Author: tazewelldave

1. Don’t talk about yourself.

If you’re a successful business developer you’re probably proactive and very people-oriented.  And you like to talk.  About yourself.  It’s natural. A little of that is fine, as it can increase trust as the customer gets to know you.  But if you don’t quickly shift to letting customers talk about what they’re interested in, all they’ll hear is Blah, Blah, Blah and they’ll place you in the same category as their cousin Franklin the physicist, who can’t stop going on and on about nuclear fusion.

2. Don’t be waiting for your turn to speak.

You’ve finally got a meeting with a great prospect and you can’t wait to tell everything you know about your product.  The customer begins by talking about completing a marathon over the weekend, how hard it was and what emotions were felt at the finish line.  The customer is smiling.  But instead of paying attention, you’re watching their lips and waiting for an opportunity to pounce. When they pause, you launch into a description of all the cool features of your product.  The customer is not smiling.

3. Don’t interrupt.

This is hard.  You love talking to people or you wouldn’t be so good at selling.  You’re filled with words and experiences and you want to share all of them as quickly as possible.  The customer makes a comment and you’re reminded of something really clever.  You can’t help but insert yourself when they take a breath and hijack the conversation.  But you’ve pirated their line of thinking and made them a conversation hostage.  Pirates are not great salespeople.

4. Don’t directly criticize the competition.

It’s tempting to criticize your contemptible competition.  Their scheming and shoddy products are delaying the purchase of your dream vacation home.  But if you criticize them in front of your customer, bad things can happen. Consciously or subconsciously, your customer may begin to fear you’ll say similar things about them.  So they become distrustful and stop talking.  If the customer starts talking about the competition, however, refer to rule number 3.

5. Don’t make the conversation an interrogation.

Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of smart aerospace engineers and technical people.  They go into customer meetings well prepared. They have a list of questions they want to ask.  That’s great, but then in the meeting many of them go down the list one-by-one.  The customer begins to feel like it’s an interview at best and an interrogation at worst.  Great business developers have the same list of questions, but get to the answers in a more artful way.  Try using two or three open-ended questions allowing customers to talk about all their important topics first and then use follow up questions to get the rest of what you want to know.  Let them talk – let yourself listen.

Have you ever screwed up a proposal?  I have. Not the important “Will You Marry Me?” proposal, although that was a near miss.  Wasn’t prepared for the “Why?”  But I followed with “Because I’m fun on camping trips.”  Apparently, that was a winning value proposition.  Anyway, back to the subject of proposal writing and four things to avoid.

1. Ignoring the Instructions

If there’s one thing in common with most failed proposals, it’s that the proposal writer didn’t follow the instructions.  There can be any number of excuses for this.  Perhaps the instructions appeared to be written by someone off their medications and/or a marmot could reorganize the instructions more logically.  No matter what the instructions say, it’s wise to follow them exactly so that the evaluator can readily see that you are compliant and easy to evaluate.  Of course, if you’ve been working closely with the customer before the Request for Proposal release you already know what the instructions mean, right?

2. Underestimating the required effort

Writing a good proposal is a lot like writing a good term paper.  It’s hard to get started.  Any number of things can get in your way before you read the RFP in detail: arranging travel for your next business trip, sorting the documents on your computer’s desktop, remodeling a bathroom, etc.  Failed proposals generally start late and fizzle out altogether as the pace of trying to obtain all the required documentation increases exponentially. Good proposal writers read the questions, think them through, martial the facts and then, and only then, start to write.  Just like you learned in English 101.

3. Delaying writing the executive summary

Every section in a proposal is important, whether it’s about technical compliance, your team, past performance, etc.  But there’s one part that’s first among equals – the executive summary.  It may be the only thing the key decision maker reads. A great technique is to write it first. Why?  Wouldn’t it be better to save it to the last to tie everything together? Likely no.  Writing the executive summary first forces one to synthesize the offering and focus on the key discriminators.  It also helps unify the proposal so later it looks and tastes more like bouillabaisse than old fish stew.

4. Filling in with boilerplate language

A lot of proposals seemly demand language cut and pasted from previous offerings.  In some technical parts that’s appropriate and may save you some time.  But too much cut and paste can make your proposal look like a ransom note.  Every customer is different and every RFP is an opportunity to show in detail that you understand that difference.  Aside from the RFP, what’s driving the customer to buy? What does the customer value? What claims does the customer want substantiated with hard data?  What risks does the customer anticipate?  Proposals tailored to each customer can turn evaluators into champions.  Think of the proposal not as an irritating requirement, but as a selling document designed to beat the competitors.

1. Government contractors generally know a lot more about programs and possibilities than the government officials they’re speaking with.

It’s not often that government customers, especially key decision makers, have the same background and knowledge as experienced government contractors.  If they do, a customer meeting can be as relaxed as a cookout with the family.  If they don’t, it can be as frustrating as trying to help your best friend remove the slice from his golf swing.  You both know something needs to change, but the more you talk the worse things get, which results in you talking more and him going silent (or hitting you with his driver).

Suggestions: Start with a conversation to find out what the customer knows and make that the baseline for further discussions to add to their knowledge.  Strive to make complex things simple.

2. Government contractors come from technical and engineering cultures and tend to think no detail is unimportant.

If you’re a government contractor and you’re ten slides into your fifty-five slide presentation and you see your customers’ eyes glaze over, is it because of the turkey pasta they had for lunch or that you’re saturating them with too many data points?  Probably the latter, though scientific studies have shown that turkey pasta can result in emergency room visits caused by heads hitting conference tables around 2PM.  As for data points, more is not more.

Suggestions: Give the big picture first.  Chunk the information so it’s more easily absorbed.  Provide data in ways they prefer: pictures, videos, conversations, demos, whiteboards, on napkins, whatever.

3. Government contractors believe it’s difficult to convince customers of the value of their solutions in a limited amount of time.

Okay, you finally got that meeting with the key government decision maker.  You’ve prepared a thirty-minute presentation for a thirty-minute meeting (leaving zero time for anything but you).  The government customer arrives late from an executive meeting, hasn’t had a visit to the restroom in four hours and is already thinking about the meeting following yours.  You’re frustrated that the customer came late to your party so you start jamming your presentation into the remaining time allotted.  The meeting soon evaporates into a non-event.

Suggestions: Let the customer control the time and tempo of the meeting.  Slow the conversation and focus on the main points.  Prepare the important messages you want to get across and practice them before the meeting.  Bring a copy of your material to leave behind and avoid the urge to go over every detail at the meeting.  Give up five minutes so they can have a break on their way to their next meeting.  You’ll get invited back.

Here are two miscalculations I’ve made and witnessed in others: from new-hires to well-seasoned business development leaders. These are “Perfecting It” and “Winging It.”  It can be challenging to find the right balance between doing too much and doing too little.

1. Perfecting It

If you’re in an engineering or technology-based company, your product is performance.  And that performance needs to be perfect.  But such an environment can lead to thinking that everything else surrounding that perfect performance also needs to be perfect.

During college summers I worked in a defense plant machine shop.  We’d get a package with a piece of aluminum and a schematic drawing of what needed to be done with it: folded, rolled, punched, etc.  Each finished piece was inspected.  If it didn’t meet the tolerances, the piece would be rejected and its maker would get a sharp word from the shop manager and razzing from the other benches.

So I made up my mind to make my pieces perfect. And I did.  The only problem was I spent so much time making the pieces perfect my section fell behind in production and – you guessed it – I got a sharp word from the shop manager and razzing from the other benches.  Then I got it.  I needed to meet the tolerances, not perfection.

Have you ever been on a team wasting valuable time and resources driving the solution to eye-watering performance while the customer only wanted “good enough” faster?  Most of the time it’s better not to be too perfect – just perfect enough.

2. Winging It

This is the flip side of perfection.  It also involves time and resources, but in this case you think you don’t have enough of the first and you don’t need the second. You’re a pro.  You may be young and smart or you may be a seasoned BD lead and it all seems second nature to you.  In either case, you can be in for a shock.  And it comes quick.

I was a U.S. Air Force officer in Europe and asked to deliver an address to an assembly of political and military leaders. How hard could it be?  I was used to top-level briefings.  So I made a few notes on cards and showed up at the conference.  It wasn’t what I expected.  The gathering was very senior and very large.  Because not everyone could speak English there was an interpreter.  But it wasn’t the slow-paced consecutive translation I was used to.  It was simultaneous translation over headphones.  And when I spoke I could hear the interpreter like a weird echo.  I lost my train of thought and to this day I can’t really remember what I said.

Afterward I asked a colleague how it went.  “You’ve done better,” he replied generously.  The thought of it still stings to this day.  The end result, however, was a great lesson learned: there’s always time to prepare for your customers.

If there’s anything life is short of it’s time.  You don’t have time to do all the work your bosses want you to do and you don’t even have time to do all the things you need to do like making more lists of the things you need to do.

There’s a perception that in the past life moved at a more leisurely pace.  But think about it.  That’s not likely the way it was.  People worked hard from sunup to sundown just to get enough for themselves and their families so they could do the same thing again the next day.  And people who had an abundance of stuff were the same as successful people of today – driven.  No House of Cardsbinging for them.  They could barely keep up with answering all those letters.

So maybe it’s a myth that the pace of life is faster now.  But it still seems too fast for comfort.  Don’t you yearn for a day, a morning, even an hour to get ahead?  Time management experts advise dividing tasks into priority lists.  The psychology of it is that you might never get to a #1 priority because those are usually hard and complicated and it’s a lot more fun doing a lot of #2 or #3 priorities because you get immediate gratification.  For example, instead of making that first contact to a potential client, you decide to spend fifteen minutes trimming your toenails.  It feels a lot more rewarding.

For people in business development and sales, one great approach is to further divide tasks into revenue-generating and nonrevenue-generating sections.  If you want to get more income, you need to spend more time doing the things that will lead to more sales.  But that’s so logical, I’m just referencing it.  Since life is fast and you’re doing the best you can already, maybe a counter-intuitive suggestion could take the pressure off.

Years ago I was friends with an executive here in DC.  George was everywhere doing everything – a whirlwind of positive energy.  He was a delightful man whom everyone liked and admired, but he always looked frazzled.  One day I was shocked at how much better he suddenly appeared.  He looked so great I thought he’d just then returned from vacation.  No, he said, he’d finally taken his wife’s advice.  She was so worried about him ruining his health, that she made him make a promise: every morning pick one thing he felt should be done that day and DON’T DO IT.

Consider this approach. Sure, there are a lot of things excluded from this technique, like remembering to pick up your kids from school, but will the world really come to an end if you don’t put that chart together on last quarter’s sales closing rates?  The DON’T DO IT approach gives you a feeling that you actually have control over your life. It can restore your positive mindset. It will allow you the freedom to trim your toenails before they curl over and damage your sandals.  A positive mindset means you’ll make that important client contact sooner than you would otherwise.  Procrastinate your way to success!  DON’T DO IT today for a calmer and more productive tomorrow.