Think Like A Journalist When Planning To Present – by Simon Mossman

To be persuasive, you need to have a point of view, and then you need to make an argument that brings the audience around to that point of view. This is something that journalists do every day, and do very well.  I strongly believe that the more you read of what professional journalists write, the better your writing will be.

A friend of mine, Simon Mossman, is a former journalist, and he has written a Slideshare presentation on a related topic.

These days Simon is a media and communication advisor and presentation skills coach, working with business owners and corporate leaders to address their business challenges through communication. If you like this presentation, check out Simon’s blogs at www.commseilleur.com and www.confidencetricks.com.au

Why you should think like a journalist when planning to present from Simon Mossman

Why buyers are asking for short proposals

Like me, you are probably seeing a lot more word and page-limited tender response requests coming out from the market these days. A quick check of the tenders I worked on over the past six months revealed that more than half had page limits for responding to each criterion. On the surface it makes sense as to why this might be happening. After all, if you're a procurement officer or a buyer and you're expecting dozens or hundreds of tender responses, you would want them to be as succinct as possible so that you don't have to wade through pages and pages of unnecessary information in order to score the response. Page limiting and word limiting proposals might reduce your workload by as much as 50%.

But there's another reason why it's a good practice to ask for word and page-limited responses.

That's because buyers understand that it actually takes much more effort to write something within a tight set of limits than it does when no limits are given.

There's a famous quote by the French mathematician, physicist, and inventor Blaise Pascal, who lived in the 17^th century. Pascal said, "I have made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

To me, that sums it up nicely. When suppliers are not limited in how much information they can provide, it's easy to just throw the kitchen sink into the bid and let the buyer sort it out. This has led to a lot of lazy, assembly line proposal writing.

Buyers know that they will get better quality responses if they force you to think about how you can make your proposal shorter. If you have less space and fewer words to get your point across, the good proposals will be better —and those that were never going to be any good anyway at least won't be as tiring or taxing to assess.

Proposal positioning tip: how to retain important contracts

In contract retention projects, the stakes are very high.  Often there are millions of dollars and many peoples’ livelihoods on the line. My specialty is working on critical bids for contracts that are strategically important to the growth or stability of the clients I work with.  This means I often work on retention projects with incumbent suppliers who are seeking to retain their biggest clients. In one extreme case, I was asked to work with a new client on a tender that represented 100% of their business.  No pressure, then!

In my experience, there are many traps for incumbents, not the least of which involves working with a lot of nervous people who are relying on you.  So if you already have the business, and need to retain it, here’s what to do.

• Sit down with everyone in your organisation that interacts with the customer and ask them a very simple question – ‘If it were in your power to improve only one thing about (customer’s) business, what would it be’?  Really LISTEN to the people at the coal face.  They are your eyes and ears on the ground and they usually have the best ideas about what the customer really wants.  They will also know which of your competitors is talking to them– and the ideas the customer is listening to.
• Approach the proposal like it’s your very first pitch to the customer.  Incumbents get unseated because they lose the fire and the passion for the business.  Prove to them that you’ve still got it.
• Use your proposal to paint a picture of the future, not to talk about the past.  Relying on past successes is a classic mistake that loses business for even the most worthy suppliers. When leading an incumbency pitch, your job is to get the customer excited about why they should sign with you for the next three years and beyond – not tell them what you’ve done for them for the past three years (or thirty).
• Spell out the risks of losing your know-how, your proprietary systems, your people - whatever it takes to make them think long and hard about what it will really mean if they go elsewhere.

What to do when prospective customers won’t take meetings

One of the biggest complaints that I hear consistently from suppliers is that buyers won't take meetings any more. This trend has been growing for a long time, and now that professional procurement processes are firmly established in most organisations, it’s something that all of us are going to have to learn to live with. Suppliers in complex industries with drawn out sales cycles have long understood the value of content marketing; providing information to buyers when they need it to narrow down the field of potential suppliers and help them make their buying decision.

With direct contact with buyers proving more and more difficult to obtain, businesses of all sizes are now turning to content marketing to generate pre-sales activity.

In September this year, IDG Enterprise, a publishing company specialising in the IT market (titles include CIO, Computerworld and Network World) shared its recent study on pre-sales customer engagement.

What they found is that during the IT purchase process, IT decision makers download an average of eight pieces of content to help guide their purchase decision, ranging from product reviews, product demos and literature to feature articles and video. The study showed that video is becoming increasingly important at the beginning of the purchase process, and that these decision makers are watching interviews with industry experts and on the technology itself.

On the downside, the study showed that 82% of IT decision makers find it difficult to locate high quality and trusted content, and felt that much of the content they are consuming contains too much marketing hype and too many buzzwords. The study found that that independent, unbiased, and specific information elevates a supplier’s message and potentially results in their content being shared.

If you are finding it difficult to engage face-to-face with buyers, there is a message here to take notice of. Buyers are still out there looking for information about you —they're just looking in different places, and for different things, to what you're probably accustomed to.

Think about how you can equip your sales force with good quality videos, infographics, white papers, and other content to help drive the pre-sales process, and the optimum amount of content that a buyer will need to consume before they are amenable to direct contact from you.

Read more about the IDG study at http://www.idgenterprise.com/press/video-and-social-media-use-growing-in-connecting-it-buyers-and-vendors#CUSENG2013

Proposal Positioning: Is Your Expert Really An Expert?

Given my background in sales and marketing, I still have a keen interest in what the advertising and marketing industry is doing. One of my favourite things to watch on TV is Gruen Planet, one of the many versions of The Gruen franchise produced by Andrew Denton. I love the way the panellists on Gruen Planet try to get inside the head of what advertisers are thinking when they put certain messages forward. Sometimes those messages can seem very strange indeed.

Recently I saw an ad that - while it wasn’t funny enough for Gruen Planet - certainly struck me as very strange. It's an ad for Sensodyne Toothpaste, and it’s presented by an attractive young woman talking about the benefits of Sensodyne Toothpaste for “sensitive teeth patients”, I think she called them.

The thing that’s really strange about this ad is that this woman is the Marketing Manager for Sensodyne, and they actually say so in the copy. Since when have people trusted the marketing manager’s views as an expert on what makes a good toothpaste? Where have all the dentists gone?

For me, this served as a reminder to be careful about who we put forward as experts in our proposal. Sure, the ideas our experts talk about are generally concocted by a team of people, which may of course include the sales and marketing people. But customers want to hear from experts - the people who have the training and the knowledge to make such pronouncements. I’d be happy to hear the marketing manager talk about marketing, which is what she’s trained and experienced to do.  But when it comes to the benefits of toothpaste, give me a dentist any day.

Context vs content - using your proposal to fill in both sides of the sales conversation

When you speak to a buyer in person, you can tell by their body language and expression whether or not your message has actually landed.  In a proposal, you can’t – and that’s pretty scary. Like it or not, a large part of the sales relationship is transacted through formal RFTs these days, without the opportunity for a feedback loop.  This means your proposal needs to work extra hard to fill in both sides of the conversation – just as if the buyer were in the room asking questions and getting information from you.

Content is what you say in your proposal; it’s your message.  Context is what gives meaning to your message.  Content without context is easily misunderstood.

For example, let’s say you have arrived back in your office after two days on the road presenting new construction techniques to a major client.  Your boss buzzes you and says abruptly “Steve, come and see me right now.”  As you hang up you think “The client called, they hated my presentation, and I’m going to get my butt kicked.”

But imagine if your boss had instead said “Welcome back Steve!  ABC Developments called, and they loved your presentation. Their engineers have raised some questions about the logistics of the new concrete panels.  It’s not a big deal but we need to work it out and get back to them by the end of the week.  Please come and see me now so we can throw around some options.”

What a difference this would make.  Instead of thinking you’re about to get hauled over the coals, you’re straight away thinking about how to answer the client's questions.

Presenting content without context in a proposal is a bit like walking up to an attractive stranger at a party and talking about yourself for 15 minutes without pausing for breath. It's not a great way to start a relationship.

As the expert, you have all this knowledge in your head that the customer doesn't have access to. The buyer doesn’t know what you know; you have to explain it to them. Think of context as a carry-bag for content – context holds your content together and helps it make sense. Part of the work of writing a proposal is to anticipate the questions you are raising for the buyer, and make sure your proposal answers them.

Book Review - Hooked: How Leaders Connect, Engage and Inspire with Storytelling

Stories provide a human connection that is often lacking in a business context. Were accustomed to substantiating claims with facts, figures and case studies, but while these might provide justification for a particular course of action, they rarely uncover the emotional need that compel us to take it in the first place. Hooked - a new book by Gabrielle Dolan and Yamini Naidu - will show you how to articulate and use personal stories in a business context, enabling you to  better connect with others and to motivate true insight, discussion and change.

As someone who has always kept their personal and professional lives quite separate, I have found storytelling a rewarding way to share more of myself with my clients and build greater understanding of who I am and what I do.

Hooked is practical, easy to read and provides a useful methodology to create and share your stories. If you work in a sales or leadership capacity - and particularly if  you're more of a facts and figures person, and you're not getting the results you want - you must read this book. Your communication style will change forever, for the better.

How we block ourselves from being good negotiators - by Bri Williams

Bri Williams runs People Patterns Pty Ltd, a consultancy specialising in the application of behavioural economics to everyday business issues - http://www.briwilliams.com.au  Negotiation is all around us because it is really about relationships. We fear negotiation because we think it is adversarial, and our behavioural biases get in the way of us getting into the headspace of our customers.

Here are five behavioural biases relevant to negotiation, and how to recognise and overcome them so that you can negotiate a decision to help all parties.

Not Invented Here Bias

We love ideas but struggle to take those of others on board. You may have heard this described as the Toothbrush Principle – everyone knows toothbrushes are important, but no one wants to use someone else’s! For negotiation this means you need to work extra hard to understand and consider an idea that the other party proposes.  Better, try collaborating on a mutually beneficial idea, building it together to ensure all parties feel like they own the idea.

Loss Aversion

It’s likely we enter a negotiation more worried about what we stand to lose rather than gain.  This can make us defensive and panicky. To overcome loss aversion it can be helpful to draft your worst case scenario and then what you would do to survive if that happened.  It means you will enter the negotiation without fear and being able to concentrate on a solution.

Actor-Observer bias

We tend to blame the mistakes of others on their character, and our mistakes on the situation.  For instance if someone cuts you off in traffic, they must be a bad driver.  If you do, it’s because you needed to get into the other lane to make the turn. For negotiations this means we are prone to attacking the person and their motivations, overlooking the situational factors that may have caused the issue. To overcome Actor-Observer Bias (also known as the Fundamental Attribution Error), focus on the situation not the character.

Confirmation Bias

Noticed that it’s easy to find stats and facts that support your view? Confirmation Bias is our tendency to zone in on information that confirms our understanding of the world, ignoring, distorting or rejecting contradictory input. In a negotiation it means we are blinkered and may miss facts that actually disaffirm our position. To overcome Confirmation Bias you need to do a 360 degree assessment of the issue. In other words, how would you argue the case for the other party? Remove yourself from the situation, step into the shoes of the other party and you’ll suddenly find a world of new data that can be used by you both to construct a solution.

Revenge It is deeply ingrained that we seek revenge for actions we see as unjust. Despite our best selves, when someone cuts us off in traffic there is that little part of us that wants to tailgate to let the other driver know how dangerous they were. Sadly that little part of us is too often the foot on the accelerator.  In a negotiation there is likely to be a lot of negative emotion, a desire by some for revenge.  To overcome revenge – your desire or theirs – takes a lot of deep breathing and distance. When things get heated (known as a “hot state”) you are extremely likely to make poor decisions so take a break, calm down and refocus on the issue not the motivation.

Proposal positioning tip: the tricycle for triplets

The other day I was walking around my neighbourhood when I saw something surprising - three identical 18-month-olds sitting on a tricycle that had clearly been built specifically for triplets. What a great idea! Our customers' businesses are full of opportunities like this; things that they need built to solve problems that they deal with every day, in this case how to manage three toddlers who all want to get on a bike at the same time.

What are the little niggles that your customers have, and that you can provide a solution for?

Not only will they love you for it, this is a great way to build competitive advantage by providing remarkable customer value.

Building a re-election campaign for your most important contracts

In Australia, the federal election is just about to happen.  So for the last six weeks, we have been treated to a once-in-every-three-years display of politicking designed to win our vote. OK, a confession. I’m a bit of a politics geek.  I follow election night stats the way others follow football. And I have been known to engage in a bit of heckling on behalf of causes I believe in.  (I’ll leave it up to you to guess how I'll be numbering the boxes on Saturday!).

Combine my personal interest in politics with a career in business development and you get someone who just can’t help comparing political campaigns to the campaigns we wage (or don’t wage) to win and retain important contracts.

The election campaign takes less than six weeks (though at times it feels like much, much longer). During this time, our pollies have been tweeting, Facebooking, flying around the country and appearing on any TV program that will have them.  Case in point - the TV interviews that Tom Gleeson did with Julie Bishop and Pauline Hanson in his segment “I Hate You, Change My Mind”.  (Julie Bishop’s performance in that interview really did change my mind.  Pauline’s? Not so much).

What’s most fascinating to observe in an election campaign is the way that people behave when they know it’s make-or-break time. Our politicians absolutely understand that what they do now will determine the job they get – if they get one at all - for the next three years or more. Will they be elected? If so, will they be on the winning side or the losing side? How much impact will they really be able to have for their electorate and for the causes they believe in?

There’s a lot riding on how politicians perform in this campaign - and of course, in the weeks and months that led up to it.

In contrast, think about the contracts that you have coming up for bid soon. You’ll have four weeks to respond when the RFT comes out.

What are you doing to get your agenda in front of the customer now, before the probity period locks down? What are you doing to boost performance? To innovate? To leverage your incumbency advantage, and fence off the business from competition?  In most cases, if you’re honest, the answer is probably “not as much as we should be”.

If you have an important contract that’s coming up for bid in the next 12 months, let’s make sure you have a re-election campaign to retain it.  Get in touch and let’s talk about how I can help you and your team to get ready to re-compete.

Spitball podcast: the changing face of positioning value

With so much competition out there, it’s no longer enough to simply keep providing a good level of service. Customers will always be looking for more - and unless you are going the extra mile to differentiate and to position yourself as the as the clear winner, you will find your competitors are pipping you at the post. As a business development consultant working on large bids and tender responses, I’ve seen first-hand the uphill battle faced by suppliers who haven’t put in the necessary work to position against highly motivated and methodical competitors. Unless you take the time to distill down your knowledge about your customer to what they actually need and value, your proposal or RFT response will be just another heavy tome to add to the pile.

In our latest Spitball podcast, Hamish Riddell, Bri Williams and I discuss “The Changing Face of Positioning Value".  Find out why we think that challenging the status quo and nudging the customer to step outside of what they know is a good thing - http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/

Proposal writing tip: should I use italics, underlining and bold text?

When you're making a pitch to a customer with a limited attention span, it's best not to do anything that is going to distract them from the point you are trying to make. Sprinkling italics, underlining and bold text throughout your narrative may seem appealing as a way to garner attention, but can actually end up breaking the flow of narrative.

If you want a piece of text to stand out, try using headlines, bullet points, or breakout boxes instead.

What contract bidders can learn from crowdfunding – Part 2

Crowdfunding offers a new model of audience engagement that contract bidders can learn a lot from.  Here are my top four lessons from the most successful crowdfunders.

1. Keep reminding the customer of what’s great about your offer. In crowdfunding, this means up to seven email follow-ups. In your proposal, this means reiterating your most compelling points and spinning them in different ways, not just burying them in the Executive Summary.
2. Make it real. Crowdfunding projects that are supported by engaging video and visuals outsell other projects by a factor of 10 to 1. Successful crowdfunder Chris Thomas, who raised $110,000 through Kickstarter against a target of $10,000 to bring “sleep earmuffs” to market (yes, really), says that there is a direct correlation between “the quality of the video and the bids, and what you end up raising”. Think about how you can elevate your pitch above the usual boring wasteland of uninterrupted words.
3. Make it stand out. In crowdfunding, successful projects tap into needs that customers didn’t even know they had. For example, Patient Zero raised $230,000 through Pozible to stage real life zombie battles, 23 times more than the $10,000 it was originally asking for. In a bid, you’re battling for attention in a crowded marketplace; if everyone can tick all the boxes in the RFT then what makes you any different? Be bold, be an expert, and show the customer a compelling vision of their future working with you.
4. Give something extra. Crowdfunding isn’t charity, and successful crowdfunders recognise that people want to get something back to their investment. A while back, I invested $100 through Pozible in a community project that eventually raised its target of $10,000. In return, I was offered email updates, an invitation to the launch, and my name on the sponsor’s ‘roll of honour’. Rewards don’t have to relate to the project at hand; offer to share your expertise for free on another issue that you know the client is struggling with.

What contract bidders can learn from crowdfunding - Part 1

Crowdfunding offers a new model of audience engagement that contract bidders — who often believe we are talking to an audience that is already sold on what we do — could learn a lot from. Crowdfunding is a social media platform through which millions of dollars have been raised for projects as diverse as a Parma and pot at the local pub ($259 against a target of $20) to millions of dollars of fan funding for a movie version of the TV series Veronica Mars. In the crowdfunding world, the only measure of a project’s worth is whether people will stump up money for it. Most crowdfunding goes to projects that it would be difficult - if not impossible - to get traditional funding for.

There is definite hierarchy in the business of raising money to do stuff.

At the top are products and services that are deemed essential to corporate or public life.  These are funded by governments or businesses through contracts and agreements.

In the middle are traditional grants, where hopefuls parade their wares in front of an entity that has money and is prepared to give some of it away (generally a large corporation, charitable foundation or private donor).

Crowdfunding is at the very bottom of this pyramid.  This is a very interesting place to be, in that crowdfunders are talking to a very wide audience that may or may not have any money - and even if they do, have no intention at the moment of giving any of it away. This forces crowdfunders to put their project in front of everyone they know in a way that is so inspiring that it will prompt them to immediately pull out their credit card.

Check out Part 2 of this article for my top four lessons for contract bidders from the most successful crowdfunders.

Evidence-based Bid Pricing webinar

This month I talked to Greg Eyres of InforValue about how organisations can derive more profit from customer contracts through a smarter approach to bid pricing. The resulting webinar on Evidence-based Bid Pricing is now available to view in Greg’s Resource Centre.

Greg is one of only a handful of specialists in the world that practice in the area of Tender Pricing and his work has dramatically influenced the bid success of some of the largest companies in the world, including Motorola, CSC and IBM. Greg has also developed a number of patents in this space and his articles on tender pricing have been published in industry publications including Informs Journal, Frontiers in Services and Shortlist. Recently, Greg developed KPrice - the world’s only evidence-based pricing tool suite designed specifically for tendering. A Chartered Accountant by training, Greg now consults on Tender Pricing issues around the Asia-Pacific region.

In this webinar, Greg shares a number of interesting case studies that demonstrate the dramatic effect of evidence-based bid pricing on the success of pursuits. For example, Greg and his team were once able to convince the client to increase their $60 million budget by 25%, due to the weight of evidence they had acquired about the true cost of providing the service.

Proposal writing tip: why your great track record isn't a free pass to reinstatement

When you’ve done similar work for a client, and done it well – sometimes for many years – it’s tempting to think this is all you need to talk about to win again. Unfortunately, when reduced to writing, your great track record only explains who you were yesterday; not who you are today and who you’re planning to be tomorrow.

Talk about your track record, but don’t rest on it. Explain how the client will derive future value from what you’ve done before - in reduced risk, higher quality, know-how and IP.

Spitball June podcast: the changing face of productivity

We all want to be productive, but is technology making it easier or just adding to the load? In this month’s podcast we discuss productivity; what holds us back from being productive, our experiences with technology and tips on Apps we’ve tried, the traps of traditional time management wisdom, “infobesity” and the all-you-can-eat buffet, dragons and punching fear in the face!

Listen in at http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/productivity-and-technology/

Books we recommend this month include The New Rules of Management: How to Revolutionise Productivity, Innovation and Engagement by Implementing Projects that Matter (by Peter Cook) and Start: Punch Fear in The Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters (by Jon Acuff).

The first sale is to yourself

What goes through your mind when you’re faced with a big, juicy opportunity that you would really love to win? Requests for Tender present exactly that kind of opportunity. The pot of gold that a huge contract might bring looks as shiny and enticing as a lotto win. On the flip side, there’s sky-high anxiety when teams are forced to re-compete for business already worth millions to them – and that competitors now also have the opportunity to bid for.

Because competing for business is so stressful, pretty much everyone’s first reaction is to start babbling about themselves and why they deserve to win. Left unchecked, the proposal will reflect that kind of shallow, self-centred thinking and the underlying current of anxiety it came from. This is very off-putting to buyers, who - like the rest of us - are wired to tune out at the first sign of a sales pitch.

Jakob Nielsen, an expert in website usability, did an experiment to measure the way that writing style affects selling on the web. He concluded that “promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users, who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts. When people read a paragraph that starts ‘Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions,’ their first reaction is ‘no, it's not!’, and this thought slows them down and distracts them from using the site.”

Therefore, when you’re writing a proposal to convince a buyer, the first and most important sale is to yourself. It’s essential to take the time to define your proposal strategy - what the customer most wants, what you can best deliver, and what positions you most favourably against competitors. This gives you access to the most powerful competitive weapon you could ever have; belief in your ability to make a difference for the customer.

Despite this, most organisations don’t have a good methodology to define proposal strategy. It’s common to see less than 5% of proposal development time devoted to strategy, and this usually amounts to kicking around “our points of difference” - the output from which then gets translated into the proposal as some kind of laundry list titled “Why You Should Choose Us.”  Unfortunately, our enthusiasm for ourselves will never be as compelling as enthusiasm for what the customer wants to achieve and how we can help them to achieve it. Or as Dale Carnegie puts it in How To Win Friends and Influence People, "the only way on earth to influence others is to talk to them about what they want and show them how to get it."

The Persuasive Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class provides many valuable tools and techniques to help you to develop your proposal from the customer’s point of view. For example, you will be trained in my Bid Strategy and Purchaser Value Topics Development Methodology, which is licensed and used by organisations in very competitive industries that consistently win almost everything they bid for. Watch the video to find out more.

Proposal writing tip: how to use case studies effectively

Case studies are an important source of evidence when substantiating claims of past performance in similar contracts. However, they will always have more impact if you can include them in the body of your proposal, and not just attached as a sheaf of project data sheets.

For example, look for opportunities to introduce case studies as an illustration of how you have successfully delivered a particular aspect of your methodology.

Nine ways to slice and dice competitors

Competition is a reality of business life. As long as there are contracts to be won, deals to be done, and money to be made, you can bet that there will be others apart from you who will be interested. Pitching for business is always a stressful exercise. Much of the stress actually comes from the fact that we are being judged against others and might be found wanting, rather than from the more obvious pressures of meeting the deadlines and the customer's requirements.

It's not always possible to know exactly how many competitors you are up against, or the strength of that competition, but one thing you can be certain of is that you won't be the only supplier in contention for the job.  When you already have the business and want to retain it, this thought can be terrifying.

So while it’s tempting to pull the covers over your head and hope they'll go away, these particular bogeymen could stand in the way of a lucrative contract. Let's shine a flashlight in those dark corners to see what might be lurking there.

When I work on bids with my clients, I’ve noticed that almost all of them think of their competitors as the firms or organisations that are the closest match to themselves – what I call “peer competitors”. Often there is a tendency to underestimate the field of competition as a result. So here are nine other ways to slice and dice potential competitors that might pose a threat to your ability to win:

1. National firms, if you are local
2. Local firms, if you are national
3. Much larger or much smaller firms
4. Firms that already work with your customers in another capacity
5. Firms with expertise in an area of current or future interest to the buyer
6. Firms with expansion plans that include your market space
7. Potential partnerships among competitors, including joint ventures and consortia
8. Offshore and multinational competitors, and
9. The buyer themselves – they might do nothing, spend their money on other priorities, or decide to do it themselves.