages marketing communications and CRM for Scandinavia for a multinational corporation, asked me to recommend some books on persuasion. Which ones did I think were the best?

I responded off the top of my head, but since then I’ve been giving it more careful thought. Now, I’m ready to share—ta da!—my list of the seven best books (or at least seven books worth reading) on the topic of persuasion.

1. Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a classic. It’s fun to read, it’s based on solid research, and it’s easy to make the connections to business. Besides, Cialdini is Regents' Professor of Psychology and Marketing at my original alma mater, Arizona State University, so that’s kind of cool. Since the first edition of Cialdini’s book came out, there have been others that walked the same path but his is still the most interesting and complete, in my opinion.

2. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Yeah, the old chestnut. It’s actually quite insightful, particularly on the relationship side of persuasion, and it remains relevant today. What he says still makes sense and it’s backed up by empirical data from recent research in psychology. What did Carengie say? Make the other person feel important. Develop a genuine interest in them, take a positive attitude, use the other person’s name, listen more than you talk, and when you do talk, talk about what the other person finds interesting. Simple stuff, but valid nonetheless. I wrote extensively about Carnegie and his ideas in The Giants of Sales because he’s extremely important to the development of modern sales. He was focusing before anyone else on the role of trust in persuasion—if we don’t trust someone, we’ll never buy from him or her. David Maister, The Trusted Advisor, and Jagdish Sheth and Andrew Sobel, Clients for Life, are solid examples of more recent books that cover the same territory, but Carnegie is just great fun to read.

3. Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter Todd, et al, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. It’s not the most enjoyable read, particularly compared to the first two. Simple Heuristics is written in an academic style that’s often too dense by half. But it’s worth the slog, because it contains extremely useful and profound insights into decision making. And, after all, decision making is fundamental to what we do professionally. As proposal writers and sales professionals, our efforts at persuasion are meaningless if they don’t culminate in a decision and/or action from our client. Simple Heuristics explains the hierarchy of processes most of us go through as we make a decision, from simple recognition (I’ll take the one I’ve heard of before) to criterion-based (this one meets our specs) to rate-of-return analysis (I’ll take the one that delivers the most value to my group). These simple processes expl ain respectively why (1) you have almost zero chance of winning a bid if you’re responding to a blind RFP, (2) your proposal should contain a compliance matrix, and (3) you must include a value proposition backed up with evidence in every proposal you write. A similar book is Gary Klein, Sources of Power. Klein’s book is a little less structured, much less academic, and more focused on the seemingly intuitive processes of making decisions. It’s still relevant. Likewise, the new book from Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, deals with decision making and draws on research by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman on decision making in the midst of uncertainty, for which Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics.

4. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point. The books I’ve mentioned above are mainly focused on what goes on inside the skull of the individual who is being persuaded—the psychological aspects, if you will. Gladwell moves the discussion into the social sphere. How do social networks influence us to accept or reject an idea, a project, a person? As social networking becomes more of a structured tool for businesses to use in marketing, understanding this aspect of persuasion will become increasingly valuable.

5. Jay Levinson, Guerrilla Marketing. Speaking of marketing, I have always loved this book because it was the first one to show us that even the little guy could establish brand recognition, generate leads, and build customer loyalty—all without buying Super Bowl ads. Levinson was so far ahead of his time that he’s probably lapped all of us by now, but with the rise of the Internet many of his concepts have become even easier to implement. He has lots of followers and disciples. I put Seth Godin in this group [Permission Marketing and lots of others, many with goofy titles], along with Chip and Dan Heath [Made to Stick], for example. But the original is well worth reading.

6. Mack Hanan, Consultative Selling. In terms of sales processes, books that recommend a consultative methodology are built on a basic understanding of persuasion. I love Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling and I learned a lot from Bosworth’s Solution Selling and Miller and Heiman’s Strategic Selling. But the first book I ever read on the subject and one of the clearest by far is Mack Hanan’s Consultative Selling. Once you finish reading Hanan, you’ll never again think it’s smart to focus on product features or to start your sales presentation with an overview of your company’s history. Focus on the client’s problem, quantify what it’s cost them, and show them how you can solve it: that’s Hanan’s method in three phrases and it’s dead on if you want to close business and gain a reasonable margin.

7. Edward Tufte, Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations. Okay, I’m cheating—I’ve listed three books by one author. But you need to look at them together to get the full impact of Tufte’s thinking. For many of us—especially if we’re writers by trade—the right hemisphere—the visual side of our brain—is a bit anemic. That’s something we have to address, however, because our customers process our message on the left (verbal) side of the brain, but they make decisions on the right (visual) side. Clip art, cluttered Excel tables, and other junk graphics just don’t work. Tufte has gained some notoriety in recent years for his vehement attacks on PowerPoint and similar programs. In his view, they corrupt the power to communicate and may lead to misunderstanding, superficial thinking, and manipulation. He rather convincingly cites the s pace shuttle Columbia disaster as an example, showing how the 28 slides presented by Boeing engineers misled NASA into a false sense of security. Chilling stuff, but it shows how subtle things, like the font size of a bullet point, can persuade, inform, or mislead an audience.

Some of the books I’ve listed here have nuts-and-bolts practicality and some are a little more theoretical. Their value to me is that they provoked new ideas. They’re the kind of books that make you look up from the page and say to yourself, “Hmmm… That’s interesting. I wonder if…” and then off you go.

Now it’s possible you may not have time to read all of these books. Or it’s possible that you won’t find them as interesting or as inspiring as I did. That’s okay. Call us. We’ve figured out some very practical ways of helping our clients create persuasive proposals and presentations and we’re happy to share them. In fact, we have a really great PowerPoint presentation we can show you that outlines all of our products and services.

Automating for the Right Reasons

2009-03-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

The old joke about proposal automation was that if you didn’t do it right, you achieved the dubious reward of producing bad proposals much faster.

But what if you did it right? And for the right reasons?

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Automating for the Right Reasons

Years ago I made a sales call on a public utility in Pennsylvania, one that was wrestling with the newly competitive, deregulated marketplace. I was there to present our proposal automation system. I had set up my computer and projector in a second floor conference room and was chatting with the division head who was our host when I heard a group of people stomping up the stairwell outside our door. One voice rose above the rest, a strident female voice, vehemently insisting, “I don’t care who else is using it, it won’t work here!”

In marched a small knot of people. At the head was the woman who had just bellowed her defiant prediction. She scowled, radiating all the warmth of a middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears. The division head cleared his throat and looked a little embarrassed. “Allow me to introduce you to the manager of our proposal operations,” he said.

I’d love to tell you a story about how I turned this situation around, but the truth is—No, it didn’t get better. Nothing she heard and nothing she saw mattered. She had already made up her mind. Oh, she had her reasons: “It won’t work because our business is different.” “Because our clients don’t want a fancy proposal.” “Because our industry requires that we do things the way we’ve always done them.” “Because…” “Because…” Just because, that’s why! What a fearful, closed-minded attitude!

Some people are just digital Luddites who try to save their jobs by defeating innovation. Generally, though, that kind of behavior is less common than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Instead, in today’s society people are more likely to be cynical about technology. And why not? They’ve seen millions poured down a porcelain chute called CRM and gotten very little back. Why would proposal automation be any different?

The problem with CRM has been that traditionally it’s been too abstract and amorphous a tool to be applied in a concrete way to specific problems. That’s not the case with proposal automation. Proposal automation, unlike other technical innovations that have been ballyhooed by the business and technology press, actually works. In fact, proposal automation is a paradigm example of a technology that produces improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness. And in today’s economic climate, every business needs to be more efficient and effective.

Efficiency is all about driving waste out of the sales and proposal process. Typical problems include finding the right content, assembling a draft quickly, coordinating the activities of a team of contributors, and getting the whole operation to follow a reliable methodology. Efficiency issues are not trivial. For a medium-sized company they can add up to hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars of effort spent in non-value adding activities. And I’m willing to bet that no sales manager in the world wants his or her sales people sitting in front of a computer, hunting and pecking, cutting and pasting, wrestling with the word processor. So automating the writing of proposals eliminates a major area of waste.

Other sources of inefficiency include:

1. Loose to non-existent control over the information going into proposals: One of our clients found they had 11 different databases containing product information and pricing, seven of which weren’t even being maintained any more! Unfortunately, sales people still went to them to cut and paste information for proposals—thereby offering products and services that couldn’t be delivered. Yikes.

2. Corporate Alzheimer’s: Somewhere somebody has the answer to the questions in this RFP. But nobody can remember where it is or who has it. So we’ll just reinvent the whole thing one more time, okay? No, not okay. It’s a waste.

3. The “ask Betty” syndrome: This form of inefficiency is common in smaller and mid-sized companies. One person, call her “Betty”, knows where everything is located—all the answers to all the RFPs ever answered in the past, all the case studies, all the team bios, everything… God forbid that Betty should ever get the flu, take a vacation, or retire.

4. Too many steps: In manufacturing environments, waste comes from handling a product without adding value to it. The same thing happens in proposal environments. By automating one of our clients, we moved them from 28 different steps involved in producing a finished proposal down to 13. That eliminates a lot of wasted effort.

Effectiveness? What about effectiveness, you ask? Well, the ultimate test of proposal effectiveness is whether it wins or not. Saving time is nice, but winning business is crucial. The greatest value of using proposal automation technology comes from improving win rates by implementing a consistent, structured process. By using a simple automation tool you give everybody the ability to put the right content into the right order so it delivers the right message—every time. In fact, that’s a key reason why our clients have experienced an average 29% improvement in win rate. They’re also able to create sales documents 36% faster.

If you’d like some help in making sure proposal automation improves both your efficiency and your effectiveness, give us a call. Our roots are in best practices and proven methodology. We know what it takes to write a winning proposal. And we know how to automate the process successfully. Trust me. And ignore that woman bellowing on the staircase. It will work here! See a demo of Sant Suite at santcorp.com/Demo.

Pictures Really Are Worth A Thousands Words

2009-03-05T12:17:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite graphics is printed on shiny paper, folds up small enough to fit in my pocket, and is given away free. It’s the London subway map. It’s a brilliant graphic because it gives you a clear, information-rich view of an unbelievably complex system. Imagine trying to write a handbook describing the London underground for tourists and travelers and you’ll see what a hopeless task it would be.

That is our topic this time.

Regards,
Tom Sant

Pictures Really Are Worth A Thousands Words

In the 1920s, Fred Barnard, an advertising executive, tried to convince his customers that adding pictures to the placards in streetcars would make their ads more effective. As evidence, he cited a Chinese proverb: “A picture is worth ten thousand words.” Thus a cliché entered the English language—although the ratio of words to picture was mysteriously reduced by a factor of 10 along the way.

What the Chinese characters that Barnard showed actually state is something a bit different. They literally say, “A picture’s meaning can express ten thousand words.” That’s a different claim, one that emphasizes the interdependence of words and graphics. Properly chosen, words and graphics can combine to create a powerful message that transcends either medium alone.

For years I’ve cited a study done by the University of Minnesota that showed adding a graphic to a piece of text increases the perceived persuasiveness of the text by 47%. I’ve urged people to include graphics in their proposals, particularly in the presentation of their value proposition. There’s nothing you want to be more persuasive than your value proposition, so that’s the place to show the bar chart, the trend curve, or the pie chart to illustrate the positive impact your solutions will have.

The value of good graphics has long been understood in other fields. Attorneys spend huge amounts to create video simulations and graphic displays to influence juries. In one notorious instance, John Gotti’s defense attorney stood before the jury with a simple table showing the names of all seven witnesses who had testified against the mob boss. All seven had become government informants, receiving immunity in exchange for their testimony. In the table, Gotti’s attorney listed all the crimes they had committed, including multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, extortion, bribery, and more. In total they had 69 different convictions. The graphic’s meaning was clear. The witnesses were sleazebags, felons and thugs; their testimony was worthless. Interestingly, this chart was the only piece of evidence the jury asked to review during their deliberations. Gotti was acquitted.

This vivid and disturbing example of the persuasive power of a good graphic comes from Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. This is one of the four books he has written on the art and power of effective visual display. (The other three are The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Beautiful Evidence.) Tufte has become almost a cult figure for his insightful and provocative opinions about the potential for excellent graphics—charts, illustrations, and so on—to convey content quickly, persuasively and powerfully.

Tufte can be cranky in his opinions. He has attacked PowerPoint as evil, argues that most of the illustrations in the New York Times and USA Today are filled with “chartjunk,” and rails that most graphics assume the reader is stupid. On the other hand, he has demonstrated the impact that poor design can have, including a convincing analysis that poorly designed charts misled NASA engineers into believing the 1986 launch of the space shuttle Columbia was safe.

As a thorough-going left brainer, I struggle to think visually the way Tufte does. But I do understand his key points and I no longer feel satisfied using the typical garish charts generated from a spreadsheet or the cheesy clip art that comes with our slide-generating software. Some of the things I’ve learned from Tufte that can help us as persuasive communicators:

1. Graphics should be interesting in their own right.

2. Graphics should be content rich, dense with information, and should include multiple dimensions and variables.

3. Graphics should force us to make “wise visual comparisons” and should show causality.

4. Words, numbers and images should be integrated on the page, never broken up by lodging all the graphics at the end of the document or on a different page from where they are discussed.

Another important point that Tufte constantly reiterates is that your presentation—both the words and the graphics—succeeds or fails based on the accuracy, quality, and relevance of your content. This fundamental truth takes us back to the wisdom of the Chinese proverb: it’s the harmony of word and image that creates the most powerful impression.

With Sant Suite you can integrate graphics with your words easily and quickly. We even provide a built-in means for demonstrating your value proposition visually. Check out the interactive, Web-based demos on our site, www.santcorp.com. With the right graphics, you may be able to save 10,000 words, and won’t that come in handy when you have a tight page limit?

Two Keys To Survival

2009-02-11T11:15:00.000-05:00

Take it from somebody who has survived more than one economic bubble bursting: your survival depends on two things.

Your cash and your attitude.

And sometimes it’s not the cash that’s the biggest challenge.

That is our topic this time.

Two Keys to Survival

The number one business killer is lack of cash. More new businesses fail from lack of capitalization than any other factor. Of course, this is especially true in times like these, when credit is harder than usual to get and much more expensive.

Oddly enough, profit is not as important during a downturn as cash. It seems like a paradox, but you can run an extremely profitable business that still fails because it doesn’t have enough cash. Cash is the blood that has to pump through the business to keep it viable. A profitable business with no cash flow will soon be a dead business.

Given that cash flow is vital, your attention should be focused on doing the things that generate cash—especially closing deals quickly and collecting deferred payments—or that reduce its outflow. Reduce expenses where you can, but beware of making cuts that hurt your potential for closing deals and bringing new cash in. It may not hurt to reduce your building maintenance but cutting back on lead generation could have a serious negative impact on your future.

My friend, Dr. Reed Holden, author of Pricing with Confidence: Ten Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table, argues that survival must be the number one goal in difficult times. “Survival pricing focuses on immediate pricing actions businesses need to take in order to make it through a deep and potentially long financial crisis,” he says. He recommends using incremental cost pricing to keep money flowing into the system and searching for services that will keep customer costs low and service levels high. You can read his nine other specific recommendations for avoiding death by cash strangulation at http://reedholden.wordpress.com.

But most smart, experienced business people know how to manage their cash. A bigger challenge is figuring out how to manage our attitude.

In a financial downturn, panic is the enemy of good thinking and good manners. We find business owners and managers forgetting to treat employees with respect, failing to be patient and empathetic with clients.

A positive attitude goes a long way to establishing the momentum for success. If you treat clients and opportunities without desperation, if you maintain an optimistic outlook, you pull others toward you. That’s exactly the kind of attitude your clients and employees want to be near. Not anger, not resentment, and certainly not fear. No, they want to be near somebody who exudes confidence and a positive frame of mind.

Plus, it’s worth making the effort to treat clients and employees with respect. One thing we all know is that the economic climate will change again, and when it does you want your clients to have strong, positive memories of working with you through the bad times. You want them to come back eagerly when things turn around.

Sadly, maintaining an upbeat, respectful attitude is sometimes more difficult than maintaining cash flow! It may be easier to track the numbers and make appropriate choices on pricing and cost containment than it is to monitor our own emotions and resist the temptation to succumb to fear or negativity.

One way to generate more cash is to generate more proposals and to do it more efficiently and effectively. Take a look at the tools we offer and you’ll see that they are ideal for helping you accomplish more with less and for transforming opportunities into cash. The price is right—the demos are free! And if you request information, we promise to be upbeat and friendly when we respond. See the demos at www.santcorp.com/demo.

Efficient or Effective?

2009-01-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

Is it better to be efficient or effective?

Most of us would probably choose to be both. But for many years now, the focus in sales and marketing operations, including proposal centers, has been on measures of efficiency.

And for years it hasn’t worked.

Efficient or Effective?

Is it better to be more efficient or more effective? Before we answer that question, perhaps we need to define our terms.

Efficiency is a function of the volume of work we do. By doing more work in the same amount of time, we increase our efficiency. Efficiency goes up when we implement tools and processes that increase speed—the throughput rate—or when we save time by eliminating steps that are unnecessary.

The focus of Lean Production as developed by Toyota and implemented by hundreds of companies around the world is making the operation more efficient by eliminating waste. In fact, Toyota identifies seven forms of waste—quality defects, production in excess of market demand, transportation of products during the manufacturing cycle, idle time or waiting, excess inventory, and over-engineering the design. Obviously, these forms of waste are specific to a manufacturing environment, but the concepts underlying Lean Principles have been applied to knowledge work as well.

Effectiveness is a function of the results we get. For people who regularly read these messages, effectiveness is most likely to come from improving the way the sales organization (including the proposal operation) works. By implementing best practices, by working in ways that generate measurable improvements in results, we increase the size of the deals we’re working on, we decrease the duration of the sales cycle, or we increase the percentage of deals we win.

Efficiency improvements are worthwhile. There’s no debating that fact. But the risk is that the improvements to work methods—the increased efficiency we achieve—fails to produce the right results, which for a sales operation would be winning business. In that case, we are efficiently moving ourselves toward failure.

Recent surveys of senior executives have found widespread dissatisfaction with the millions invested in software intended to make the sales process more efficient. These sales force automation (SFA) or customer relationship management (CRM) systems were bought with the hope that they would automate and streamline major chunks of the sales organization’s work, making them more efficient.

They did that, all right. The problem is that the kinds of efficiencies they introduced had virtually no impact on effectiveness. With these SFA/CRM systems we can now create a pretty picture of the pipeline or produce a management report much faster. But we’re not able to close deals any better than before. In fact, research published by the Gartner Group, Aberdeen Group, and Yankee Group all indicate that most senior executives do not believe the investment in SFA or CRM has produced better results. For example, a Yankee Group found that 77% of the respondents said they would like to create more persuasive proposals, only 34% thought their SFA/CRM system helped them do a good job of that. Similarly, 49% rated their sales team’s ability to find appropriate marketing materials for a specific customer situation as very bad or bad, even though 86% thought that doing so was highly desirable.

For sales organizations the real breakthroughs come from improving effectiveness. For too long we have wasted time and resources in pursuit of the wrong goal. Merely automating an aspect of our work without also improving the results we get is a short-term gain. Applying the right methodologies to generate better results is the foundation for sustainable competitive advantage.

In a slow economy, senior sales executives want to help their sales people increase their closing or win rate, improve their ability to sell solutions, increase the value of contracts or the size of deals being sold, and shorten the length of the sales cycle. Those are measures of effectiveness, and if the typical sales manager can achieve even one of those, that manager won’t care a bit if efficiency is less than optimal. However, in the ideal world you would be able to get both: greater efficiency and improved effectiveness.

As you might imagine, we’re proud to say that our proposal automation tools within Sant Suite increase efficiency and dramatically improve effectiveness. And we have the research to prove it.

Cut or Run?

2008-12-30T11:00:00.002-05:00

Cut or run? That sounds like the kind of question you might hear during a Presidential debate. But this has nothing to do with “staying the course” or “raising the white flag of surrender.”

It has to do with managing your business, particularly in tough economic times. What I’m getting at is whether it’s better to focus your efforts on cutting expenses or on running after every bit of new business that’s out there.

Should You Cut or Run?

The predictions are frightening, the reality is sickening. A tracking graph of the recent performance of the world’s stock markets looks like a real-time image of your kid playing with a yo-yo.

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the collapse of Bear Stearns, the near collapse of AIG, the failure of Washington Mutual, the $700 billion bailout package, the automakers' bailout: well, you’ve been reading the headlines. Maybe you’ve been living the headlines. Even if you’ve done nothing but glance at the quarterly statement on your retirement accounts, you’ve shared in the experience. It's difficult to find credit, venture capital is scarce, and many businesses—perhaps your customers’ businesses—are about to start cutting back on discretionary spending. It’s enough to make you want to collect firewood and hunker down behind the desk in your cozy corner office for a long, cold winter.

What to do, what to do? Should we focus on cutting costs as much as possible, driving every shred of waste out of the operation? Or should we focus on winning as many new deals as possible, throwing ourselves into business development with all the energy we can muster?

As you can probably tell from my picture, I’m old enough to have lived through a couple of recessions in the past. In each of those downturns, the money people took over and started cutting—payroll, benefits, capital projects, energy consumption, raw materials, anything and everything that might show up on the balance sheet as a cost of doing business. Wall Street tends to like cuts. Just ask Al Dunlap.

It was during one of those earlier recessions that the colorfully nicknamed Chainsaw Al Dunlap first gained notoriety as a uniquely enthusiastic and ruthless job cutter. Stock prices soared as he slashed jobs and shuttered whole operations. It turned out, though, that Chainsaw Al’s cuts really weren’t as effective as they appeared, at least at Sunbeam, his last stop. It turned out he had also engaged in more than a little hanky-panky with the books to inflate earnings reports. As a result, he agreed to pay $500,000 to settle SEC charges he had defrauded investors, agreed to pay $15 million to settle a class-action lawsuit from shareholders, and agreed never to work as an executive at a public company again. Oh, and Sunbeam went bankrupt.

Admittedly, Chainsaw Al is the worst example of dealing with a crisis by mindlessly cutting jobs. But even without the whiff of fraud in the air, cost cutting alone seldom produces positive results. During the recession of the early 1990s, the Kepner-Tregoe consulting firm analyzed the cost-cutting behavior of more than 300 executives. Among other findings, the study found that executives who implement aggressive cost-cutting programs were four times more likely to cut costs again, but even after the second round of cuts still didn’t rate their attempts as successful.

The problem was that they were making blanket cuts—“Ten percent of the total workforce, no exceptions, Bumstead!”—rather than looking for ways to drive waste out of the system. Across-the-board cuts neglect to look for opportunities to achieve growth or at least lay the foundations for fast growth when conditions improve. Customer service, R&D, and sales are particularly damaged by that kind of an approach—the very areas that are likely to yield big dividends downstream.

An economic downturn is frightening, but it can also be an opportunity. People are eager for hope and open to change. As a result, a recession is a great time to begin initiatives that would have provoked fierce resistance in better times.

We’ve talked for years about proposal automation’s value in driving waste out of sales. Just last week I spoke with a senior manager at a major IT firm who admitted that his sales force had very few tools to help them manage deals and write good proposals. In fact, he thought they could probably handle a much larger number of accounts if he could take away a lot of the time-wasting administration that they had to do. So isn’t it possible that investing in the tools that make them more productive and eliminate a major source of waste be as smart as cutting jobs?

Cut if you must, but also invest in the tools necessary to run after more business and close it faster. Focus not merely on reducing headcount, but on reducing complexity and waste. If you’re interested in not merely surviving the current economic downturn, but actually thriving, take a look at your operations. Cut the waste, not just the people and resources.

If you’d like to explore how you can cut waste and increase productivity in your sales organization, call us. We have proof that, on average, Sant Suite customers realize a 29% win rate improvement and create sales documents 36% faster. See a demo of Sant Suite at www.santcorp.com/demo.

Are You a Shark?

2008-12-04T08:49:00.001-05:00

So, are you a shark?

No, I don’t mean a lawyer. And I don’t mean a member of a gang in West Side Story.

I mean are you like the shark in that you (or your business) must keep moving forward or you’ll die? And if that does describe you, what do you do when everything around you is paralyzed into immobility?

That’s our topic this time.

Somebody once said that a business is like a shark. It has to keep moving forward or it will die. The analogy is less than perfect, but it seems to make a point. If we don’t continue to grow, to innovate, to close deals and invest in the future, we’re not likely to make it.

But what do you do when everything around you has fallen into narcoleptic immobility? Nothing is moving. Nobody is buying. Money has dried up, funding is limited, and decisions are being postponed indefinitely. How do you keep moving forward in that kind of environment?

It’s a big problem, one of the reasons that economies get stuck. Recessions become self-perpetuating because so much of economic behavior is predicated on economic attitudes.

Well, here’s a little known fact: Sharks don’t have to keep moving all the time. That’s a myth. People believed it for a long time, but scientists discovered not too many years ago that many species of shark can stop swimming, resting quietly on the ocean floor, and still breathe. Apparently they choose spots where the ocean currents are strong enough to pump water over their gills so they stay alive. Think of it as a Blue Ocean strategy for sharks.

The equivalent behavior for our business might be to remove ourselves as much as possible from the economic turmoil and allow the natural waves of economic activity to help keep us afloat? How do we do that?

Carter Schelling, a consultant and economic advisor, recommends taking specific steps to protect your business during a recession. Here are a few of his ideas:

First, fire some of your customers. Which ones? The customers who are most likely to struggle themselves during the recession. Identify the customers (it’s usually a pretty small list) who provide you with 80 percent of your gross profit. Which ones are likely to survive or even thrive during a recession? Focus on doing business with them. Which ones are likely to see their sales or cash take a precipitous drop? Which ones are too far in debt, too leveraged, too dependent on the bubble? Drop them. They’re not going to make it anyway, so don’t tie your fate to theirs.

Second, take a look at the products and services you offer. Now is the time to focus more than ever on making your customers successful. Mack Hanna, author of Consultative Selling Skills, has argued for years that if we are going to run a successful sales organization we need to understand what our customers do, how their customers benefit from what they do, and how we can strengthen the relationship between them. If we can give our customers a competitive advantage in a recession, they will give us their business.

Third, thin the herd. During prosperous times it’s hard to find good people. As a result, we sometimes put up with poor performers, including sales people who never make their numbers. Now is the time to make changes. Drop the ones who don’t produce and enlarge the territories of those who do.

Fourth, look for opportunities to drive waste out of the organization. Schelling recommends implementing Lean Principles so that you can lower your price without lowering your profit. I recommend looking at the waste in your sales organization and getting rid of non-value adding activities. A decade ago, George A. Smith published Sales Productivity Measurement through the American Society of Quality Control. He found that on average sales people spent about half of their work week in activities that kept them from talking with clients or prospects! Mostly they wasted time traveling, doing price checks, handling correspondence, and preparing proposals. Does anybody think that travel is less time-consuming today? That our e-mail is less burdensome? Or that creating a winning proposal is easier?

Well, actually, proposals are a lot easier if you’re using Sant Suite, which automates the creation of client-centered persuasive proposals, presentations, and other sales documents. And that’s a great example of how you can drive waste out of the organization.

So be a shark! Keep moving. Or slow down if you must and take advantage of the ripples of change washing over us during the current economic slowdown. But do it in a way that assures you can flash into action instantly and become the mighty predator of the deep waters of business that you were always meant to be.

Take a look at our proposal and presentation automation tools. If you’re not using them already, you’ll be amazed at how they can drive waste out of your operation. In fact—dare we say it—once you see them in action, we’re sure you’ll be in a “feeding frenzy” to implement them for your team.

Selling Fast in a Slow Economy

2008-11-17T12:51:00.001-05:00

The economy has slowed down. There’s no question about that.

But you need to keep selling, right? So what’s the answer?
I think we can learn an important lesson from one of the pioneers of human psychology, Abraham Maslow.

That’s our topic this time.

When the economy slows down, selling becomes more difficult. People feel vulnerable and they become reluctant to spend money or allocate resources to anything new. From a psychological standpoint, they are moving down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs toward the basics—the survival issues.

Maslow believed that when any two needs were demanding satisfaction at the same time, it will be the need that is more “prepotent” (to use Maslow’s jargon), the more biologically urgent, that will take priority. Needs that are less prepotent are pushed into the background, delayed, or ignored. For example, a person might be dying of hunger, but he or she will forget all about food if you choke off the supply of oxygen!

So what does this mean regarding our customers? It means that because they feel threatened in a declining economy, they will tend to hoard what they have. They will pull back from completing mere “transactions.” They will be reluctant to exchange the organizational equivalent of oxygen—money—for any product or service that doesn’t meet their basic needs. As a result, when you try to sell a product or service for a particular price, the customer may perceive doing business with you as purely transactional. And they want to minimize the number of transactions they do in order to hold on to scarce resources.

There is some good news, though. In a down economy, decision makers are eager to find solutions. They want to do those things that will help them cope with changing circumstances, that will meet their basic business needs for revenue and stability.

Selling solutions is consultative, not transactional. Selling solutions requires:
• A broad business perspective
• Alignment with the customer’s objectives
• An ability to demonstrate value that matters to the customer

If you ask most sales people, they will tell you that they are writing proposals and delivering presentations that are solution oriented. But in reality they are not. The customer perceives their offers as transactional and pulls back from making a decision to buy.

Why do many solution-oriented proposals and presentations fail to communicate themselves that way to the customer? They fail because they are NOT client centered, value based, or decision oriented.

Often, sales people resort to “clone and go” proposals. They think that it’s enough to provide a boilerplate, “checkbox” proposal, one that focuses mainly on their products or their company. But to be seen as a solution-oriented proposal, the document must focus on the customer’s needs—the most “prepotent” ones, to use Maslow’s term—and link whatever is being recommended to meeting those needs.

Similarly, many proposals do not contain any value proposition. They present a price, but they don’t contain any calculation of return on investment or any other measure that is linked to survival and coping in a tough economy.

Finally, many proposals are not organized to help the customer make a decision. They tend to be information dumps. They fail to differentiate the offer from alternatives and fail to provide grounds for moving forward with the decision.

To sell faster in a slow economy, we need to make sure we focus on what matters to the customer, spell out the concrete benefit they obtain from doing what we recommend, and present our recommendations using a structural pattern that leads logically to a decision.

One way you can sell faster is to automate the creation of proposals that actually win more frequently. Sant’s proposal automation software will do exactly that: increase your win rate and slash the time it takes to issue a proposal. Check out the interactive, Web-based demos of them at our site, www.santcorp.com.

Entering Your Evidence

2008-09-30T08:38:00.001-05:00

Evidence is crucial in a courtroom—it’s the basis on which the judge or jury makes a decision.

It’s just as important in your sales process and your proposal. The kinds of evidence you use and the way you present it can make a huge difference in whether the verdict goes in your favor or against you.

That’s our topic this time.

We’ve been talking about persuasive structure in our recent messages. We said that effective persuasion follows the NOSE pattern: Needs, Outcomes, Solutions, and Evidence. We start by restating the client’s needs because that gets their attention and reduces their anxiety. We then outline the potential outcomes the client will achieve by solving their problems or meeting their needs, because that creates the motivation to go forward. Third, we recommend a solution, but we do it in a way that’s client-centered rather than product-centered.

I hope that so far you’ve been gulping down the Kool Aid and are in full agreement. Anyway, all that remains is the final step, presenting our evidence.

What are you trying to prove with your evidence? Basically, you are trying to show that you can and will keep your promises. You are trying to show that you can deliver the solution you have proposed on time and on budget. You are trying to convince the decision maker that this is your area of expertise. You might even be trying to establish that your firm is financially stable, properly managed, and well prepared.

Providing evidence is usually the part of the persuasive job that most proposals handle pretty well. But there are two ways we can do the job better. First, we can be thoughtful in selecting our evidence, choosing items that are most likely to appeal to the specific decision maker and to be relevant to the opportunity. And second, we can present our evidence in the most effective way possible.

In future messages we’ll deal with the second issue, covering the best ways to write typical kinds of evidence, such as team member bios, case studies, company histories, and so forth. In this message I want to discuss briefly what kind of evidence to use.

The first rule is that just because you have a particular bit of evidence doesn’t mean you should throw it into a proposal. Just because you have a map of North America showing all 78 of your company’s office locations, don’t use it unless it’s relevant. If you’re trying to sell to a company that also has numerous locations in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and they closely match your locations, then it’s relevant and helpful. If you’re selling to a prospect who only has one location, forget it.

The second rule about choosing evidence is to consider the source. There are three kinds of evidence—things you say about yourself, things your clients say about you, and things independent third parties say—and each has a different level of credibility.

Among the things you can say about yourself, you might include information about product features, about the members of your team, about your project management methodology, or about your quality control philosophy. Those things are relatively noncontroversial, and a prospective client could check for accuracy if he or she really wanted to. These forms of evidence help establish your competence. They answer a key question in the decision maker’s mind, namely, “Can these people really do what they claim?”

Another form of evidence you can offer about yourself—a type of evidence that helps minimize the client’s sense of risk or enhances their perception of the value of your offering—focuses on measurable performance indicators and special financial terms. For example, you might provide evidence relating to unique contractual terms that you are offering. Or you might outline a “gain sharing” or “risk sharing” program based on specific performance guarantees or service level agreements.

The second source of evidence is your previous clients. What they’re willing to say about you is often more convincing than what you say about yourself for the obvious reason that they presumably have nothing to gain from it. You can provide evidence to a new prospect from a prior client by including references in your proposal. Just make sure you check with the reference to make certain they’re still happy with you. Sometimes yesterday’s glowing reference becomes tomorrow’s flaming law suit and we didn’t even know it. You might also include testimonials, including images of letters of praise from previous clients. But one of the most convincing forms of evidence you can offer is the case study. As long as your case study is from a client similar in nature to your prospect, who had a similar problem, who had that problem alleviated by a solution similar to the one you’re proposing, and who achieved measurable positive results from your work—then you’re in great shape. However, if your case study just rehashes the history of some project in chronological fashion, forget it. That’s boring.

Finally, third-party evidence comes in the form of awards, rankings, recognition, articles, analyst reports, and so on. Although that form of evidence used to be the most convincing of all, the fact that so many analyst firms are willing to sell their “approval” to the highest bidder has made them somewhat suspect in recent years. All the same, if you were named the “best place to work” or an “industry innovator” or “Five Star Quality Award Winner” or some such thing, take advantage of it when you can. That’s still good stuff.

The Sant Corporation has all kinds of evidence to back up our claims that we can save you time and increase your win ratio through our proposal automation systems and services. And we’d love to share that evidence with you! Give us a call and let us prove it.

Getting Out of the (Information) Dump

2008-09-15T09:51:00.004-05:00

Even proposals that start with a great executive summary often lapse into the information dump mode when it comes to presenting the solution. How can we get out of the informative pattern so that our proposals are more effective in delivering a persuasive message?

The heart of the proposal is, of course, your solution. Your clients will be eager to hear your solution, if you have whetted their appetite by first discussing their needs and the probable outcomes of meeting those needs. But you can’t just lapse into the technical “info dump” style of writing that characterizes most solution write-ups.

Take a look at some old proposals, particularly the sections where you describe products or services. Do you see long lists of bullet points, the so-called “features” of your solution? If so, the solutions are informative, not persuasive, and most of your readers are probably skipping these parts.

To present your solution in a more customer-friendly, persuasive way, start by presenting your recommendations in two to three strong, focused paragraphs. You want to start by presenting the solution in general terms, focusing on business fit rather than details of execution. Emphasize why this solution is right for the client. Mention a couple of strong differentiators that set your solution apart and make your recommendations the right ones.

To focus on what matters in your solution, write from the customer’s point of view and move from general to specific:

Recommend the solution in a single sentence. Focus on functional impact, not operational or technical issues. In other words, in the first sentence, tell the customer what your solution will do for them. By the way, if you have a branded product or service, do not use the product name at this point. Product names are jargon and no one knows them outside your company (unless your product is as well known as the iPod or the ThinkPad). Tell the customer what they are getting and why it’s the right approach.

Explain the recommendation in another sentence. In the next couple of sentences, focus on at least one detail that relates to your intellectual capital, unique methodology, relevant expertise, or depth of experience. Focus on how you will do the work and what the results will be.

Differentiate your recommendation. Provide two sentences that state relevant differentiators that set your company apart from others who provide this kind of solution. Indicate why these differentiators add value for the client.

Present the features of your solution in the context of the customer’s needs or problems. Remember that customers do not automatically recognize that the solution you are proposing will give them the results they want. Particularly in a highly complex or technical environment, you must link the outcomes of what you are proposing to the elements of your solution. Imagine the client asking after each mention of a feature, “So what? Why should I care?” This means you should not mention a feature without linking it to the customer’s issues and to the benefits that feature will provide. (The benefits should also be linked to the customer’s issues, needs, or goals, of course.) Remember: a feature is a component of the solution, but a benefit is an impact on the client’s operations that the client will find desirable.

In fact, the details of your solution will be much more persuasive if you don’t focus on features at all. Instead, start by mentioning one of the customer’s key needs. Then mention the feature(s) of your solution that address that need. Point out the benefit the feature offers, and conclude with a brief proof statement showing how this feature of your product or service worked in another account (a mini case study).

Then start with another key need, link that to one or more features, show the benefit, and conclude with proof.

This pattern will make it easy for your customer to see instantly that what you are offering truly is a solution, because it’s presented in the context of the customer’s problems or needs.

After you’ve shown how the customer’s needs are being addressed, you can move into a more traditional description, going through the important details of your product or service in some logical order. Now if the customer starts to skim, we don’t mind because we’ve already made our point persuasively.

You can store persuasive descriptions of your products and services in the content library that comes with ProposalMaster and RFPMaster. That way you can pick and choose the right details to present at the right time and keep yourself from falling into the information dump.

Does it Sizzle?

2008-08-29T11:18:00.000-05:00

Ever hear the expression, “Don’t sell the steak—sell the sizzle?”

No, it wasn’t Snoop Dog who first said it. (He said something about “f’shizzle” which I have never understood.) It was Elmer Wheeler, a man who’s scarcely remembered today but who was America’s number one sales guru for more than twenty years.

“Don’t sell the steak—sell the sizzle,” said Elmer Wheeler. And he went on to say, “The sizzle has sold more steaks than the cow ever has, although the cow is, of course, mighty important.”

What Wheeler meant by a “sizzle” is the detail that has primary appeal for the customer—the aspect of our product or service that grabs their imagination and gets them excited. It’s the feature that’s most closely linked to the customer’s interests or motivations.

Wheeler described “sizzles” as being the “best selling arguments” we can come up with, factors that have a real gut-level appeal to the buyer. Wheeler thought this kind of appeal was spontaneous and irrational, and he used lots of food analogies to make his point—the sizzle of the steak, the bubbles in the wine, the tang of the cheese, the aroma of the coffee. A good “sizzle” will have the same immediate impact on us as walking into a restaurant and smelling something delicious, like hot pizza.

Wheeler’s point is a good one. Customers want to know, what’s in it for me? Unfortunately, the vast majority of sales presentations and proposals focus on facts. They cover details of the product or service or, even worse, the vendor’s history. No sizzle there!

A good sizzle should answer the one question every customer has rattling around in their head when they are listening to our sales presentation or reading our proposal: So what?

According to Wheeler, the rule to remember is this: “What is a ‘sizzle’ to one person may be a ‘fizzle’ or a whole bonfire to another person. Therefore, fit the ‘sizzle’ to the prospect on hand!” Figure out your client’s hot button and lead with that.

A technique I recommend to clients is to itemize their differentiators. What is it you do that nobody else does? What are the unique features of your products or services? What separates you in terms of methodology, management techniques, facilities or resources from the competition?

Once you’ve got your list of differentiators, put them down the first column of a table. Across the top, put the kinds of value customers look for—increased productivity, reduced operational costs, improved quality, whatever. This gives you a matrix of differentiators and value orientations. Now you can rank each differentiator in terms of its ability to prove to your customer that they’ll get that kind of value if they choose you. If it’s a terrific proof statement, give it maximum points. If it’s basically irrelevant, give it one or none. When you’re all done, you’ll not only have your sizzles, you’ll know when to use them. If you’re selling to a customer who’s looking for guaranteed compliance with regulatory standards, and you have three or four differentiators that help assure that, those are the ones you mention.

The next time your mouth starts watering at the smell of a onions sizzling in the pan or the aroma of chicken roasting on a spit, remind yourself that your sales presentations and proposals need to create that same kind of quick, visceral impact on your prospects and customers. Start looking for the hook, the sizzle, the appeal to the customer’s interests that will make them excited and eager to hear your message.

You can integrate your best sizzles with Sant Suite. To see an interactive, Web-based demo of our software in action, visit our Web site, www.santcorp.com. Or you can request more information from me by sending an e-mail to tomsant@santcorp.com.

Formulas for Solving Word Problems

2008-08-15T10:13:00.001-05:00

Clarity is the first rule of persuasion. If our customers don’t understand what we’re saying, they’re not going to reach for their wallets and offer us wads of cash. When people are confused, they slow down the buying process or shut it off completely. So it’s in our best interests to make sure our message is easy to understand. That’s our topic this time.

I was working with a group of engineers recently and mentioned that many editors use mathematical formulas to determine if a piece of text is readable. Their faces lit up like children who just saw grandma and grandpa pull up in a car full of presents.

“Formulas?” they asked. “There are formulas to show us how to write better? Why didn’t anyone tell us this before? We understand formulas.”

So we spent the next half hour looking at readability formulas, why they work, and how they can serve as a rough but reliable guide to the clarity of your writing. I honestly believe those engineers will now write better, because they have a tool to help them measure how well they’re doing.

Most readability formulas (and there are lots of them) measure how long your sentences are and how many big words you use. The underlying assumption is that long sentences and big words are harder to decode. Obviously, long words aren’t always hard to understand. And long sentences aren’t always difficult to read. There are exceptions. However, as a rough guideline, these underlying assumptions work pretty well.

The easiest way to calculate readability is to let your computer do it for you. There are two other formulas that are simple enough you can do the calculations in your head.

Measuring Readability with Your Word Processor

If you use Microsoft Word, open the “Tools: Options: Spelling and Grammar” box and select “Show Readability Statistics.” Now the word processor will calculate your readability each time you run a spelling check. If you want to check the readability on just a portion of a document, simply highlight the portion you want to check and click on the spell check icon. When it asks if you want to check the rest of the document, select “No.”

Microsoft Word presents your readability in a chart titled “Readability Statistics” that gives you lots of useful information. (WordPerfect users have a similar tool that also yields a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index.)

There’s a lot of useful information here. I can see that my average sentence length is about right (around 15 to 17 words is a good average sentence length for adult readers), and I see that I’ve completely avoided passive voice constructions. But what about the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level numbers? Are they good or bad?

The Reading Ease score is based on a standard of 100. The higher the number, the easier the writing is to understand. In business writing, which includes proposals, of course, a good score would be somewhere between 50 and 70. Based on that score, my paragraph is all right, but it could be simpler.

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level measurement correlates the complexity of the writing with the equivalent U.S. grade level of education the reader needs to read the particular passage easily. (Note that this is strictly a measurement of the complexity of the writing. It does not mean the content is appropriate for someone at that level. Readability and content are different issues.)

What is the right level for your proposal? For your executive summary, aim for a grade level equivalent of 10 or less. That’s approximately the level of front page articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, which are clearly intended for well educated adults. Other parts of the proposal could creep a little higher than 10, but 12 is the danger line. If the grade level is higher than 12, you must simplify the writing. Unfortunately, I’ve seen executive summaries that had readability scores above 20!

Sometimes you can’t use the word processor to calculate readability. Maybe you have hard copy only, or maybe the text is stored in Adobe Acrobat. Retyping an entire passage just to measure its readability is not a task most of us would gladly undertake. The good news is that you can still calculate readability easily by using either of two simple techniques: Gunning’s Fog Index or the SMOG Index.

Gunning's Fog Index

Robert Gunning first published his measure of readability in 1952. Half a century later, people still produce “foggy” prose, so his tool is still relevant. To calculate the Fog Index, follow these three steps:

1. Choose a passage of about 100 words and determine the average sentence length for that passage. (You just divide the number of sentences into the total number of words.)

2. In the same passage, count the number of big words—which, by definition, means words with three syllables or more. Do not include proper nouns (like Cincinnati), words that are combinations of short, easy words (compound words like bookkeeper and understand), or verb forms that acquire three syllables by the addition of -ed, or -es or -ing (like created, trespasses, traveling).

3. Add together the average sentence length and the number of big words. Then, to determine the Fog Index, multiply this sum by .4. This will produce a number that is a grade level equivalent, just as you got from the Flesch-Kincaid index.

The Smog Index

Like the Fog Index, the Smog Index measures the murkiness inherent in a piece of writing. It uses a slightly different method to arrive at the final answer, which is again a school-grade level that indicates the relative difficulty or ease of reading the given passage.

To use the Smog Index, count the number of big words (same definition applies) in a passage of 30 consecutive sentences. Then find the square root of that number. Add 3 and you’ll have a grade level equivalent.

I know these formulas probably sound goofy to you if you’ve never heard or them or tried them before. But if you try them a couple of times, you’ll see that they’re both easy and helpful.

Another way to improve the readability of your writing, of course, is to hire people who can write clearly to do it for you. That’s where the Sant Corporation can help. We have writers trained in persuasive communication principles who know how to produce clear, simple prose for your proposals and presentations.

Words That Make Me Wince, Part 2

2008-08-07T11:20:00.000-05:00

Probably no message that I have sent out in the past few months has generated more e-mail in response than my tirade about misused words. It seems that many of you have your own pet peeves.

So here is the sequel: another installment of Words that Make Me Wince.

In an earlier message, we commented on some words that are frequently misused, including impact, parameter, affect/effect, serve/service, and simple/simplistic. These are words that writers often use incorrectly and, speaking strictly for myself, the errors make me wince.

For example, a proposal recently stated:

"All communications, which effect the technical aspects of the project, must be directed through the Project Manager."

The obvious error is the word "effect." The writer meant "affect," a verb. In addition, the idea of directing communications "through the Project Manager" is an intriguing one. A lot of communications could leave that Project Manager looking like a sieve.

Well, there are a few other words and mistakes that bug me.

First, why do people write, "There are more than 114 sales managers attending the conference." Why not a round number like 100? Or 110, even? Why "more than 114?" And what is that, anyway? 115?

Another goofy thing-a phenomenon I call "drive by capitalization." It's the apparently uncontrollable urge some people have to throw in a capital letter every so often. The result is this kind of passage:

Nova Technology's long term Strategy is to contribute significantly to our customers' Competitiveness by becoming world-class in Reliable and Responsive.

There are at least eight things wrong with that sentence, but one of the most pointless mistakes is the capitalization of strategy, competitiveness, reliable, and responsive.

Here are some other mistakes that undercut our credibility:

IT'S/ITS/ITS': It's pretty embarrassing to misspell a three-letter word, but people do it all the time. I-T-apostrophe-S is a contraction. It means "it is." I-T-S without the apostrophe is a possessive pronoun. For example: "The company and its board of directors...." I-T-S-apostrophe doesn't exist. There's no such word.

Maybe it will help people who make this mistake to think about other possessive pronouns, such as "yours," "hers," "ours," and "theirs." None of those words get an apostrophe. I guess the confusion stems from the fact that we show possessive case with nouns by adding an apostrophe-S: "The company's managers..." "The building's exit..." The customer's decision..." (Using the apostrophe that way is a mistake that goes back so far in the history of English that it has become accepted.)

PRINCIPAL/PRINCIPLE: Most of us remember that "the principal is our pal." What about the main partners in a law firm? It's the same word. The main person or main thing is the "principal" element. "Principal" can also mean "leader" or "head."

On the other hand, a "principle" is a code, a standard, or an axiom. Thus, we could say, "Some principals have no principles" and make perfect sense.

IMPLY/INFER: To imply something means to suggest it. Inanimate objects can imply things. For example, we could say, "The laboratory tests imply that the new compounds are safer than the current formulation."

To infer requires mental activity. It's an activity. Thus, we would say, "Sherlock Holmes inferred from the evidence that the crime had been committed by a disgruntled proposal writer."

COMPLIMENT/COMPLEMENT: To "compliment" means to say something nice, to flatter someone. To "complement" means to go with, to fulfill or augment something. If the menu says each entrée includes "a dinner salad to compliment your meal," we may be interested to hear what those compliments will be, but we're likely to find that the salad is just as mute as any other plate of lettuce.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Proposal Writing

2008-08-01T11:22:00.000-05:00

A recent article talked about schools that are improving students' test scores by "teaching the test." In other words, they're showing them exactly what to do and what to avoid in order to get better scores on standardized tests.

There's some logic to that approach. Knowing the biggest problems in advance can help a person avoid them. So that's what this attachment is about. It describes the "seven deadly sins" of proposal writing. The biggest mistakes people make. I hope that by making you aware of them I can help you avoid them.

Clients will judge you in part by the quality of your sales proposal. It may be subconscious, but they look at your proposal for indications of your ability to handle a project professionally.

Here are the seven most common mistakes that can destroy your client's opinion.

It's time to confess: Are your proposals committing any of these sins? Put a mental check mark next to the ones you think might apply to you.

Fail to focus on the client's business problems
No persuasive structure
Full of jargon, making them difficult to understand
Too long, overly detailed, too technical, disorganized
Inconsistent in appearance, content, or pricing
Inaccurate or incomplete information
Credibility killers--misspellings, grammar mistakes, etc.

Some sins are worse than others. If you checked either of the first two, your proposals are in serious trouble. Next time we'll talk about how to identify the client's business problems, and the message after that will discuss persuasive structure.

The third, fourth, and fifth sins are not quite as serious, but they will probably make it difficult for the customer to understand your message. The customer may "tune out" of the document, start skimming and skipping and flipping pages. An inconsistent format or contradictions in content or pricing causes additional confusion and raises doubt in the customer's mind.

Inaccurate or incomplete information can result in bad, unprofitable business. One telecommunication firm found that sales people were building proposals with information drawn from "orphaned" Web sites and databases. In fact, they were offering proposals for products and services that didn't even exist any more!

The last sin is a basic one and the main damage it does is to your credibility. Misspelled words, errors in grammar or punctuation, typos, and similar errors may not change the meaning of what you say, but they will definitely undercut your professionalism in saying it.

The Dumbest Cliches In Business Writing

2008-07-30T11:12:00.000-05:00

We've all heard them or seen them in print. We're so used to them, we don't think about them any more. But when we use them, we don't sound very smart or original.

What are they? The clichés of business writing. Here are a few to eliminate from your own writing if you can.

Scott Adams' hero of the cubicle, Dilbert, has helped us realize how ridiculous we sound when we use business and technical clichés. Some clichés were originally clever or original phrases that have become meaningless through overuse. Other clichés never made sense in the first place; they were based on the misuse or abuse of language.

My personal favorite among dumb clichés is the all-purpose closing to sales letters and proposal cover letters: "If you have any questions, please feel free to call."

Why does it bother me? First, it turns over control of the sales process to the customer. Second, it presupposes a failure to communicate. ("Look, I know I can't write. I confuse people all the time. Just call me and we'll figure this out together.") And, third, it contains no call to action at all.

At the front end of proposal cover letters, you often read this cliché: "We would like to express our appreciation for the opportunity to submit our response to your request for proposal..." Blah, blah, blah. So what's wrong with it? Because it's in subjunctive mood, I'm always tempted to mutter, "Well, if you would like to, go ahead. Express yourself already." Plus, it sounds formulaic and phony.

Another cliché that people use to damage themselves is the phrase, "to be perfectly honest with you..." What does that mean? Previously you were lying to me? Being less than "perfectly" honest? Hmm. When people use that expression frequently, I really become suspicious.

A couple of clichés that have become popular recently, particularly in high-priced consulting circles, are the use of "traction" applied to something intangible, such as an idea, and the phrase "at the end of the day," meaning something like "finally" or "later."

So a truly gifted communicator might say: "To be perfectly honest with you, at the end of the day the advertising campaign failed to gain traction with consumers, so we didn't achieve market penetration."

Whoa! There's another beauty: "penetrating the market." How Freudian is that?

Other dumb clichés fall into a couple of categories. There is the set of grandiose clichés: "best of breed," "world class," and "cutting edge" are among the most popular. (To me, "best of breed" brings to mind thoughts of a dog show. The other just seem pompous.)

Another category of clichés includes such "touchy/feely" expressions as "partnering," "win/win," "rightsizing" (instead of layoffs), "holistic," "user friendly," "value added," and so on. Interestingly, the same people who talk about "win/win" and "partnering" are often the same ones who use militaristic language to describe business: "campaigns," "capturing markets," "take no prisoners," and similar nonsense.

If you love the language, or if you just want to make your point clearly and forcefully, challenge yourself before using clichés in your business writing. At best, they have no impact and suggest that you lack originality. At worst, they distract the audience from your message, spawning irrelevant associations and undercutting your credibility.

Breaking the Rules

2008-07-15T10:17:00.000-05:00

Randy, a reader of Messages That Matter, wrote me last week to let me know that I had made a mistake in one of my messages. I had written a sentence fragment, which he thought sounded awkward and, well, fragmented.

I wrote Randy back to thank him for reading so carefully and for caring about the correct use of English. But I also said that I thought he was wrong about the sentence fragment thing. He was quite right that it was a fragment. But writing an occasional sentence fragment isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

That got me to thinking about our topic this time—rules of grammar and style that either aren’t rules at all or that don’t matter very much.

Correct grammar must matter, right? Otherwise, why would the school system spend so much time and effort in trying to teach it to us? After all, they call it “grammar school,” not “arithmetic school” or “reading school.” It must be important.

Understanding standard English grammar and learning to use it correctly are both worthwhile accomplishments. As we move into the world of work, we need to communicate with people whose use of language differs from our own. They may speak with a regional accent or come from a different ethnic background than we do, one that has influenced their use of English. In order for us all to communicate with each other successfully, we need to share a common understanding of how the language works. This is particularly important in writing, because in writing we don’t have access to all the nonverbal elements that help us get our point across when we are speaking to someone in person.

That’s the point of standard English. The “rules” of grammar are actually nothing more than a description of how this standard system works. If we all play by the same rules, the communication game can proceed relatively smoothly. If some of us follow different rules, communication will quickly break down.

But some of the so-called rules aren’t actually rules. They are pedagogical shortcuts that our teachers used to make their own jobs easier. Or they are rules that applied to the use of language several generations ago, but which we no longer follow.

Here are some examples of so-called rules that aren’t:

Never start a sentence with “And”. And why not? Because Mrs. Whipple said we couldn’t back in the fourth grade? And, like the other coordinating conjunctions (but, or, for, nor, yet, and so), is used to join words, phrases, clauses or ideas of equal rank. Sometimes those ideas will be expressed in the form of complete sentences. The relationship between them will be more obvious to our reader if we use a coordinating conjunction at the start. You have probably noticed this practice in newspapers, magazines, and books and, if you had a Mrs. Whipple in your background, you may have assumed this was just further proof of the decline of civilization as we know it. No, that’s not the case. Instead, it’s an example of a teacher making her job easier by laying down an absolute rule rather than explaining the underlying principle.

When kids learn to write, they struggle to master the tools of the written language, including spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. As a result, they are likely to write something like this:

“Last summer we went to Disneyland on vacation. And Sea World.”

The last three words logically belong in the preceding sentence. But Mrs. Whipple doesn’t have the time to explain why, so she just circles them and writes in the margin of our paper, “Never start a sentence with ‘And’.” So we never do, even when it would make sense.

Never write a sentence fragment. Is that really a rule? Maybe. It depends on how formal your writing is. If you want to sound conversational or if you want to create some dramatic emphasis, you should consider writing a sentence fragment instead of a complete sentence. I use a lot of fragments in these messages, but I almost never use them in proposals. The choice is driven by tone and by the nature of the audience.

Never end a sentence with a preposition. Sometimes putting a preposition at the end of a sentence is awkward or even unnecessary:

“Where are you going to?”

We could just say or write, “Where are you going?” The “to” at the end isn’t needed. But sometimes the preposition falls naturally at the end of the sentence. When it does, leave it there:

“I don’t remember which file I put her documents in.”

I suppose you could twist that around to say something like “I don’t remember into which file I put her documents,” but why would you? You’d sound like a dweeb.

In other cases, the preposition isn’t functioning as a preposition at all, but rather as part of the verb. We say that we will not “put up with” certain conditions. We express “interest in” something. It’s possible that those prepositions could end up at the end of a sentence:

“We told the realtor which offices we are interested in.”

There’s nothing wrong with that sentence and there’s definitely no reason to move the preposition.

In my response to Randy I said that grammar is like music. If we don’t have an ear for what sounds right in the first place, knowing and applying rules won’t help us much.

The Sant Corporation’s team of writers can produce great proposal text that will be music to your ears. If you need help creating your proposal library, give us a call.

Establishing Meaningful Outcomes

2008-06-30T10:20:00.000-05:00

In the last message, we discussed the impact and importance of solving a customer’s problems. By focusing on the impact of these results, customers can then become inspired to make a decision because they are more aware that the problems they face are actually worth solving.

So how do you find out which results actually matter to the client? Are they solely financial? Technical? Social? A combination of these and several more? That is your ultimate goal, to establish all levels of outcomes a client deems as most meaningful.

If the customer doesn’t get that the problem your proposal addresses is real and you are providing a significant potential payoff for the organization, then run for the exit. You’re wasting your time.

People buy to meet their needs or solve their problems. To get them to buy from you instead of your competitors, you need to broadcast a clear, compelling value proposition over a channel they’ll be sure to hear: WII-FM.

What is WII-FM? A radio station? Actually, no, it’s a receiver located inside everyone’s head that guides the decision making process, translation - What’s In It For Me?

When your offer is delivered, customers want to see that it produces positive business impact. They may be seeking goals such as improving financial performance, increasing market share, retaining more customers, advancing the technical infrastructure, automating a labor-intensive process, or even complying with regulatory standards. It’s your job to identify these goals and then link your value proposition to them.

Ineffective sales messages focus on information about your company, your products, or your services; however, effective messages provide answers to these four basic questions decision makers typically ask:

1. Is this really what we need?

2. Will it have a positive impact on our business?

3. Can this vendor deliver the products or services on time and on budget?

4. Are we getting good value for our money, particularly considering the probable impact on our business?

By consistently returning to these core concerns as you deliver your sales message and keeping the customer tuned in to WII-FM, you can remain on that sales frequency.

So where’s the best place to get insight into what outcomes the client desires? From the client, of course. Try these questions: What kinds of results are you seeking? How will you measure success? Are there key performance indicators that you will monitor to determine whether you’re getting the right results? When you did similar projects in the past, how did you measure success? How will managers in other areas of the company know that this project was a success?

In the private sector, clients often measure success in financial terms. They seek increased revenue, greater profitability, a bigger market share, reduced headcount, lower cost of operations, budgetary compliance, and so on. For government agencies and nonprofits, financial return is likely to be less compelling than fulfilling the mission for which the organization exists—improving time on station for a particular weapon system, increasing diversity among graduate students, or reducing recidivism rates among parolees.

Two other areas of performance are frequently important. Customers often seek technical outcomes or infrastructure improvements. For example, getting disparate information systems to share data across mixed platforms might not increase revenues, but it will make the IT infrastructure work more efficiently. Likewise, achieving compliance with the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley might not increase market share, but it might keep your CEO from costly and time consuming legal challenges.

The other area of performance is one we might call “social outcomes” such as reducing attrition among middle managers, increasing customer loyalty, or even developing a stronger relationship with suppliers or resellers.

Clearly, there’s a lot of overlap among financial, technical, and social goals. The point is to make sure we look at all to maintain a three-dimensional view of outcomes.

When the client sees a big payoff from different levels, he or she is much more eager to hear about your solution.

That’s why Sant’s clients get so excited about our messages on improving proposal processes and content. Sant Suite delivers a compelling, measurable improvement in financial, technical, and social terms. Call us, we’re tuned in and ready to deliver the right results for your organization.

Once More with Feeling

2008-06-15T10:23:00.000-05:00

Winning the second time in a proposal competition is normally much easier than winning the first time around. Incumbent vendors win, on average, about 90 percent of all rebids. Even incumbents who have performed poorly win about 50 percent of the time. Clearly, winning a renewal is not as difficult as winning new business.

But you still have to do it right. That’s our topic this time.

In many industries, contracts come up for renewal every year or two and we are required to recompete for the business we’re already doing. This can feel like a waste of time. If we’ve been the client’s choice for several years and have done a decent job of providing services or products, we may think it’s unnecessary to write a persuasive proposal just to keep the business. Unfortunately, that attitude can creep into our proposal, suggesting complacency or even contempt, triggering the customer to start looking closely at competitors.

Another mistake people sometimes make on renewals is to wait to start the process until the Request for Proposal has been issued. If the decision maker in the client organization hasn’t heard a word from us in the past year, we may have made our job harder than it needs to be. It’s a good idea to start the renewal process on your own, well before the client brings it up. For example, you might schedule a “mid-term review” so you can remind the client of the promises you made in your last proposal, what you have done to fulfill them, and how well you have met or exceeded their expectations.

The renewal proposal can be shorter and more focused than a first-time proposal, because you don’t need to include some of the traditional content areas. For example, you won’t need to provide as much evidence of your competence. The client already knows whether you’re competent. You can minimize the company history, the team resumes, the references, and the case studies. (Obviously, if you’re responding to a formal RFP and the document asks you for these items, you must provide them.) Your renewal proposal can be much more concise and still be effective. However, you still must provide some evidence of competence, ideally by referencing work you have done during the previous period of work for this client.

There are two other changes to a renewal proposal that are important to note.

First, you should use the same persuasive structure you use in competitive proposals where you’re not the incumbent, focusing first on the client’s needs, then the outcomes, followed by the solution and evidence. However, when you present the client’s needs, you need to finesse them. After all, if you’ve been the incumbent provider for any length of time, the client might reasonably ask, “If you’ve been doing such a great job, why do we have these unmet needs and unsolved problems?”

The answer to this conundrum is to position the issue of needs by pointing out to the client that because of the positive changes that you have already introduced, because you have successfully resolved existing problems, you have laid the foundation for further growth, for improvements and innovations. Or you might try to position the client’s needs in terms of changes in the marketplace or the competitive landscape that require a response. Or you might present what they need in terms of opportunities. We’re no longer taking the client from a state of disarray to a state or order. Now we’re taking them from a very good position to a state of excellence, from a position of strength to a state of overwhelming competitive advantage.

Second, at the very outset of your executive summary, before you ever discuss the client’s needs, take a few minutes to remind them of some key successes during your recent contract. People have short memories. They tend to forget how it used to be before you came in to fix things. If you really did do a great job of improving their situation, you don’t want them to forget about it. Listing the accomplishments and comparing the client’s before with their after is an effective and appropriate first step.

What if there were problems between your organization and the client’s? What if you failed to deliver, missed deadlines, had cost overruns, or otherwise had serious client satisfaction issues? Is it better to ignore those problems and hope for the best, or to acknowledge them and try to put a positive spin on the situation? In general, if the problems occurred recently and were of some significance, you are better off mentioning them and indicating what lessons were learned and what changes to procedures or personnel were made to assure smooth performance going forward. However, if the problems occurred early in the contract and considerable time has passed, there’s probably no point in bringing them up. If you had some hiccups during start-up, for example, but since have had two years of seamless performance, why dredge up ancient history?

Renewal proposals are great, because your odds of winning are so much higher and you can cite specific examples of success the client will recognize. But the one thing you can’t afford is to take the renewal—or the client—for granted. Maintain a competitive attitude and write to win.

Did you know that Sant Suite allows you to convert your previous proposal into a new document with just a couple of mouse clicks? That feature makes it easy to turn your proposal into a review document or to transform a review presentation into a proposal. And with Sant Suite you can easily modify the proposal format so that renewals are different from first-time proposals. It’s all part of giving you a complete solution for your proposal needs.

Calculating Trust

2008-06-06T11:15:00.000-05:00

Math was never my favorite subject, but here's one equation that I find fascinating: The formula for trust.

Creating trust is an important part of selling. If we understand the components of trust, we can work that equation so that it comes out in our favor.

Most people prefer to buy from people they trust.

That sounds like common sense. Almost nobody would dispute it. But it leaves an important issue unresolved:

What is trust? And what are the behaviors that will contribute most directly to the creation of trust?

Here's a simple equation that expresses the essence of trust:

*****Trust = Rapport x Credibility / Risk*****

Rapport is based on a gut-level reaction. Do I like this person? Do I enjoy talking to him or her? Am I comfortable with this person's style?

The personal reactions that are the basis of rapport vary widely. A person who is very pragmatic and bottom-line oriented will become impatient with someone who is long-winded and detail oriented. Another person will be alienated by habitual tardiness, while someone else won't care. In general, it's safe to say that being respectful, behaving professionally, demonstrating sincere interest in the other person, not taking yourself too seriously, and being reliably truthful are all behaviors that consistently build rapport.

Credibility tends to be based on cognitive matters. Does this person seem to be an expert in his or her own field? Do they understand my business? Do they have the insights into my business that will help me achieve my goals?

To demonstrate your credibility, include case studies, references, testimonials, project plans, timelines, brief resumes of key team members, and similar forms of proof. The customer is looking for evidence that you know what you're talking about.

And then there's risk. Customers always perceive risk. Will I waste money? Will I waste time? Can the vendor really do what they claim? Are they too small to deliver? Too large to care about our business? Is their technology too old? Is their approach too new?

The best way to minimize risk is to offer some kind of guarantee. A service level agreement, a risk-sharing plan, a free trial period--these are all strategies for minimizing risk. You can't always do that, though. The other approach that will work is to provide good references to similar kinds of customers. Detailed case studies are also effective in overcoming the perception of risk.

Plus, you need to recognize that the sense of risk often comes from anxiety. By addressing the customer's business concerns and defining clear outcomes, you minimize concern about wasting money or time.

Finally, you can overcome risk by showing a big payoff from taking the chance. If the potential reward is big enough, even conservative decision makers will move forward. But the payoff has to be believable, and it has to deliver in an area that matters to the customer.

Showing the Impact

2008-05-30T10:26:00.000-05:00

Does your business have any unresolved challenges? Any needs that aren’t being met? Any problems crying out for a solution. Of course. Every business does.

And will they all be addressed? Probably not. Most of the time we choose to just live with our problems or needs. We don’t intend to do anything about them. Why not? Because the time, money and effort involved just aren’t worth it. There’s not enough of a payback to bother doing anything.

You don’t want your client to decide that it’s “just not worth it” to do anything about the problems or needs your proposal is addressing. Our topic this time is how to

The fundamental difference between informing and persuading is that persuasion must motivate action. If a customer reads our proposal and is motivated to make a decision, it was persuasive. If the customer reads it, nods his or her head, acknowledges that what we’re saying makes sense, and then does nothing—the proposal failed.

We start our proposals and other persuasive messages by focusing on the customer’s needs or problems. If we identify their “pain” correctly, we get their attention. But to get their motivation to act, we must move beyond the pain and focus on their potential “gain”. We must show them that there are important, positive outcomes from dealing with these issues. They want to know: How will the organization benefit if they eliminate the problems or meet the needs we have identified? Where’s the bottom-line impact? Is it worth it?

Outcomes are the impact our services or solutions have on the customer’s organization, and for maximum effectiveness our proposal should address the client’s outcomes immediately after identifying their needs. This is somewhat counterintuitive. You might think that it would be more logical to present the problem and then immediately recommend a solution. Maybe that would be more logical, but it won’t be as persuasive. People want to use the “estimation heuristic”—the technique of looking at various courses of action and choosing the course of action that yields the highest rate of return. But if we don’t show them where the outcomes are, they may not be able to figure it out for themselves. And it the outcomes aren’t big enough, they won’t care about the solution.

Write your outcome statements so that they meet five criteria:

1. Focus on an outcome the customer actually desires

You can sing a song of quality all night long, but if the customer is looking for cost savings or increased market share, your message will fall flat. The outcomes must be client-centered.

2. They must be measurable or quantifiable

“Improved efficiency” is not an outcome, but “reducing system downtime by 20%” is. “Increased profitability” is not quantified; “reducing attrition by 20% among mid-level managers and saving $1,250,000 annually in recruiting fees” can be measured. Marketing fluff—grandiose claims of “state of the art” solutions built on “best of breed” products and similar nonsense—is neither measurable nor quantifiable. It’s just annoying.

3. They must be organizational in nature

Personal or political goals usually don’t’ work in a proposal. They are very hard to quantify and they have too narrow an impact. Just because your key contact will benefit—for example, by achieving a key performance goal—that doesn’t mean the rest of the company will see compelling value. Results and outcomes are relevant if they benefit many people across the organization, not merely one decision maker or one group of employees.

4. They must come as a direct consequence of the impact your services or solutions have on the customer’s business operations

In this regard, you have three possible options:

1. You can improve a process, system, or mechanism that is already in place.

2. You can fix something that isn’t working.

3. You can implement a capability that the customer does not have.

5. They must be proportional to the cost of the solution

The larger the amount you are charging, the bigger the outcomes must be. Most folks aren’t interested in spending a lot of money for a little bit of return.

Defining the outcomes the customer will achieve from taking action is an essential step in delivering a persuasive message. That’s why the Sant Suite of proposal and presentation tools includes components to help you identify and position outcomes effectively. We try to make sure all the important elements are built right in to the system. The outcomes for you and your company are higher win ratios from better proposals produced faster. Are those outcomes you might be seeking?

The Only Opinion That Matters

2008-05-15T10:29:00.000-05:00

In sales, the only opinion that really matters is the customer’s. We may love our proposal, our boss may think it’s terrific, but if the customer doesn’t find it clear, compelling, and persuasive, it’s a loser.

But there’s another customer opinion which is even more important and more fundamental than their opinion about our proposal. That’s our topic this time.

Nearly 50 years ago, Joe Girard discovered a fundamental truth: every customer he sold had the potential to recommend him to 250 other people. If he could convert each customer into an enthusiastic, raving fan, his business would grow exponentially.

Girard outlined his approach in his book How to Sell Anything to Anybody, calling it his Law of 250. Girard’s insight is so important that I included it as one of the four key ideas that lie at the foundation of modern professional sales.

Fred Reichheld had the same insight. He concluded that the only opinion that matters is the opinion of the customer, and the only question on which their opinion matters is this: “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” Reichheld recommends that you ask your customers to answer this question on a scale of 0 to10, with 0 being “not in this lifetime” to 10 being “absolutely and enthusiastically!” Customers who rate your company in the 0 to 6 range are implicitly detractors—they are either actively negative about you or are so lukewarm as to damn you with faint praise. A score of 7 or 8 is considered neutral. A score of 9 or 10 means the customer is a promoter. Take the percentage of your customers who are “promoters” and subtract the percentage who are “detractors.” This is what Reichheld calls your “Net Promoter Score” or “NPS,” a metric that he claims is a reliable indicator of how well your business is doing. If you have a high NPS, you have a significant and sustainable competitive advantage.

What Girard and Reichheld are both pointing out is that no form of evidence is as convincing to a prospective new customer as the enthusiastic endorsement of an existing customer. In our sales activities and in our proposals, we need to remember the power of customer endorsements and include them at every opportunity. We can use references, testimonial letters, quotes from clients, and case studies to demonstrate that we have customers who are enthusiastic about our products or service. Because these embody the customer’s strong, positive opinion, they are convincing forms of evidence.

David Sroka, CEO of Point of Reference, recommends creating audio recordings of clients being interviewed about their experience of working with us and putting those files on a private Web page. We can then provide our prospects with the URLs to Web pages we want them to see.

To make customer endorsements work, regardless of the format in which they’re presented, we need to make sure that the customer’s experience clearly communicates a compelling value proposition. Prospects are faintly interested to hear that our current customers love working with us. They will be much more impressed if our current customers tell them that our efforts have resulted in bottom-line improvements to key performance indicators.

We’re pleased to report that a recent survey of our customers indicated that the vast majority of them are strong supporters of the Sant Suite solution. In our annual customer survey, we achieved a customer satisfaction rating of 88% from all customers and a rating of 95% from customers who use all four Sant Suite applications. There’s a score even Fred Reichheld would find impressive!

Competitive Intelligence

2008-05-07T11:17:00.000-05:00

Recently, one of the people who receives this newsletter wrote in to ask, "What would you think of a company that says we don't really have any competitors, because no else does exactly what we do. As a result, they choose to ignore information regarding the closest competitors."

It's an interesting dilemma and it's our topic for this message: how much time to spend studying and analyzing our competitors and when to just let it go.

Is it possible for a company to have NO competitors? Theoretically, it's possible, I suppose, but it's very unlikely. After all, even if you are the proud owner of iron-clad patents in a business so new and innovative that nobody else is in it yet, you still have a significant source of competition from other demands on your customers' time and money.

And I'm not even sure having no competitors is a desirable situation. Having no competitors may sound great, but in reality, it will probably make your sales process more difficult. Why? Because your customer will have no frame of reference and no points of comparison to use in developing an understanding of what the firm is offering.

In the classic "elevator story" structure that Geoffrey Moore presents in "Crossing the Chasm," the final part of that 30-second sound byte defining your entire business model and value proposition is "Unlike our key competitor X, our product/service [key differentiator]." The obvious point: If you can't make some kind of comparative statement, it's hard for the buyer to develop contextual understanding of what you offer and why it has value.

There are some other reasons why ignoring or denying the existence of competitors may not be a wise approach to business.

First of all, even if you know that nobody else is doing exactly what you do, the market may not see you as being that unique. Life is, in William James's phrase, "a booming, buzzing mass of confusion," and we have to do a whole lot of filtering and sorting just to make sense of it. Except for the things that are of most immediate, intimate concern to us (like our own families, our own businesses) we are likely to pigeonhole people and things into convenient slots. That means a customer may lump you into some broad cognitive category--IT consultant, sales trainer, healthcare provider, whatever--even though you do something that's uniquely different and that in your opinion should invalidate that kind of gross categorization.

Another thing to keep in mind is that sales is the epitome of knowledge work. And it's pretty hard to succeed in knowledge work from a position of ignorance.

Finally, we all need to remember that sometimes the biggest "competitor" we face in closing a deal is the option the customer has of doing nothing. There's always competition for the attention and budget of your prospective customers.

Which brings us to the main reason to be aware of your competitors. Having an accurate and up-to-date understanding of your competitors--whatever form they may take-will provide you with insights into ways to differentiate yourself and to craft a compelling value proposition. As we've said before, if you're not selling based on unique value, you may be selling on behalf of your competition.

What Do You Need?

2008-04-30T10:31:00.000-05:00

If you have been reading these messages for awhile, you know that I advocate starting your persuasive messages—including sales presentations, executive summaries, and cover letters—with a brief restatement of the customer’s needs.

In spite of my badgering, though, some people still choose to start with their company’s history, with a presentation of their solution, or some other generic content. I think that creates a bad first impression. They are saying to the prospective client, in essence, “You may have thought this proposal was about you and your business, but that’s where you would be wrong. It’s about us, our company and our products.”

It occurred to me recently that one reason people start with self-centered content might be that it’s easier to come by. If we don’t know what the customer’s needs are, or if we don’t know how to present those needs, we might resort to generic stuff about ourselves out of desperation. So that’s our topic this time—defining the customer’s needs.

The customer’s needs are the reasons they are considering making a major investment in your solution—the products and/or services you are proposing. Their needs are the business drivers that make the deal possible in the first place. If they have no need, there will be no deal.

Now, it’s true that by starting with a brief restatement of their needs, we’re not telling them anything they don’t already know. So why bother? We start with the customer’s needs because what they don’t know is whether we’ve been paying attention. Did we listen and have we crafted a proposal that actually addresses their business needs? The first question buyers ask themselves is this: Am I getting what I really need, or am I getting what they want me to buy? Starting with a focus on their business situation is an effective way to answer that question correctly.

In your executive summary, don't waste time telling the client how thankful you are for the opportunity to submit a proposal. That usually ends up sounding like you’re groveling anyway. Instead, focus on the specific problems, capability gaps, or other issues that are hurting the client's productivity, profitability, or ability to achieve key objectives. The more specific you are about the client’s needs, the more believable your recommendations will be.

There are four mistakes that proposal writers regularly make in discussing the client’s needs. These pitfalls undercut the persuasiveness of your message, so avoid them:

1. Defining the customer’s need as being identical with your solution. This happens all the time because some people have a hard time getting outside their own head and thinking like the customer.

I was once working on a major proposal with a national bank so I asked the sales team, “What is the customer’s key need.” After some thought the account manager said, “I guess I’d say that they need the ability to verify credit cards on line.”

“Hmmm. Really?” I said. “So what’s your solution for them?”

“Well, we’re going to provide them with the ability to verify credit cards on line.”

“Sounds like a perfect fit!” I said. “But I’m curious—why do they need to verify credit cards on line?”

The account manager rolled his eyes, a little impatient at my obvious lack of insight, but he finally explained, “So they can sell stuff over the Web.”

“Oh, of course. And why do they want to do that?”

“Because their two biggest competitors have e-commerce sites and are selling products over the Web.”

“Okay,” I said. “But why do they want to copy what their competitors are doing?”

“Because they’ve lost over 20 percent of their market share over the past year!”

Ding! Ding! Now that sounds like a need statement, doesn’t it?

Sometimes it pays to act like a four year old. Keep asking why until you get to the root cause that is the basis of the opportunity.

2. Failing to push your analysis far enough. Try to trace the “chain of pain” as far into the organization as you can. Ask to interview other key managers. Look beyond the obvious to see what results are being affected or impeded at the client organization. By taking a larger view, you can see the breadth of the problem and can then present it in your proposal as having organizational implications. That will increase the sense of urgency associated with solving it, and will also make it easier for you to establish a compelling value proposition.

3. Assuming that the RFP defines the business problem or need. The RFP typically defines the requirements of an acceptable solution, not the business reasons a solution is needed. In an RFP, companies and government agencies are highly reluctant to specify actual problems. That’s information that could aid their competitors or that could spook investors. It almost never appears in the RFP.

4. Not talking to enough of the management team in the client’s organization. HR and Operations are likely to have very different points of view on what the company’s problems are than Finance or Sales. Go beyond a single contact or a single department to get a well-rounded view of the issues or problems the company faces.

The good news is that as you learn what your customers’ needs are, Sant Suite allows you to capture and store them. That way you can quickly pull them into a presentation or proposal when you work with a client whose needs are similar. You save time without sacrificing persuasiveness.

Three Qualifying Questions

2008-04-15T10:39:00.000-05:00

I’m convinced that poor qualification leads to more wasted effort in sales than almost any other problem. For your own sanity and efficiency, you need to screen out the non-starters among your leads as quickly as you can to avoid wasting time. That means qualifying prospects early and effectively. And that’s our topic this time.

Before you do any qualifying, do your homework. Know your client. Review their web site, read their annual reports and 10-K, read their product brochures and company history before you talk to them. Your goal is to prepare yourself so that you can talk with the prospect in an intelligent way about his or her business. In fact, you should have three specific questions prepared in advance, based on what you’ve learned from your research. For example, if you were selling to an office products company, you might say:

“I see you are focusing on selling large business shredders this year. Is that your primary sales focus?”

“Do you typically compete against the large-scale document storage companies or are they going after a different market?”

“Has the growth of digital documents affected the volume of paper that needs to be shredded?”

Is there a real need?

Qualifying questions should uncover whether or not the prospect has a real need, problem, issue, or opportunity that you can address. If there’s no problem, there’s virtually no likelihood that they’ll buy. Good business people don’t spend money unless they are eliminating an undesirable situation or capitalizing on an important opportunity. Here are some questions that could help you figure out if there’s a real need:

· Who in the prospect’s organization is experiencing a problem that could be solved by using your product or service? Is this problem significant to them? Besides the people who are directly dealing with the problem, who will gain from eliminating that problem or meeting that need? In what ways?

· What are the consequences if they don’t solve the problem, close the gap in capabilities, or meet the need?

· How are they handling this issue or problem now? (To build rapport and credibility, you can share a success story of a client who had similar concerns and overcame them through the use of your product or service.)

· What is their biggest complaint or concern about the product or service they are using now?

Is there a significant payoff?

If there’s a real problem to be solved, the next question should determine whether or not there’s a compelling outcome, impact or other measure of gain associated with solving the problem. For example, you might ask:

· How do they calculate return on investment? How do they recognize and publicize a good decision? Who determines what a good investment is?

· What does management want to gain from improving a process or from buying your product?

· Ask for the operating numbers or statistics. How many? How often? At what cost? In which locations? Numerical results? Statistical findings? You’re looking for information indicating what kind of baseline they have now (so you can prove that your solution has improved the situation) and what their key performance indicators are (so that you know where to focus your value proposition).

Is there a good fit?

Finally, ask questions to determine whether or not your solutions are a good fit—in terms of technical features, specifications, business practices, locations, or other factors—for what this prospect seeks. Some questions to help you figure out the issue of fit include:

· How do they make decisions? What are their steps? Approvals? Timeframe?

· What criteria do they use in making decisions? How are those criteria ranked?

· What are the technical specifications that a solution must meet? What are the operational, logistical, or other factors that will determine whether a solution represents a good technical or business fit?

If you ask probing questions at the outset to determine if there’s a real need, a potentially compelling payoff, and a good fit, you’ll avoid wasting your time pursuing deals that aren’t real or that you don’t have any chance of winning.

Once you’ve qualified those deals, you can generate terrific proposals and presentations that address all the key decision factors with ProposalMaster and PresentationBuilder from Sant.

Entering Your Evidence

2008-03-30T10:43:00.000-05:00

Evidence is crucial in a courtroom—it’s the basis on which the judge or jury makes a decision.

It’s just as important in your sales process and your proposal. The kinds of evidence you use and the way you present it can make a huge difference in whether the verdict goes in your favor or against you.

That’s our topic this time.

We’ve been talking about persuasive structure in our recent messages. We said that effective persuasion follows the NOSE pattern: Needs, Outcomes, Solutions, and Evidence. We start by restating the client’s needs because that gets their attention and reduces their anxiety. We then outline the potential outcomes the client will achieve by solving their problems or meeting their needs, because that creates the motivation to go forward. Third, we recommend a solution, but we do it in a way that’s client-centered rather than product-centered.

I hope that so far you’ve been gulping down the KoolAid and are in full agreement. Anyway, all remains is the final step, presenting our evidence.

Sant Corporation has all kinds of evidence to back up our claims that we can save you time and increase your win ratio through our proposal automation systems and services. And we’d love to share that evidence with you! Give us a call and let us prove it.

Emoticons?—LOL!

2008-03-15T10:46:00.000-05:00

Smiley faces don’t belong in your business e-mails. Neither do acronyms that create confusion. They look unprofessional and way too casual. That’s our topic this time.

“Emoticons” is the term applied to the various combinations of punctuation used to express emotion and to the actual icons of little faces displaying various states of happiness or distress. For example, : - ) indicates happiness, while : - O is supposed to suggest surprise.

Using these things is perfectly all right if you’re sending an e-mail to a good friend, to a child, or to a message board where you anonymously post your feelings about your favorite sports team or somebody’s chocolate cheesecake recipe. For instance, if you want to show that the quarterback’s performance in last week’s game made you sick, stick in the green, queasy-looking face. It’s kind of cute.

But don’t put emoticons in your business e-mails, please. They’re inappropriate.

The same goes for cryptic abbreviations and acronyms. Recently a colleague of mine in the U.K. sent me an e-mail in which he wrote:

The client would like you to pencil in last the two weeks of September, if possible, to run another program for them. I will meet next week to discuss their plans, which are firming up. Can you as a first step, let me know WRT September?

I let him know which dates in September were open, but I had to ask him what “WRT” means. I felt a little stupid, but I couldn’t figure it out. He wrote back:

WRT: With Respect To!

Okay. Now I felt really dumb. But at least I knew what the acronym meant.

What if I hadn’t been a good friend and colleague, but rather a customer. Would I have asked for a definition? Probably not.

What about you? Are you certain your recipient knows what LOL means? What about IMHO? Or YMMV?

If you do a lot of instant messaging or hang out on MySpace, you’re probably rolling your eyes at me. These acronyms are the lingua franca of the on-line world, a staple of the vocabulary of the IM crowd. But I have to confess that for quite awhile I thought LOL meant “lots of luck.” As a result, I often couldn’t quite grasp what the writer meant by using that term. Often it appeared to be ironic. Imagine my surprise to learn it actually means “laugh out loud”.

(If you’re as clueless as I am about these acronyms, you can find a helpful list of definitions for Internet acronyms on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFO#W .)

For help in writing clearly and persuasively, contact us. We have a staff of trained persuasive writers who can cut through the toughest assignments quickly and professionally. And when we’re done, the only emoticons you’ll want to use are the ones expressing happiness and outstanding customer satisfaction. (I think that’s the smiley face with the bracket, but I’m not sure.)

Capturing the Lessons Learned

2008-03-07T11:25:00.000-05:00

Nobody can afford to waste experience. It cost way too much to acquire it.

How do you capture lessons learned from your proposal writing experience? And how do you convert those lessons into improvements that affect everyone?

That’s our topic this time.

There are a number of activities you can engage in after you have submitted the proposal. Some of these are on-going steps in the sales process. Others are intended to help you learn what works and what doesn’t to improve your next proposal. Both kinds of activities should be a regular part of your post-submission regimen.

In the private sector, and even in some government bids, contacting the decision maker after your have submitted your proposal is a good idea. Maintaining open communication after submission may help win the deal, since it can be an opportunity to begin closing the deal and negotiating terms. (In some government bidding processes, you are expressly for bidden to contact the Contracting Officer, and doing so will result in your disqualification from the bid process, so make sure you understand what’s allowed.)

It can also be a great opportunity to learn what worked and what didn’t. Often, after we have finished a major proposal, we’re so sick of the thing, we don’t want to look at it, much less talk about it with the customer or with our colleagues. That’s understandable, but if we don’t make the effort to do some basic analysis, we’ll never learn to do a better job. We’ll tend to repeat the same processes and produce the same documents over and over.

Talk to the Customer

The decision has been made. You won. You lost. The award was split between you and a competitor. Regardless of the outcome, there are still things you can do to learn and possibly to influence the future. Some of these activities include debriefings, win/loss analyses, and research to prepare you for the next opportunity.

Debriefings. If you were competing to win business from the federal government and have been notified that you did not win, you have the right to receive a debriefing after the decision has been announced. This is a legal right which you can exercise under Federal Acquisition Regulation Part 15.506. Among state and local governments the rules vary, but often you can request a debriefing in those situations, too. And if you have been competing in the private sector, there’s nothing to prohibit you from asking the prospective client to provide you with some insight into their process and how well your proposal stacked up. (Of course, there’s nothing to prohibit them from telling you to go pound sand, either. In the private sector, they don’t have to tell you anything.)

If you do arrange for a debriefing, use it as an opportunity to learn as much as you can about how the agency handles acquisitions, what their key decision criteria are, whether or not they followed their own guidelines, and anything else that may help you in the next opportunity. Don’t go into a debriefing with the notion that you are going to turn around the decision that was already made. That’s not going to happen.

Instead, focus on process. How were the proposals evaluated? How were scores assigned? If you think that the evaluators failed to understand or ignored important aspects of your proposal, try to think like a courtroom attorney. Ask a few innocent and nonthreatening questions that establish the assumptions, then start asking the tough ones. If you hear that some of your references were weak, ask which ones and what specifically they said that seemed lukewarm. You should also focus on specific content about your proposal and how it was reviewed. If you go in with a few prepared questions that address the actual content of your proposal, you’re more likely to learn something you can use in the future to improve your works.

Win/Loss Analyses. Even if a particular client won’t give you a formal debriefing, you can still learn a lot about how your proposals are doing. Start conducting regular win/loss analyses the same way that businesses conduct customer satisfaction surveys. That is, select a specific percentage of all the opportunities you propose and seek feedback. Conduct the analysis whether you win or lose. You can do it in the form of a questionnaire, a telephone interview, even a site visit if that’s convenient. Be sure to make it clear that you are not trying to re-open the decision process, but are interested in getting feedback to improve future proposals. Keep the analysis short, factual, and focused on the actual document—format, pricing, length, clarity, use of differentiators, and so on. If you have the resources, you might even consider hiring an outside firm to conduct these analyses for you. That makes the process more objective and also less threatening to your clients.

Research. Win or lose, maintain contact with the client organization and listen for opportunities that may lie ahead. Contact them regularly, sharing with them new ideas and developments, articles that you think will be of interest to them, and so forth. An on-going campaign of regular communication can help establish strong recognition for you and your company and may help open channels of information that will be invaluable on the next bid.

Talk to your Colleagues

At the conclusion of each proposal project, after a suitable period of rest and healing for the proposal team, conduct an internal review for about an hour. The main goal is to review the process and the deliverable to find out how you can do a better job next time. What lessons did you learn from this experience? How can those lessons improve your performance or simplify the task in the future? The proposal manager can lead the discussion, but if the proposal manager is part of the problem or if there is conflict about which lessons need to be learned, you might want to bring in an outside facilitator.

To engage in continuous improvement, you need to make a conscious, consistent effort to gather information about how effectively each proposal succeeds in achieving its purpose. Keeping track of the “lessons learned” from each project, and then using them to modify content in your database, steps in your process, or components in your training, will help all team members deliver more value, communicate more persuasively, and enhance your contributions to your company.

Solving the Puzzle of Solutions

2008-02-29T10:49:00.002-05:00

We’ve talked about addressing the customer’s needs and the outcomes they seek as being the first two steps in delivering a persuasive message. Now it’s time to talk about the part you probably find most interesting—your solution.

But how do you do that without sounding self-serving? How do you recommend yourself, your products, and your services without losing the client-centered tone you’ve established so far?

That’s the puzzle of solutions, and solving it is our topic this time.

The heart of your proposal is, of course, your solution. If you have first whetted the client’s appetite for it by focusing on their needs and potential outcomes, your client will be eager to hear it. However, this is the stumbling point for many proposals.

The dilemma is when the solution’s presentation lapses into technical details and jargon, focuses on details rather impacts, and then comes across as self-centered because it fails to connect back to either needs or outcomes. The client still wants to know why you’re recommending this approach or this product. What makes this the right way to go? How does it solve the key problems? Why is it the best way to deliver the results the client seeks?

To solve the solution puzzle, write from the top down. Your first sentence should focus on a general statement of what you are recommending to solve the client’s problem. The next sentence or two should explain the recommendation in functional terms. What will your solution do for the client? How will it work? Then make sure you tie this with the client’s specific needs by:

· Explaining what component(s) of your solution are intended to address each need

· What positive impact each aspect of the solution will deliver

· Cite a brief bit of proof—a reference, an award, test data, or some other form of objective validation that substantiates your claim

Here’s a sample solution statement:

The InVicta IronClad model 2100 Access Control Head End Hardware and Software will be the heart of the system for your offices in Pittsburgh. The panel will connect to the new software head end located within your facility. The system will be designed for easy access into your existing network if you decide to connect remote sites to your location. In the initial design, we have assumed that the host computer will be located in the Security Console. As part of this project, we will install access control panels, card readers, and alarm contacts for granting or denying access into the existing three doors in your office. We will additionally install Card Readers on the existing sliding gates and turnstiles. Each of the access points will have a card reader and contact for access into the facility as well as door status. The purpose of the system is to determine who is allowed into the facility at any given time and to keep accurate records of all access or alarm activity.

Blah, blah, blah… Not very persuasive, interesting, or clear, is it?

Here’s the same solution statement rewritten using the format outlined above:

To address your need for improved physical security in the office environment at your corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh, we recommend an electronic security system that limits access to authorized personnel only. The access system prevents everyone from entering your offices unless they first swipe an electronic ID badge through an automated card reader. We recommend the InVicta IronClad model 2100 Access Control system, which includes all required hardware and software. At the heart of the system, the InVicta uses a comprehensive control panel, known as the “head end” hardware, and a software package that controls all access points, reads the ID cards, checks the database, and provides constant monitoring around the clock. We recommend this system because it matches your specific needs:

· Budgetary compliance: The total price for the InVicta system is more than $20,000 below the budget you have established. Other systems using biometric data rather than card readers are much more costly without providing any more security. The InVicta’s lower price will free up funds to cover installation and training, assuring a smooth roll-out. For example, we installed an InVicta system for a large automobile dealership and the entire package, including all support services, was less than the hardware costs alone for competitive models.

· Minimal disruption to workflow: Your employees will find the ID card system easy to learn and use. As they quickly accept the system, you will benefit by sustaining your normal working patterns thus eliminating any impact on productivity. To indicate how easy this system is to learn, consider this: we installed a new access control system at a major Pittsburgh bank over a three-day weekend. When people arrived at work on Tuesday morning, management greeted them in the lobby, gave them their new ID cards, and taught them how to swipe the card reader for entry. From that day forward, the bank experienced only two access control problems out of more than 250,000 uses of the system.

· So on and so forth…

You can see which solution presentation is designed to communicate to the client’s interests and which is just a feature dump.

If you’d like help in rewriting your solutions statements, please give us a call. We’ve solved the solution puzzle for hundreds of companies around the world and we’re eager to help you put the pieces of your solutions together.

Lose Early

2008-02-15T10:51:00.000-05:00

A recent TV show titled The Biggest Loser focused on people who lost huge amounts of weight by exercising and dieting. Only in America would this be prime time entertainment…

For proposal writers, there’s another meaning to “biggest loser.” The biggest loser is the proposal that finishes second. That’s our topic today.

When I was in Copenhagen last spring, Jens Agerskov, managing director of Dencore, made a very perceptive comment. He said, “Winning fast is great. Winning slowly is good. Losing fast is all right. But losing slowly is unacceptable. The biggest loser is always the proposal that finishes second.”

I think he’s exactly right about this. After all, if you compete for business and get knocked out right away, you’re done. You won’t put any more time or resources into the opportunity. You’ll move on to something else. But if you make it past the first round of cuts, you may need to revise your proposal into your best and final offer. Or the next stage of the competition may require you to develop an oral presentation and rehearse your team for hours in preparation for your final shot at winning.

Regardless, you’ll be putting in lots more effort and spending more of your scant bid-and-proposal budget in pursuing the deal. And if you don’t win, your loss is literally more costly than somebody who got knocked out right away.

A client in London shared a story with me recently of being invited to bid for a major piece of work. It was a multi-million pound opportunity, so they assembled a large team and worked for six weeks on the proposal. They submitted their proposal and were pleased to be invited to the next stage of the process, a formal presentation. They put together hundreds of slides and rehearsed for days to be ready. They arrived at the client’s site filled with excitement, thinking they had a real shot at winning the business and displacing a major competitor in the process. But as soon as they put their title slide up on the screen and stood up to begin their pitch, the head of the client’s decision team interrupted them, saying, “Thank you so much for coming today. We just want to make it clear that we don’t intend to actually change vendors this year. However, we are very interested in hearing what you have to say. So please, go ahead!”

Talk about sucking the air out of the room!

My client estimates that besides the six weeks of effort, they spent in excess of a hundred thousand pounds putting their proposal and presentation together. And they never had a chance!

The ugly reality is that clients will sometimes invite us to submit a proposal even though they have no intention of buying from us. Their actual motive might be beating up their current vendor on price, or learning what’s new in the industry, or simply creating the appearance of due diligence, even though they already have decided who will get the contract. One thing is certain: we never had a chance.

One way to avoid this kind of disaster is to qualify opportunities ruthlessly. Make sure you have a real opportunity to win—that the client has a budget, that the competition is fair and open, that you match up to the key criteria the decision makers will use, and a few other factors. And continue to qualify and assess as the deal moves forward.

Another way to minimize the negative impact of bidding for work you can’t really win is to use a proposal automation system. That way, you spend far less time putting out a decent proposal and/or presentation, so your loss is much less. (Of course, a better reason for using a proposal automation system, or at least the one available from Sant Corporation, is that it incorporates best practices and will increase your win ratio.)

Put the two together—effective qualification and maximum efficiency from automation—and losing slowly will be slightly less painful.

Focusing on Real Needs

2008-01-30T10:54:00.000-05:00

A few messages ago, we talked about how important it is to focus on the customer’s needs or problems at the onset of a proposal. Sound easy? Let’s see.

There are times when people think they’ve focused on a customer need, but then find out that they didn’t dig deep enough or didn’t communicate with the right people. That’s our topic this time—knowing what the mistakes are and knowing how to avoid them.

The client’s business need is our starting point. It’s the first thing we should address, because it shows we paid attention and implies that any recommendations we make are based on a solid understanding of the client’s problems, issues, or opportunities.

Most proposals don’t start with the client’s needs. Instead, they make the big mistake of starting with the vendor’s corporate history. Other losing strategies are starting with content about the vendor’s products or with an executive summary of qualifications. To formulate a solid start to a proposal based on client’s needs, you must first avoid these three mistakes:

1. Defining the client’s need as being identical with your solution.

I was working with an account team at a major bank to help develop a proposal for a potential client, a chain of outdoor equipment stores. The first question I asked was, “What is the customer’s business need?”

The account manager leaned back, massaged his temples thoughtfully, and answered: “They need to be able to verify credit cards on line.”

“So what are you proposing?” I asked. “What’s your solution?”

“Oh,” he answered, “we’re going to give them the ability to verify credit cards on line.”

We could have stopped right there and exclaimed, “What a wonderful world where the need and the solution align so perfectly!” But maybe, just maybe, we needed to dig a little deeper. So, I asked him, “All right, but why do they need that ability?”

He looked at me like I was daft. “So they can sell stuff over the Web, of course.”

“Okay. But why do they want to sell their products over the Web? They already have a big chain of stores.”

“Because their two biggest competitors are doing it,” he said.

“Hmm. Interesting. But why should they copy their competitors?”

“Because they lost forty percent of their market share to them last year!” he said.

That’s when the shovel finally struck the business need treasure chest. Verifying credit cards is definitely part of a solution, but it’s not the business need in this case. Their need is to stop the bleeding and regain some of the market share they’ve lost.

This true story illustrates a very common mistake: defining the client’s need in terms of your solution. It happens all the time. The sales team at a property management firm told me with straight faces that what their client needed was to appoint a property agent. Further analysis suggested that what the client actually needed was to liquidate some real estate assets to generate cash to fund expansion into Asia.

Keep the shovel digging. Ask—Why do they need to do this? And keep asking “Why?” until you get to the real need. Digging does become easier.

2. Assuming that the RFP defines the complete business problem or need.

The request for proposal almost never states the real need of the client. Why would it? Does it seem smart, for example, to broadcast that a client’s company is having a big problem in some area of its operations? That it has an unacceptable level of attrition? That it’s short on cash? That one of its key products has quality problems? That information in the hands of a competitor could cause enormous damage?

Instead, the RFP typically defines the requirements of an acceptable solution. It’s silent on the business reasons why a company needs the solution. Answering exactly what the RFP asks without showing some insight into the underlying business problem means that your proposal will be technically compliant yet basically irrelevant.

This is one reason that responding to an RFP without having had any interaction with the client is almost always a losing strategy. You don’t know enough to structure your response so that it addresses the real need.

3. Not talking to enough of the management team at the client organization.

If you’re selling banking services and are talking only to a financial officer or an IT professional at the client organization, you may never hear the real drivers. Only by talking to the head of sales or the CEO would you see how significant the loss of market share actually is. The finance officer is probably focused on cash flow through the e-Commerce site. The IT person is focused on data handling. Neither of those issues is at the heart of the problem.

To make sure you fully and accurately understand your client’s need, negotiate for access to other senior managers in the client organization. Get their perspective on what’s important, what needs to be changed, what’s not working, and why the problem is urgent. Once you’ve done that you’ll have the insight you need to write a winning proposal. In the end, they’ll look at you and your solution differently from your competitors who may only be guessing at what the client needs.

If your real need is to improve your proposal process or to create better content, give us a call. We’ll definitely ask you Why, but only so we can help you get the solutions you need.

How Good Is Good Enough?

2008-01-15T10:56:00.000-05:00

Time is running out. The second hand relentlessly pecks away at the minutes and hours. Our proposal will soon be due, and yet we know it needs more work. The question is: When can we stop? What’s an appropriate standard of excellence for our proposals? Do we just keep editing and proofreading until time runs out? Or is there a reasonable standard that tells when we’ve done enough?

That’s our topic this time.

In some operations, the sound of the UPS truck backing up to the loading dock—beep! beep! beep!—is the signal to start editing. But waiting until the last possible instant to correct your work guarantees you won’t have enough time to do the job right. Even if they don’t wait until the last moment, proposal writers still send out proposals that they believe aren’t quite right, simply shrugging and saying, “It’s good enough!”

But how good is “good enough”? When is your proposal “good enough” to go to the client? What does a proposal that’s “good enough” look like?

We can define six levels of “correctness” or quality for our proposals:

No spelling, grammar or punctuation errors, and no typos.
No obvious errors of fact, content or logic that the reader will notice immediately.
Well structured, using a persuasive pattern of development, and divided into meaningful chunks so the reader can understand and use the proposal easily.
Clear and concise writing, no unnecessary jargon, and nothing that could be misinterpreted.
Effectively aimed at the decision maker’s level of expertise, personality, and values.
Creative, informed, and intelligent, written in a crisp and interesting style, and delivered in a format that makes it easy for multiple evaluators to read it.

So—how good is good enough? Lots of sales or proposal professionals are happy if their proposals reach level 2. If it sneaks by on the first reading, it’s good enough for them.

From a customer’s point of view, however, where the reader is making a buying decision, nothing less than level 5 will do. So how much should you edit? Enough to get to that level of excellence.

“Excellence” is the key word, by the way. Our goal in writing proposals should never be perfection. That’s not realistic. Even the most stringent quality control processes used in manufacturing high-reliability products don’t set perfection as the goal. Instead, as sales people and proposal writers, we should strive to deliver proposals to our clients that are truly excellent. We want them to read our proposal and say, “Wow! That was really interesting! That was well done!”

So, how much editing should you do? As much as you can. I know that’s a bit vague, but I’m sorry to tell you that there’s no magic formula, such as “five minutes per page” or “15% of the total time allocated to document development.” If it’s of any interest to you, at Sant Corporation we typically allocate about as much time for editing as we do for creating the initial draft. We think a one-to-one correlation is about right. For someone who has never written a proposal, the editing time might easily exceed the writing time.

The important point is to plan editing into your overall proposal project. Designate a specific amount of time for it, and resist any attempts to poach on editing time for other activities. Making our proposals perfect isn’t realistic. But making them extremely good is an obligation we ignore at our peril.

Selling Fast in a Slow Economy

2008-01-07T11:27:00.000-05:00

The economy has slowed down. There's no question about that.

But you need to keep selling, right? So what's the secret?

I think we can learn an important lesson from one of the pioneers of human psychology, Abraham Maslow. That's our topic this time.

When the economy slows down, selling becomes more difficult. People feel vulnerable and they become reluctant to spend money or allocate resources to anything new. From a psychological standpoint, they are moving down Maslow's hierarchy of needs toward the basics-the survival issues.

Maslow believed that when any two needs were demanding satisfaction at the same time, it will be the more "prepotent" (to use Maslow's jargon), the more biologically urgent, that will take priority. Needs that are less prepotent are pushed into the background, delayed, or ignored. A person who is dying of hunger forgets about food when he or she is deprived of oxygen, for example.

So what does this mean regarding our customers? It means that because they feel threatened in a declining economy, they will tend to hoard what they have. They will pull back from completing mere "transactions." They will be reluctant to exchange the organizational equivalent of oxygen-money-for any product or service that doesn't meet their basic needs. As a result, when you try to sell a product or service for a particular price, the customer may perceive doing business with you as purely transactional. And they want to minimize the number of transactions they complete in order to hold on to scarce resources.

There is some good news, though. In a down economy, decision makers are eager to find solutions. They want to do those things that will help them cope with changing circumstances, that will meet their basic business needs for revenue and stability.

Selling solutions is consultative, not transactional. Selling solutions requires:

a broad business perspective
alignment with the customer's objectives
an ability to demonstrate value that matters to the customer

If you ask most sales people, they will tell you that they are writing proposals and delivering presentations that are solution oriented. But in reality they are not. The customer perceives their offers as transactional and pulls back from making a decision to buy.

Why do many solution-oriented proposals and presentations fail to communicate themselves that way to the customer? They fail because they are NOT client centered, value based, or decision oriented.

Often, sales people resort to "clone and go" proposals. They think that it is enough to provide a boilerplate, "checkbox" proposal, one that focuses mainly on their products or their company. But to be seen as a solution-oriented proposal, the document must focus on the customer's needs-the most "prepotent" ones, to use Maslow's term-and link whatever is being recommended to meeting those needs.

Similarly, many proposals do not contain any value proposition. They present a price, but they don't contain any calculation of return on investment, of reductions in operating costs, in reduced cost of ownership, or any other measure that will is linked to survival and coping in a tough economy.

Finally, many proposals are not organized to help the customer make a decision. They tend to be information dumps, and they fail to differentiate the offer from alternatives and fail to provide grounds for moving forward with the decision.

To sell faster in a slow economy, we need to make sure we focus on what matters to the customer, spell out the concrete benefit they obtain from doing what we recommend, and present our recommendations using a structural pattern that leads logically to a decision.

Most Expensive Writers in the World

2007-12-18T12:09:00.000-05:00

For most sales people, writing is neither a strength nor a pleasure. And yet they end up doing a lot of it.

When sales people write, it usually costs the company a lot of money. How much may surprise you. In the attached message, we show you some ways to calculate how much it costs you to have your sales people writing.

They just might be the most expensive writers in the world.

The Most Expensive Writers in the World

Your sales people are probably among the most expensive writers in the world if they're doing their own letters, proposals, and presentations. And to make matters worse--they're probably not very good at it, either.

How much is it actually costing you to have them write their own proposals?

Costs based on salary:

It typically takes a sales person hours to write a proposal. That's time spent in front of a computer, instead of a customer. How much does that cost? The formula is:

# of hours to write a proposal (average)

# of proposals per year each sales person produces

hourly charge rate for sales people

(calculated as annual salary divided by 2,000 hours [50 weeks x 40 hours])

For example: If a sales person, with a salary of $100,000, spends an average 12 hours per proposal and he or she sends out 10 proposals per year, the cost to the company will be:

12 hrs. x 10 proposals/yr x $50/hr. charge rate:

$6,000!

(The hourly rate was calculated by dividing 2,000 hours per year (50 weeks x 40 hours/week) into the $100,000 average salary.)

Costs based on sales quota:

You can also measure the costs in terms of quota. A sales person a $1 million quota is worth approximately $500 an hour (based on 2,000 hours of work time available per year to generate $1,000,000 in business).

Using these numbers, 12 hours spent on a proposal costs the company $6,000 to produce. For 10 proposals a year, that adds up to:

$60,000!

Proposal value:

Finally, what is the average value of a proposal in the organization? Suppose the average is $50,000. Divide that figure by the 12 hours the sales person spent writing it. Each hour of effort is worth more than $4,000, and writing 10 proposals costs nearly:

$500,000!

Other than Stephen King or John Grisham, nobody is making that kind of money writing!

To learn how to get your sales people in front of customers instead of the computer, visit us at www.santcorp.com.

Four Types of Decision Makers: How to Reach Them

2007-11-29T11:05:00.000-05:00

It takes all kinds. That goes for decision makers, too.

The problem is that sometimes their kind isn't our kind. And if we don't consciously make an effort to adjust our style to match theirs, we're likely to communicate to the one audience we really understand: ourselves.

Here are guidelines for communicating persuasively, in person or in print, to the four most common types of decision makers.

Four Types of Decision Makers: How to Reach Them

People are different, of course. But there are some guidelines that can help us deal effectively with certain types of decision makers. Some of these guidelines are based on research into personality types, and some of them are based on research into communications theory. Either way, if it helps you get your message across.

Pragmatic decision makers:

Pragmatic decision makers are focused on the bottom line. They value feeling in control and become irritated by inefficiency or indecision. In your presentations and proposals, they mainly want to know what will it do for me, how soon, and at what price? The delivery style they prefer is concise, focused, and objective. If you make them uncomfortable, they become bossy, assertive, or aggressive. Sometimes they just shut down completely and don't return your calls.

Your key strategies:

Show that you support their business or technical goals and objectives.
Keep the relationship businesslike.
Focus on facts, not feelings.
Be precise, efficient, and well organized in your writing and presenting.
Provide a few alternatives and indicate their probability of success.
Always show how your recommendations will help achieve the decision maker's objectives.

Visionary decision makers:

Visionaries are entrepreneurial. Geoffrey Moore, in Crossing the Chasm, calls them "the early adopters." They value intelligence, creativity, imagination, flexibility, and energy. They are likely to listen to what you say and immediately transform it in terms of their ideas or goals. They need to know how your products or services help them achieve their goals. In your presentations and proposals, they react favorably to high energy, excitement, commitment, focused interest, and sensory stimulation. Detail, routine, and boring processes are a turn off for these people, and once they decide you're not the person they want to work with, they will turn against you, become sarcastic or disruptive, and may even attack you or your ideas.

Your key strategies:

Support their ideas.
Don't argue with them, especially regarding details or factual points.
Keep your presentations fast moving, interesting, and concise.
Don't pressure or hurry the decision maker.
Get their agreement and commitment to details and deadlines in writing.
Use humor, ingenuity, color, splash, and dash in your proposal and presentation.
Use testimonials and success stories from successful, high-profile clients to influence the decision process.

Consensus-seeking decision makers:

Consensus seekers are sincere and care about the feelings of others. They tend to get lost in technical details. They value close working relationships and want to know that you are dependable and that what you are recommending will be beneficial for all concerned. They want you to be pleasant, trustworthy, and reliable, so they are upset by insensitivity, self-interest, or pressure. Oddly enough, when they become uncomfortable, they are likely to give in and agree, then later become obstructive or resentful.

Your key strategies:

Support and respect their feelings.
Demonstrate personal interest in the project and decision maker.
Proceed informally and carefully, building rapport and clarifying goals.
Practice "active" listening, particularly feeding back what you hear them say.
Back up recommendations with personal assurances of your support.
Minimize risk for the decision maker.
Base your persuasion at least in part on the positive consequences your solution will have for the people involved.
Gently keep meetings and presentations on track, but allow time for personal talk.
Establish mutual deadlines, schedules, and objectives, but indicate flexibility.
Document key decisions, commitments, and action steps.

Analytical decision makers:

Analytical decision makers think that they can't decide anything until they know everything. They want lots of information and will examine it closely. They value being correct, so they want you to be accurate, precise, and logical in your proposals and presentations. They want to know how your solution will work, how it will be implemented and supported, and how they can logically justify it. They hate surprises and unpredictability, and will demonstrate their discomfort by withdrawing from the task and the relationship even to the point of avoiding you.

Your key strategies:

Show patience and support for their thoughtful, organized approach.
Demonstrate your competence.
Provide solid, tangible, factual evidence for what you claim.
Remember that accuracy is a primary virtue for this decision maker.
List the advantages and disadvantages of your recommendations or plans; give priority position to the advantages.
Allow the decision maker time to verify what you have said.
Follow up personal contacts with written communications.
Be systematic, exact, organized, and well prepared.
Base your persuasion on accuracy and logic; avoid gimmicks and emotion.
Provide guarantees and factual evidence that your solution will work.

Remember: If you don't understand your audience, you end up writing to yourself. And your chances of being right are no better than one in four!

To learn more about reaching your customers efficiently and effectively, visit us at http://www.santcorp.com/

Sales Productivity: Where Do Sales People Spend Their Time?

2007-11-16T08:46:00.000-05:00

Sales productivity is one of the hot topics of recent years. Unfortunately, there's generally been more heat than illumination.
But George Smith used the principles of total quality management to analyze sales processes. He found out where the "average" sales person is spending time and how to eliminate some of the waste. We've summarized his findings in the accompanying message. How do you think his numbers compare to your sales team?

Sales Productivity: Where Do Sales People Spend Their Time?

How do sales people spend their time? How many hours do they work and how much of that effort is productive?
In Sales Productivity Measurement, published by ASQC Quality Press, George A. Smith, Jr. summarizes research from a variety of sources. He found that the average sales person works 47 hours a week, but the majority of that time was spent on non-selling activities. In fact, Smith suggests that 50% might be a conservative estimate of non-selling time.

A typical distribution of effort looks like this:

Face-to-face selling: 25%
Telephone selling: 15%
Waiting/traveling: 22%
Proposals, presentations: 12.5%
Order preparation: 10.25%
Administrative tasks: 6%
Internal paperwork: 6%
Order follow-up: 3%

These numbers suggest that only 40% of a typical sales person's time is spent in direct customer contact.

New technology may eliminate some of the need for traveling. Using Internet-based presentation systems, sales people can make presentations in real time, talking with one or many prospects over the telephone while everybody has the same information displayed interactively on their computers. (For example, visit www.webex.com for an example of this kind of technology.)

But for many sales people, travel will always be necessary. It's going to be difficult to sell a big ticket solution without some face-to-face contact. Instead, the big gain will come from eliminating or slashing the amount of time spent on labor-intensive activities, particularly the creation of proposals and presentations.

In fact, I think in a few years it will seem as silly to do proposals and presentations the old-fashioned way, cutting and pasting and writing by hand, as it would be to go back to typewriters.

To learn more ways to improve sales force productivity through automation, visit us at www.santcorp.com

Shortening the Sales Cycle

2007-11-07T10:22:00.000-05:00

The next week we were in Chicago. I was about fifteen minutes into the demo when the senior vice president of sales leaped up and said, "That's it! That's exactly what I envisioned. Get it." And with that he left the room. Ten days later we had a signed contract and a check.

Unfortunately, most of our sales cycles aren't that short. How about yours? If you'd like to shorten the sale cycle, this is a good message for you. It focuses on how effective follow-up communications can reduce the length of the sales process.

Shortening the Sales Cycle

Bringing a deal to closure can seemingly take forever. It may be even more difficult today than ever before. Think about the characteristics of selling in today's markets.

Often you are selling not to an individual, but to a team. And that team is composed of people with different, sometimes conflicting views of what your solution should do and how it should be judged.

Typically, you're under severe cost pressure. And the analysis of costs goes much deeper than merely acquisition price.

Finally, you're expected to demonstrate positive business impact. Your decision team is looking for a solution that will improve their operations, their bottom line, their use of technology--all at the same time probably!

So that's a lot to handle. No wonder it takes so long to close a deal.

Here's a little secret that one of the largest high-technology companies in the world found several years ago:

Backing up sales calls with good written communication reduces the selling cycle by as much as 86%!

This is an insight that has also been offered by some of the leading sales training organizations. In fact, the Solution Selling curriculum emphasizes the importance of putting every step of the sales cycle into writing.

Why does it work? And how can you take advantage of this insight to reduce your sales cycle?

It works because good written communications eliminate ambiguity. That's very important in a situation where you're selling to a team, because people often listen with filters on their ears. They hear what they expect to hear or what they want to hear. Sending a document that summarizes the key points of a meeting, identifies responsibilities, establishes the next steps, confirms a timeline, and so forth, clarifies the content of the call and confirms the decisions the team has made.

It works because good written communications reinforce your selling message. Even if the communication is simply intended to confirm the date and time for a meeting, it gives you a chance to demonstrate competence and reliability. And you may be able to slip in a sales message, too. At the very least, a written message extends your "mind share" and helps the decision team remember you.

The best way to take advantage of the power of written communications is to automate the creation of the types of documents you need most often. Be careful not to use boilerplate text or static "templates." Those will actually do more damage than good, because they smell like complacency to the customer.

Instead, implement an automation tool that enables you to build a compound document that contains client-centered, unique content each time.

Words That Don't Work

2007-10-17T08:14:00.000-05:00

The language changes. Every language does. So it's always risky to go around saying which words are "good," and which ones are "bad." In a generation or two, those opinions might look pretty stupid.
However, the risk of looking stupid hasn't stopped me before, so here goes. In this message, I'm offering some observations on words that just don't work.

WORDS THAT DON'T WORK

Some years ago I came across a column written by a pundit who was criticizing the sloppy way people were using language. He was writing back in the '50's, but his points seemed pretty relevant. Then he started listing the newly minted words he thought were particularly obnoxious: supermarket, briefcase, freeway.

Uh, oh. Those sound pretty good to me. Back when they were new, they must have grated on his finely tuned ear, but the fact is they filled a need in our language and have stuck around.

Languages change in weird and unpredictable ways. One of the words that I personally think doesn't work is "impact" when used as a verb. For example:

The new equipment impacted our productivity.

To my brain, "impact" sounds like a noun and the only connection I can make to its use as a verb is when we are describing what happens to people's wisdom teeth or their colons. In neither case is the image particularly persuasive. I would rewrite the sentence to say "The new equipment improved [or affected] our productivity" or "The new equipment had an impact on our productivity."

But I have to admit that lots and lots of smart people are using "impact" as a verb without wincing, so maybe it has changed and I'm just out of touch.

It's still worth worrying about, though. Using words incorrectly can undercut our credibility when they appear in an important proposal, sales letter, or e-mail. And using words that the customer misunderstands can prolong our sales process and sometimes create other problems. In fact, we see lots of proposals that are damaged by the author's use of fancy words, or their use of internal jargon, or their misuse of ordinary words. (By the way, my examples will all be drawn from American English, but our readers who are using the Queen's version or who are doing business in another language entirely can probably attest that the same kinds of problems occur around them, too.)

Fancy words are the three- and four-syllable, Latinate beauties that people like to toss in just so you'll think they have an Ivy League education. (After all, isn't that what the ads on the radio promise?) For example, for some reason people love the word "parameters." They'll write something like "during the needs assessment phase of the project, we will examine all the parameters of the problem to determine timeline and cost."

Okay, but is that what they really mean? A "parameter" is a variable or a mathematical limit. They might literally mean that. But a lot of people seem to think "parameter" means something like "scope" or "dimensions." Maybe they're confusing it with the word "perimeter," which means the outer boundary of an area.

To me it would be clearer if they said, "we will examine the problem carefully to determine timeline and cost." Or, instead of "carefully," how about "thoroughly?" Or, "we will examine all aspects of the problem to determine timeline and cost."

As Thoreau said, simplify, simplify, simplify.

When people use their own jargon without thinking about it, they're making a natural human mistake, which is to assume that since they use this language every day at work, everybody else understands it, too. Of course, they often find that when they go home at the end of a busy day they struggle to explain what the heck they do for a living in terms their loved ones can understand.

For example, I remember seeing a proposal letter years ago written by an AT&T account executive, who told the customer that his new phone lines "will be terminated on June 15."

The account executive was surprised when the customer called up in a rage, complaining that AT&T was proposing to remove his lines before they had even been installed! It seems that "to terminate" in telecom jargon means the exact opposite of what it means to the rest of us. It means to bring the line in so that it can be connected to the phone set or switch. I guess that means that if The Terminator worked for a phone company, he would really be an installer, right?

You get the point. We just get so used to our own jargon we forget to make the little translations necessary for clarity.

Finally, I'll end my rant by mentioning some words that people use incorrectly. They don't ruin the document, they don't necessarily create a lot of confusion, but they do produce that little snort that makes us feel the author is just slightly dumber than we are. Most of us enjoy discovering that we're cleverer than another person, but the next reaction is to wonder if we want to choose this individual as our vendor.

AFFECT/EFFECT: Affect is a verb. Effect is a noun. There are very specialized cases where that rule changes, but they won't apply to you unless you're a psychiatrist or a corporate attorney. "His decision affected us." "The invention had an effect on our business plan."

DATA IS/DATA ARE: Everybody who knows a smattering of Latin will argue that "data" is plural. "Datum" is the singular form. Therefore, "data are" seems correct. Well, no, not really. I guess if you're writing a proposal to the Pope in Latin, that's the way you should do it, but if you're writing in English, you need to be aware that we have what are called "collective nouns." These are words like "jury," "team," or "sales force," that represent a group of individuals but which almost always take a singular noun: "The jury is sequestered in the Brown Hotel." "The team is flying to Chicago for a weekend series." "The sales force is gathering in Orlando for training." The word "data" is that kind of noun. Therefore, correct usage in English calls for a singular verb form: "The data is stored in a relational database."

SERVE/SERVICE: I saw a proposal in which a systems integration company promised, "Every facet of our company is oriented to servicing you, the customer." Does that sound odd to you? I'm not sure I want to be "serviced," although I might try it once just to see if I like it.

SIMPLE/SIMPLISTIC: The word "simple" means uncomplicated. The word "simplistic" means, essentially, "stupid." (It really means something like oversimplifying to the point of distortion, but "stupid" is close enough.) Anyway, what kind of impression does a cover letter make when it proudly tells the customer, "We have carefully developed a simplistic solution to assure rapid deployment."

Okay, thanks for letting me complain. I feel better now. And if there are some usages that bug you, go ahead and send them to me. We'll commiserate about how the world is going you know where and people just don't know how to use the language any more!