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The problem with Unique Selling Propositions

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For a long time, the world of marketing was very taken with the idea of unique selling propositions. The idea was to find the thing that's unique about you, compared to other people in your market, and position yourself on that.

The term unique selling proposition (USP) was first proposed in the 1940s as a theory to explain why certain advertising campaigns were successful in convincing consumers to switch brands.

An example is M&M’s classic 1954 slogan “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand".

Like a lot of consumer marketing concepts, the Unique Selling Proposition doesn’t translate well into a business-to-business environment. There are four primary reasons for this:

  1. Unique Selling Propositions encourage us to look externally for validation, by comparing ourselves with competitors as the main yardstick of our own value. This is isn’t very helpful, and it also has negative psychological effects.
  2. A Unique Selling Proposition is often very superficial; really just an attention-grabbing slogan, like “melts in your mouth, not in your hand”. This is fine if you’re selling a $2 packet of chocolates, but doesn’t work so well when you’re selling a $2m IT system or $200m construction program.
  3. Business development in business-to-business markets is way more complex than simply “selling”. The purpose of business development is to create value that customers can buy, and selling is just the transactional bit that follows on from that. 
  4. Finally, just because something is unique, doesn’t make it valuable. The world is full of unique things that no one bought, like Jell-O for salads, toaster bacon, and blue French fries. (All real products that tested well with consumers, but tanked horribly when they made it into retail stores.)

Last week, I looked at how the sales environment is changing due to the effects of market disruption.

In this new sales environment, you can forget about unique selling propositions. What you need to find is your commercial value proposition; the connection between what you know and can do, and what makes commercial sense for your customers to buy.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Why the way we sell is changing – then, now and next

The way we sell is shaped by the way people buy, which is aligned to the prevailing economic and social environment of the time. We’ve already moved on from a time where the most experienced supplier would always win, to a time when the most cost-effective was generally the winner. Now that buyers are grappling with the effects of disruption on their operating environment, the game has changed again – and it’s the supplier who can make the greatest value contribution that will achieve the most success.

The following chart describes this evolution, showing that the way we sell eventually adapts to keep up with changes in the buying environment.

Chart: The evolution of sales organisations

In the past, when the buying environment was simply competitive, the most experienced supplier would usually win. We mostly sold on our credentials, and our biggest sales problem was convincing the buyer that we had what it took to do the job. This was the “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” era.

You know you’re in a competitive environment when:

  1. Customers demand a lot – they have a very high list of hurdle requirements that you need to meet, which helps them to weed out “less qualified” suppliers.
  2. You often lose to larger or better-resourced competitors.
  3. The most successful people in your industry are those with an impressive track record of similar work.

Then, the buying environment became commoditised. Challenging economic times fuelled demand for buying practices that would bring costs down, like category management and competitive tendering. As a result, the most cost-effective supplier would usually win.

You know you’re in a commoditised environment when:

  1. Customers buy through competitive tenders and online reverse auctions; constantly ask for discounts and ‘best and final’ offers; and the price goes down every time a contract goes back to market.
  2. You often lose on price – and often by a wide margin.
  3. The most successful people in your industry are those with a very low cost business model, or who are prepared to sacrifice margins to get the business.

Now, the buying environment is changing again, but in the most significant way of all – business and government are being disrupted. In 2015, consulting firm PwC undertook a study of thousands of CEOs to find out what kept them up at night. 52% said their greatest fear was “being Uber-ised” – disrupted by someone from outside their industry that they simply didn’t see coming. Disrupted environments bring a lot of problems that buyers need your help with.

You know you’re in a disrupted environment when:

  1. Customers ask for reform, innovation, or new ideas.
  2. You often lose to a competitor who is proposing something dramatically different to what the customer initially asked for.
  3. The most successful people in your industry are those who can break the mold of the way things are traditionally done, and deliver dramatically better results.

While each new buying environment keeps some elements of what came before – you’ll always need a strategy for credentials and price – disruption is a major opportunity for suppliers who seize the day early.

So what are you doing to codify (and explain to customers) the inherent value in what you already do and offer? How are you engaging your team in the work of customer value creation? What are your plans to “disrupt yourself” before someone else does?

Think about these questions, but don’t think too long. Start moving. In a disrupted environment, the future will belong to those who act – quickly.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

How to win despite tough competition

Winning business is a case of ready-aim-fire. Most of us spend way too much of our time on the “aim and fire” part – targeting customers, and firing off presentations and proposals. What we don’t do enough of is readiness; making the connection between what we know and can do, and what makes commercial sense for customers to buy. This leaves us woefully underprepared for the mental, emotional and physical challenges that come with tough competition.

Over the last fortnight, the sights, sounds and spectacular performances of the Rio Olympic Games have captivated the world. One of the biggest stories of the Games has been the success of American swimmer Michael Phelps.

At 31, Phelps is the most-decorated Olympian of all time, and the most outstanding swimmer the world has ever seen. This week, he announced his retirement from swimming after a career that spans five Olympic games and 23 gold medals, five of them won in Rio.

This image from the Rio Olympics perfectly captures the essence of success. While Phelps is focused on winning his race, the closest competitor has his eye on Phelps instead. On social media, it was captioned “Winners focus on winning. Losers focus on winners.”

In an elite field of almost-equals, it is mental and emotional preparation, as much as physical conditioning, that separates those who win from those who come in second.

At the Olympics, swimmers who compete against a phenomenon like Michael Phelps at least have the consolation of a silver or bronze medal as a reward for their sacrifice and hard work. 

In business, we don’t have this luxury.

Looking over your shoulder at what competitors are doing – even (and perhaps especially) when they are winning – is not helpful. It will throw you off your game and send you into a spiral of comparison where, inevitably, you will come out in second place.

Instead, run your own race. Focus on making the connection between what you know and can do, and what makes commercial sense for your customers to buy.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

 

 

What Heston Blumenthal can teach us about creating an experience that sells

In any transaction between buyers and sellers, it’s the buyer who holds the purse strings. But this doesn’t give them ultimate power. Yes, buyers can choose, but not always from among alike things that will give them the same result. Because of this, sellers who have something unique and valuable that others need or want have a lot of power too.

We saw an example recently when restaurateur and celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal transplanted his celebrated Fat Duck restaurant to Melbourne during the shutdown and refurbishment of the original in Bray, England.

The $525-a-head tickets for Fat Duck Melbourne were sold by public ballot.

$525 is a lot of money and, given that there were 14,000 tickets on offer, you’d think that meeting this target would be kind of a stretch. But in fact, the opposite was true.

Fat Duck Melbourne received 89,179 entries worldwide in the online ballot. Based on an average booking of three people per table, that equates to a staggering 267,537 people who couldn’t wait to part with at least $525 a head - and with paired wines, nearer to $900 a head - to get a piece of the action.

At the time, the sought-after ballot was likened to the “golden ticket” to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, a fitting comparison for a man who is known for his fantastical food creations, including snail porridge, bacon & egg ice-cream, mock turtle soup and Meat Fruit. 

Dining at The Fat Duck is an experience you can’t get anywhere else – and to a lot of Melbourne locals, the cost compared pretty favourably to the alternative (a trip to England).

Restaurateurs are in the business of theatre, and Blumenthal understands this well. It’s his job to create an experience, not just a plateful of food.

This is useful thinking to apply to your business and what you offer.

For example, what would be considered your ‘signature dish’? How do you go about revealing this offering to customers? What is part of the experience of working with you, that your customers can’t get anywhere else? How do you talk about this to customers? And even more importantly, how do they talk about it to each other?

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Sell insight, not information

Back when sellers had a greater influence over what people bought, it was often because we controlled the information that was made available about our products and services. This meant that anybody who wanted that information had to come to us, which gave us a lot of power.

But buyers, understandably, didn’t like this so much. They thought it made us lazy and greedy.

So they invented procurement and professional buying, including the discipline of competitive tendering. Since the 1980s competitive tendering has been growing quickly. In the 2014-15 financial year, one of Australia’s largest buyers – the Australian government — spent $59.447 billion on buying goods and services through its online competitive tendering system, Austender, and issued 69,236 supplier contracts.

At the same time, the internet - and social media in particular - changed the way buyers could access information. Now, it’s very easy for buyers to find their own information, and to seek information from other buyers (or customers).         

What does that mean for sellers and suppliers?

We've gone from a time where we had a lot of power, to one where we it doesn’t feel like we have much power at all.

As sellers, when we held all the information, we had more power. Now we don’t, and most of us don’t know how to reassert our value. Within your team, this shows up as frustration and disappointment:

  • Why don't customers understand how important this is?
  • Why don't they ‘get’ us?
  • Why do they insist on buying from that guy, who we know is not as good as us?
  • Why do they insist on doing something that isn’t going to get them the great result we know we could get?
  • Why won’t they listen?
  • Don’t they care?

Actually, customers do care - but they don't care about us. Or our technical solution. Or our years of experience and impressive qualifications. At least, not specifically.

They care about one thing - themselves - and getting the results that they need to get.

Information is no longer a valuable currency in business-to-business sales. We need to turn our information into insight – making the connection between what we know and can do, and what makes commercial sense for customers to buy.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Risky business: the mindset mismatch that is costing you work

When I talk to people about a contract that is up for tender, a project they’d like to do, or a piece of new business they would love to win, there are several things that they usually tell me.

The first is that this venture has their name written all over it; that they are the ideal people for the job. They’ve got the credentials, the methodology, the people, and the skills to get the job done.

Something else I hear a lot is that the opportunity is an “ideal fit” for their vision, mission or strategic plan – or it just fits their image of where they’d like to be in future.

Another thing that people often say is that they would love to have the chance to do this kind of project, or to work with that customer; that it would look great on their CV or would help them attract other, similar business.

Interestingly, the pragmatic arguments – that there is significant money to be made, or a chance to beat competitors – often come well behind, or aren’t mentioned at all.

What this says to me is that, first and foremost, most of us want to do interesting work and to make a difference.  We tend to approach a pitch with an “opportunity” mindset.

On the other hand, when looking at the same contract, project or tender, prospective customers have a completely different set of thoughts going through their mind:

·      This is a really important project. It needs to go well.

·      If it doesn't go well, it's my job or my reputation on the line.

·      There's a whole bunch of things I want done, but I don't know if those things are really possible, and I don't know if I trust you to do them for me or not.

·      I'd love to make an impact with this project and have it be a huge success, but I'm more worried that it won't be.

·      I need this, but I don't want to pay too much for it.

·      I don't want to get ripped off by someone who knows more about how this works than I do.

The contrast is a stark one. While we pitch for new business with an opportunity mindset, the customer is almost always thinking about what could go wrong.

When you first begin a pursuit or a proposal, think about risk and its implications for the customer.

The real opportunity is to ask “why not”, instead of just “why”.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Clarity: the key to selling professional and technical services

Professional and technical services are, by definition, complex and time-consuming to execute. That’s why the customer needs us.

Unfortunately, this also makes them complex and time-consuming to explain, which means we feel under constant pressure to get straight into unpacking our methodology and implementation plan – what and how. This often comes at the expense of explaining the problem we’re solving (why), which from the customer’s perspective is the only reason why they would even consider buying from us.

According to Daniel Pink, author of To Sell is Human, the qualities of Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity (A-B-C) are what’s needed to be effective in today’s world of sales, where buyers and sellers are evenly matched on information. This makes pretty good sense.

In terms of how we put these principles in practice, though, we actually want to think in terms of C-A-B:

1.     Clarity means knowing what you are really selling, understanding the value it creates for a customer, and being able to articulate why they should buy it. Clarity comes from focusing squarely on value (why) rather than methodology (what and how). Clarity needs comes first, because without clarity nothing else really matters.

2.     Attunement means being able to understand what buyers want. Most popular sales and marketing books are about attunement, because figuring out what buyers want is what most people associate with success. However, “wants” are only part of the value puzzle. As an expert selling a complex service, and who wants to deliver great work as a result, attunement needs to go both ways – not only to what buyers want, but also to what they really need.

3.     Buoyancy means being able to overcome rejection, so you can keep going until you get a result. Many selling skills methodologies focus on buoyancy (resilience) because it is what veteran salespeople understand is the key to longevity. By selling value, though, we will experience less rejection, and thankfully also need to rely less on being able to rebound like a human punching bag.

A good reason to start with Clarity is that it’s the only one of these three attributes where we can exert total control.

Attunement and Buoyancy both require that we develop strategies to respond to factors external to ourselves, which is much more challenging, and pretty much impossible when we don’t have Clarity.

Clarity starts with examining what you really do, the results that you’re creating, and what is truly remarkable about your work.

That understanding - that clarity - is the key to winning the business you want, at the margins you want, and making the difference you alone can make.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.
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Three reasons why incumbents are more at risk than they think

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I have a confession to make – I’m tragically addicted to politics. Elections are my kind of competition. Some people live for the AFL Grand Final. Others obsess over Eurovision or MasterChef. Me, I’m an election groupie.

Every three years, when the Federal election rolls around, I stalk proudly through the gaggle of political party volunteers at the local polling booth – accepting one or two how-to-vote leaflets and loudly refusing others – to place my very important vote.

As soon as the vote count starts, I settle in with snacks for a nice long stretch of channel surfing, shouting at the commentators and throwing things at the TV when the count doesn’t go my way. I love the process, but what I’m really hanging out for is the end result, and the leaders’ concession and victory speeches. 

This year, I stayed up for a very long time. Maybe you did too. And wasn’t it frustrating? We didn’t get a victory speech that night, or even the next morning. We were left hanging for a week before we knew the likely outcome of the election – the government returned to office by the narrowest of margins.

We were told the election would be close, but not so close that it would eventually come down to week’s worth of postal votes.

What happened?

Incumbents are more vulnerable than they think. This is true whether you’re a political party or a contractor selling commercial goods and services.

Here are three things that every incumbent can learn from the very close result of the Australian Federal election – a result that could easily have gone another way.

  1. Incumbents are always vulnerable to a protest vote. The customer, in this case the electorate, had already seen what this government could do and many of them weren’t happy about it. With only a single term under their belts, we also still remember the alternative, and it seems we weren't happy with them either, resulting in a large rise in votes for Independents and for the Greens. By Monday, with 80% of the vote counted, nearly a quarter of Australians had given their votes to an independent or minor party, with the Coalition registering a primary vote of only 42.1 percent - its fourth lowest result for the past 60 years.
  2.  An incumbent’s team listens only to the good news, and blocks out everything else. In this election, it has been suggested that the Coalition was so enamoured of its own internal polling – which optimistically predicted that the party would be returned to government by a large margin - that it even convinced the majority of the media this was a foregone conclusion. The result was much closer than the Coalition’s polling anticipated, and the fallout and recriminations have been difficult for its leadership to handle.
  1. An incumbent's program of work and track record are visible and open to scrutiny. Like it or not, this makes it very easy for an opponent to find the patterns, holes and gaps and to mount an effective attack, as Labor did with the Medicare, or “Mediscare”, campaign.

What can we learn from these results?

  • The time to start campaigning again to win an election is the day you form a government.
  • The time to start campaigning to retain a customer is the day you sign the contract.

Incumbents ignore this, and believe their own hype, at their peril.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

Seven questions buyers are asking about what you’re selling

When we want to be of service to others, it’s exceptionally frustrating when some – including those who seem to be in the greatest need – are unwilling to let us help them.

I bet you’ve sat in many meetings where prospects have explained problems that you know you are exquisitely qualified to solve.

You’ve heard their aspirations and been able to see instantly how you can achieve them. Seen how the course of action they have mapped out in their heads will land them in a place that they really don't want to go. Felt the excitement of knowing you have a solution that can really help them.

The conversation goes well - they like you and you like them. It should be a total no-brainer that you'll do business together. Yet this is not always what happens. Why?

Services are difficult for buyers to evaluate. Buyers can neither see, touch, smell, taste nor hear services, so as far as they’re concerned, we may as well be selling fairy dust.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of hidden mistrust of service providers by those who buy services. Although they probably won’t say it to your face, here’s what they are thinking:

1.     What does this really mean, anyway?

2.     How do I know you will do what you say you will?

3.     Will I actually get the team you're proposing?

4.     How do I know this will get results?

5.     Is this going to be hard for me to manage, or justify to my boss?

6.     Does it really cost that much?

7.     That doesn't look too hard…tell me again why I really need you, anyway?

Research by Qvidian shows that 63% of sales are lost to “no decision”. Opportunities often stall because doing nothing is often easier for a buyer than doing something that seems difficult or risky.

Although the buyer might give you many reasons as to why they did not proceed, these usually boil down to a single factor; they simply don’t believe the commercial value proposition you presented them with.

If you often find yourself in this position, it might come as a relief to know that the solution to this problem isn’t to get better at sales techniques or at negotiation. It is to better understand the value in what you are selling, and to present this in a way that helps people to understand why they should buy it.

A sales pitch often begins with aspirational attributes – how you can do things smarter and better – while the buyer’s thinking is stuck at the visceral level, worrying about cost and risk. This mismatch is costing you business.

Understanding how buyers perceive value, and calibrating your pitch to suit this, will answer their unasked questions and make a huge difference to your results.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

How to sell services in a competitive tender

Are you in the services business? These days, most of us are. A World Bank study showed that in high-income countries, services represent 66% of GDP compared with only 35% in low-income countries. In Australia, services employ more than 8.6 million people, representing 76% of all employment.

As the people who deliver these services, we understand how essential they are. Yet services can be hard to understand and define, making them difficult for us to sell.

Complicating this is the issue that the people who buy our services often don’t understand them as well as we do.  The “product” of a service is often the result of specialised experience and training. As a result, clients who lack this knowledge often have difficulty evaluating the value of service products.

This lack of understanding leads to commoditisation and unfair pressure to force our prices down.

Consider the impact of competitive tendering. Since the 1980s this system of buying has grown quickly, and now most contracts of any size and value are transacted through bids and tenders. In 2014-15, one of Australia’s largest buyers – the Federal government – spent $59.447 billion buying goods and services through Austender, and issued 69,236 supplier contracts.

In a competitive tender, you will be pitted against many competitors – sometimes a handful, sometimes hundreds.

And the competitive tendering system is particularly challenging for people who sell services.

Services are often complex and time-consuming to execute. Unfortunately, this also makes them complex and time-consuming to explain.

In a competitive tender, we are faced with word limits, page limits and character limits. This means we’re under constant pressure to get straight into unpacking our methodologies and implementation plans (what and how). This often comes at the expense of explaining the problem we are solving (why), which is the main reason why a customer actually needs us in the first place.

If you have no choice but to engage in competitive tenders, learning to communicate value – in a way that goes beyond the easier default position of “price” - is essential to stand out in this crowded, competitive environment.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

What you do is already awesome

We are often too close to what we do to get a true picture of its value and usefulness to others.  This is because our relatively complex maps of what and how we do things result in a cognitive bias known in psychological circles as “functional fixedness.”

Functional fixedness means that our thinking has evolved in a way that limits us to using an object (or an idea) only in the way that we are accustomed to using it.

In 1945, Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker defined functional fixedness as being a "mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem."

In his classic experiment, Duncker gave participants a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches, and asked them to attach the candle to the wall so that it did not drip onto the table below. He found that people tried many unsuccessful ways to solve the problem – including attaching the candle directly to the wall with the tacks, or gluing it to the wall by melting it – but very few of them thought of the inside of the box of thumbtacks as a candle-holder, and tacking this to the wall instead. When he repeated the experiment, giving people a box that was now empty of thumbtacks, they were almost twice as likely to solve the problem.

The older we get, and the more experience we gain, the more likely we are to exhibit “functional fixedness”.

Tests have shown that children aged 5 years have no signs of functional fixedness, but by age 7 have acquired the tendency to treat the originally intended purpose of an object as special.

This might explain why you can tip a box of Lego on the floor of a kindergarten and the three and four-year-olds will just go for it, making the most weird and wonderful creations, whereas school-age children often prefer being given a Lego box containing the parts and instructions to make something tangible, like a car or plane.

As well as making it more challenging to think laterally to solve problems, there is another impact of functional fixedness – our inability to acknowledge what we do as valuable, and special.

If this is a problem for you, hold onto the possibility that what you do is already awesome, and that all we need to do is find a way to explain it to others so that they get it - and want to buy it.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.

 

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You bought a WHAT?

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Identity is at the core of every buying decision. Because we all buy things, we can all get better at persuading others to buy – otherwise known as “selling”.

Selling requires the ability to put yourself in another person’s position, and to appeal to their identity - whether you’re selling to consumers or to business buyers.

The “I Bought A Jeep” campaign is a good example of how identity affects purchase behaviour. This campaign, launched in 2012, has become part of the Australian cultural vernacular. 

The advertising firm behind the campaign, Cummins&Partners, discovered that although Jeeps were very popular with the people who already drove them, the brand was struggling to reach new customers with its previous ad campaign slogan, “Don’t Hold Back”.

Qualitative research with current Jeep customers showed that most of them had experienced an “incredulous” reaction from family and friends when explaining they’d bought a Jeep (“you bought a WHAT??”).

The big idea behind the new campaign was to dramatise this as “incredulous approval”. Therefore, the reaction to saying “I bought a Jeep” became “You bought a Jeep!”

Jeep’s brand values are freedom, authenticity, adventure and passion, and the ads tap into a customer’s desire to live those values - not just buy a car.

This campaign won two Silver awards at the advertising industry’s 2014 Australian Effie Awards.  The agency’s submission to the awards committee shows that the campaign had dramatically increased sales for the parent company, Fiat Chrysler, in a difficult car sales market. Since the start of the campaign, Jeep sales increased 156%, outgrowing the SUV category by 300% while also reducing media expenditure per unit by 45%.

Australia is now Jeep’s second largest sales market outside the USA. Talking about the success of the campaign, Cummins&Partners’ CEO Sean Cummins said:

“Our aim is to create enduring platforms for brands that inspire action. And this does both. In spades. What is exciting for us is that “I bought a Jeep” has become so idiomatic to Australians. This is the stuff brands dream of. And it is a sensational platform that could go for years…the work we do is not for the industry, it is for consumers. And they are buying Jeeps!”

Knowing what we know about how the ads play to the connection between Jeep’s brand values and the values of the customer, we could also add to this by concluding:

“…because we found a way to appeal to the buyer’s identity”.

This is an extract from my new book Value: how to talk about what you do so people want to buy it. To order your copy, go to http://www.robynhaydon.com/buy/

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We are what we buy

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“Who am I?”

It’s a big question, and one that has occupied psychologists and sociologists for hundreds of years.

A more useful question, when it comes to buying and selling, is “How do I see myself, and who do I want to be?”

We all have an identity that we want to show to the world, and we confirm that identity through our actions. Therefore, what we buy, and who we buy it from, both affect the way we see ourselves.

Let’s look at a few examples.

  • If you’d like to be seen as a good person, someone with integrity, you might be on the lookout for ways to “do the right thing” – probably without even realising it. As a result, you might find that you end up buying ethical, environmentally or “green” products and services over alternative options.
  • If you’d like to be known as a generous person, someone who gives to others, you might find yourself sponsoring a child in a developing country, or contributing to (and sharing) online fundraising campaigns.
  • If you’d like to be seen as a frugal person, who is good with money, you might enjoy sniffing out a bargain and sharing these good deals with your admiring friends and family.
  • Or if you want to be seen as a productive person, who gets things done, you might like trying out and talking about gadgets that help you to do more in a day and to make the most of your time.

We all buy things, and we all play roles while we’re doing it.

In going about your day-to-day purchases, you probably don't give a lot of thought or attention to this.

However, identity shapes all of our buying decisions – both good and bad. How does your identity affect what and how you buy?

This is an extract from my new book Value: how to talk about what you do so people want to buy it. To order your copy, go to http://www.robynhaydon.com/buy/

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The problem with selling services

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Do you work in a service industry or service-based profession? Many of us do. In Australia, services employ more than 8.6 million people, representing 76% of all employment.

If you’re drawn to this kind of work, you probably want to use your expertise to help others, to do good work, and to make a difference. But in the real world, we must first convince people that they need our help; we have to convince them to buy from us. And this isn’t always as easy as it should be.

Products are fairly straightforward to sell, because we can touch them, feel them, and understand through experiencing them how they work.

Services on the other hand, are not straightforward at all.  Like a product, a service solves a problem, but the problem is often hard to see, and may be completely unknown to the person who is experiencing it.

As a result, people are often suspicious of buying services, because they don’t understand them and are worried that they might never get the outcome that they were promised.

But these people – your customers - have real problems that you can solve, and they need your help. It's your duty and responsibility to get out there and help them, but this means getting past your own fears and biases first.

Doing is easy. Selling can be hard.

Back in Renaissance Italy, artists were supported by wealthy patrons who admired their work.  This system had benefits for both parties.

Artists received a living wage, access to luxury materials (such as gold and lapis lazuli) and commissions to produce art on a size and scale they could otherwise only dream of.  Patrons used the art they produced as a means of expressing and enhancing their social status. Without this patronage system, we wouldn’t have many of the works of brilliant artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo or Raphael.

In service industries, we also need to find patrons – customers –who get what we do, and who see the mutual benefit in commissioning us to do it. This is essential if we are to have any chance of bringing our gifts into the world.

It’s easy to accept the excuse that it is all about price and that customers don't want what we have anymore. That isn’t really true. They may want it – and they probably need it – but like the rest of us, they are time-poor, risk-averse and battered by disruption and change.

Our job now is to give them extremely compelling reasons to do things the way that we suggest.

This is an extract from my new book Value: how to talk about what you do so people want to buy it. To order your copy, go to http://www.robynhaydon.com/buy/

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Value: how to talk about what you do so people want to buy it

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Today I am proud to announce the release of my new book, Value – How To Talk About What You Do So People Want To Buy It.

It’s the final book in my Winning Business series, which also includes The Shredder Test, a step-by-step guide to writing winning proposals, and Winning Again, which reveals how to retain your most important contracts and customers.

For almost two decades, I’ve been helping suppliers to win multi-million-dollar contracts in complex services industries.

Through this, I’ve learned a lot about how business and government customers buy, including why they say “no” to offers that seem to make perfect, logical sense.

This book focuses on value creation, which is the key to successful new business pursuits.

A recent study on sales execution trends by Qvidian found that only 63% of salespeople actually make their targets, with pursuits ending in “no decision” the major reason for the shortfall. While four in 10 salespeople thought that an inability to effectively communicate value might be behind their lack of success, only half of these people also chose this as a skill they needed to work on.

Understanding your true value is the key to unlocking more of what you want–  more customers, higher margins, and more rewarding work.

It is my hope that Value will help you to look at what you do in an entirely new way: from the perspective of how it creates commercial value for customers. Reading Value is like being a fly on the wall of your prospect’s office, while they talk about a problem you have the perfect solution for. It could just make the difference between sealing the deal,  or losing, as so many do, to “no decision”.

If you have ever missed out on an opportunity that you really deserved to win, ever struggled to explain what you offer to people who just don’t seem to understand, or if you’ve ever seen prospective customers stubbornly go down a path that you know is not right for them – then this is the book for you.

You can buy your copy here. I hope you enjoy Value as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it for you.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.
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Five ways to win more tenders

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Last week I caught up with a client whose team did some tender and proposal writing training with me a few years ago. She told me they are having a lot of success with competitive tenders now, and that their business has grown exponentially over the last few years. She also said the feedback they get now about the quality of their tender responses is very positive. At one debriefing meeting recently, the buyer even told her that her company’s tender was the best they had ever seen.

If you’re not yet getting that kind of success, or feedback, about your tenders there are some things you can do to improve. Here are five of the most effective.

1.     Make sure you have a strategy to win the business that translates into two or three compelling messages that are easy for the buyer to remember. I call these Purchaser Value Topics, and they are basically evaluation criteria that you suggest to the buyer that go over and above simply complying with theirs.

2.     Provide insights that transcend their briefing. Anyone can regurgitate the tender document back to the buyer, and it takes a smart cookie to tell them what they don't know - but should.

3.     Really analyse everything they’re asking for, and answer the ‘question behind the question’. Why did they ask this question? What do they want to know? How will the answer affect their decision-making process? Many tender questions are made up of more than one part, so don't just skim the surface. You'll miss something, and this could count against you.

4.     Don't dumb down what you do to fit the briefing. The client I mentioned earlier is in a complex industry that buyers often don’t understand. Her company’s tender responses generate a lot of discussion with buyers, because they shed light on things that the buyer simply hadn’t considered.

5.     Make sure you present it beautifully. These days, when people are selling their home, they'll often spend thousands on staging and furniture to show it off to potential buyers and to achieve the best price. Think of your tender response like that. It’s the only chance you’ll get to make a first impression.

Doing well in a competitive tendering environment isn't easy, but it can be done, and successful tender writing and presentation is a skill that you can learn.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.
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Is your proposal really a proposal?

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When your proposals aren’t successful, it can be hard to figure out why. Trying to fix this problem on your own is like trying to fix a car when you’re not a mechanic. You can tinker and try things, but it’s hit-and-miss, frustrating and slow.

So let’s start with defining what a proposal really is.

A proposal is a commercial document whose purpose is to influence the customer to say "yes" to you. To achieve this, proposals need a combination of style, substance and relevance.

  • Style is the way the proposal looks and sounds, and how it makes the reader feel.
  • Substance is the content of the proposal, which outlines the offer that you are making to the buyer.
  • Relevance is the “fit” between the offer and the problems and aspirations of the customer.

Problems occur when any one of these elements is missing; the “proposal” becomes a brochure, a report, or a presentation. All of these are interesting in their own right, but none are likely to get you hired.

When there’s style and substance, but no relevance to the customer, your proposal becomes a Brochure. This is a generic document that looks and sounds great, but could apply to anyone. Studies show that brochures are useful in consumer businesses, particularly retail trade and in tourism. If you’re selling to business and government, not so much.

When there’s substance and relevance, but a lack of style, customers read the proposal as if it’s a Report. Proposals are about selling the job; reports are about doing the job.

Customers are trained to read reports as a set of recommendations - not all of which may be adopted.

Where there is style and relevance, you’ve got a Presentation. In his book Pitch Anything, Oren Klaff, a venture capital consultant who pitches multi-million dollar deals for a living, says that customers often see sales presentations as “the morning’s entertainment” - a pleasant enough way to spend an hour, maybe even to learn something new, but probably not to buy anything.

So, is your proposal really a proposal? Or is it something else? Identifying the problem is the start of the solution.

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Can you really bid less but win more?

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“Sales is a numbers game”. This saying comes from a time when relationship selling was king, deals were done on a handshake, and the more people you got in front of, the luckier you became.

However, it is harmful advice when it comes to competitive tenders.

Submitting competitive tenders is like feeding coins into a slot machine; your chances of winning don’t get any better as your supply of coins goes down.

In fact, the opposite is true.

The more tenders you invest time and effort in, but don’t win, the more discouraged you're likely to get. Buyers don’t give you good feedback – or any feedback. All you’re really doing is depleting your most important currency, the energy, enthusiasm and engagement of your team, for absolutely zero return.

People will try to tell you you’re not winning because you “didn’t write the tender”, meaning the buyer didn’t go to market based on the specifications you gave them. This is baloney too. Buyers are smarter than that; they won’t deliberately favour one vendor. And I've known plenty of people who have won competitive tenders without any prior relationship with the buyer.

Most likely, the problem is that you’re submitting so many tenders that they look like brochures – carbon copies full of cut-and-pasted content. Or, they are simply responses to the tender specification – which is what everyone else is doing too – without any real strategy to win.

Over the years I’ve noticed a marked difference in the way that clear winners approach bids and tender proposals, while others are setting themselves up to lose. It starts with how (and where) we spend our time.

 

Spend more of your time up front on the thinking work, without jumping straight into the “doing” work, and good things will happen. You’ll get better engagement from your team. You’ll impress buyers. And you’ll win more often. And that’s a win for everyone.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.
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Is it time to pimp your proposals?

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For most people in business, proposals are not a joy – they’re simply a hassle.

Proposals chew up a lot of your time and resources. You spend hours, days or weeks slaving away over them, and when you lose, there are no prizes for second place. Customers don’t give you useful feedback (or any feedback) and it can be impossible to work out what you’re doing wrong.

Imagine your most recent proposal has just been graded, and is sitting in a stack, on a desk, inside your buyer’s office.

On the bottom at level 1 are the proposals that are the most unappealing. If yours is in this part of the pile, we need to do some work on your message – what you are actually selling.

Above this at level 2 are the proposals the buyer found unclear; they didn’t quite “get it”. Here, we need to work on your presentation.

Above the line are the level 3 proposals the buyer sees as competent.  On the surface, these seem okay, but they often lack evidence to support the claims you’re making. Without this, you won’t be winning business as often as you should be.

Where you want to be is at levels 4 and 5. Level 4 proposals are convincing, and show a level of strategy and insight that others don’t. At level 5, you’ve really made it; your proposals are so compelling that buyers simply can’t say no to you. At this level, you’ll be able to leverage more business, at better margins, because you are positioned as the go-to people in your market space.

Compelling and convincing proposals are a combination of style, substance and relevance.  Problems happen when any one of these elements is missing; the “proposal” becomes a brochure, a report, or a presentation, none of which is likely to get you hired.

A proposal effort that isn’t getting you results can leave you feeling stuck and frustrated – like being trapped in the movie Groundhog Day. But no matter where you’re starting out, there is always a way to improve.

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Claim + Evidence = Persuasion

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The customer who is reading your proposal has many demands on their time and attention. Your proposal must entice them in, make the journey interesting, and ultimately convince them that what you are offering has real merit.

These days, it’s pretty hard to get people to read long documents. A recent study by The Pew Research Center confirmed that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.

It doesn’t really matter whether we are reading for business or for pleasure – the barriers are the same.

Improving the evidence that supports your claims is an important first step towards making your proposal more readable and more convincing.

For example, in a tender evaluation, the people sitting on the evaluation panel have to give your proposal a score.  What sets apart the proposals that achieve high scores is the quality of the evidence that they provide.

Tender evaluators use a score sheet that has a built-in process for scoring the quality of evidence you provide in each part of your submission. To get a top score of 10/10 or 8/10, your evaluator will have to justify that ‘all claims are fully supported’ in the part of your proposal that they are reviewing.

If your proposal has even ‘minor shortcomings in scope and detail’ – and this is very easy to do if you make claims without substantiating them with evidence – the maximum you can score on an answer is 6/10. In a very competitive tender, even one score this low could put you well out of contention.

Evidence is often the first thing that suffers when your writing is challenged by competing demands from your day job, tight deadlines and even tighter word limits. Here’s an example of what I mean:

 

XYZ Road Maintenance is Australia’s leading provider of road cleaning equipment to municipal authorities and private cleaning contractors. 

Our highly experienced, results-driven research and development team has drawn on world’s best practice to develop our Road Maintenance Widgets, which are considered the most reliable on the market today.

 

This short proposal extract alone has five unsubstantiated claims. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. So how do we fix the problem?

For example, let’s look at the claim of “reliability”. Here is a better way to convince the customer that this claim actually has some merit. The first sentence makes the claim, and the rest provides the evidence.

 

Reliability is an important indicator of widget quality, as reliable widgets have a longer lifespan, better up-time and lower overall costs of ownership.

XYZ Co. offers a ten-year guarantee on the operational performance of our widgets, double that of most other widget suppliers. 

We supply more than one million widgets each year to 87 contract customers, including almost half of Australia's municipal authorities and eight of the country’s top 10 private cleaning contractors,. Our standard supply contract promises 98.5% up-time for each individual widget; however, we have consistently exceeded this benchmark, achieving 99.3% up-time over the past three years across all 87 contracts.

Reliable widgets require replacement less frequently, reducing costs. Broken Hill City Council saved $50,000 on its annual road maintenance bill by using our widgets and private contractor Alphabet Cleaning Services has more than doubled the useful life of its existing road maintenance vehicles by replacing Acme widgets with ours.

 

A proposal without evidence is like a fairytale; ultimately, it's very hard to believe. Unlike a fairytale, though, reading such a proposal doesn't even have the benefit of being entertaining. It's disorienting, exhausting and the reader will most probably cast it aside without ever finishing it.

So stop cutting and pasting your proposals.

Slow down, really think about the message you want the reader to see, hear and feel, and find evidence to support every claim you want to make. You will find that you’re even more convinced about your offer as a result – and this conviction will lead to better results and more sales.

Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Is it time to pimp your proposals? Stop wasting time and money on proposals that go nowhere. The Pimp My Proposals program will give you the feedback, content and structure you need to build compelling proposals that win business. Learn what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.
Robyn Haydon is a business development consultant specialising in business that is won through competitive bids and tenders. Her clients have won and retained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business with many of Australia’s largest corporate and government buyers.

Re-Engage is my training and coaching program for organisations with multiple major accounts. It will give your people the framework, skills, and confidence to lead contract renewals with your existing customers. Email info@robynhaydon.com or call 03 9557 4585 to find out more.