INSIGHT

Hints, Tips & Blog from the Essential Edge

• Why Don’t Outsourcing Suppliers Use Deal Coaches?

  Jul 7th 2010

  By: admin

  1 comment

  By Simon Knowles

  If we look at any professional or semi-professional football or rugby team each has a manager and at least one or more coaches to enhance performance. So why in our highly competitive outsourcing industry do so many service providers still only hire sales managers?

  Doing it the ‘old way’ is not enough to win

  I believe the answer lies in the fact that senior management today still operate their bid teams in the same way they used to in the ‘good old days’ when there was rapid market growth and fewer competitors. Managing a reasonable sales team in a rapidly growing market to a reasonable set of processes, with a reasonable cost saving proposition generally did the job. However things have changed since those dizzy days of rapid growth. Outsourcing is not a black art anymore; customers have matured and expect more, whilst competition has increased exponentially. So what can we learn from this?

  What needs to change?

  Well lessons I believe can be learned from any professional or semi-professional sports team. If we look at the support team deployed, what do we tend to find? Firstly we see that they have a manager; a person responsible for ensuring the team is focused on the right fixtures and delivering winning results – something akin to the sales management function of today. However what we also see is the deployment of at least one team coach whose specific role is to coach and enhance an individual’s and or a team’s performance. And that’s why market-leading outsourcing providers are starting to use what we call ‘Deal Coaches’ to help win new business.

  Deal Coach in action

  To bring this to life, I would like to draw on a real-life example from one of our Deal Coaches. In short, our Deal Coach was hired by an outsourcing provider to help the sales team position and engage with key decision makers in a way that would significantly enhance the provider’s win probability. By deploying Value Based Selling as a strategic methodology, backed up by ongoing deal coaching, the team were able to differentiate their proposition and engagement which ensured this outsourcing provider, who was considered a rank outsider, come from nowhere to win a $500m+ IT outsourcing opportunity in Europe. 

   If you would like to find out more about the value of using a Deal Coach, please email simon.knowles@essential-edge.com

  Creating Winning Proposals

• Improving Sales Performance Through Win-Loss Analysis

  May 24th 2010

  By: admin

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  By Simon Knowles

  IT and Business Process Outsourcing companies spend a considerable amount of time and money pursuing sales opportunities however many fail to capitalise on capturing and tracking valuable customer perceptions and competitor insights as to why they won or lost an opportunity.

  For companies that do carry out internal assessments, these organisations often run the risk of making decisions based on fragmented (and at times incorrect) information from internal employees who are not in an objective position to gather and share unbiased information.

  One way to overcome these challenges is to use a third party organisation to help implement an independent, objective and systematic win/loss analysis process that provides actionable intelligence for improving sales performance.

  So what are the benefits to this approach?  

  • Gives you greater insights as to why you won or lost as the client often feels more comfortable about telling the “home truths” to an independent person;
  • Provides a truly objective analysis of the bid and provides senior managers with unbiased actionable insights;
  • Gives you a better understanding of your competitor bid activities and sales strategies;
  • Improves sales performance and win rates through the consistent application of lessons learned;
  • Helps benchmark and track the strengths of your company’s sales effectiveness, solutions, products and services against your competition.

  Getting Started

  Before any client engagement, we always stress the importance of ensuring the win/loss questionnaire and reporting templates are tailored to your (the clients) specific requirements. It is also important to put in place a systematic trend management and reporting process by implementing, for example, a quarterly review of all deals in order to highlight the trends and key issues that need to be addressed.

  With now over 180 outsourcing providers competing for opportunities in Europe alone, accurate and timely intelligence is critical to gaining that elusive sales edge. So if you would like to find out more about implementing an effective win/loss analysis programme for enhancing sales performance, please email simon.knowles@essential-edge.com.

  Creating Winning Proposals

• How Bid Based Marketing Helps Differentiate Propositions & Win New Business

  Apr 19th 2010

  By: admin

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  By Simon Knowles

  In my last article Outsourcer Competition Up: The Imperative for Change, I outlined how strategic marketing can help providers differentiate their corporate position and engage with target buyers more effectively. This article gets right into the trenches and focuses on, what I call, Bid Based Marketing which helps bid teams create compelling propositions, differentiate the way they engage and produce impactful proposals.

  So what is Bid Based Marketing? In short it is a strategic approach to winning a defined piece of new business by differentiating propositions and communicating with impact to a well defined set of stakeholders.

  Unfortunately in our industry Bid Based Marketing is not widely exploited or deployed, however given the increase in competition and commoditisation in the sector, its time has come.

  Marketing and sales alignment is key

  It is an approach that needs to be tightly aligned with the sales lead/bid team and goes beyond generic marketing communication initiatives to focus on leveraging client and competitor intelligence to create a distinctive position, together with tailored messages articulating unique value to target decision makers and influencers.

  It touches all parts of the bid process and should be woven into the opportunity planning, call planning and opportunity engagement process.

  Benefits of Bid Based Marketing

  To bring this to life I would like to draw on my experience of setting up a Bid Based Marketing capability for a global tier 1 outsourcing provider and outline the types of activities my team got involved in to help bid teams gain that critical edge: 

  • Deployed market research capability, competitor analysis and client requirement workshops to help bid teams gain a deep understanding of the client’s formal and informal requirements;

  • Deployed strategic marketing and communication techniques to craft a compelling win strategy, unique positioning, set of win themes and value proposition;
  • Aligned sales and marketing messages with solution teams;
  • Crafted high-impact executive summaries and developed compelling proposal copy and presentations;
  • Developed effective call planning and stakeholder communication programmes;
  • Delivered ongoing client and competitor intelligence throughout the bid process;
  • Ensured compliance through independent bid marking.

   

  The winning providers of the future will be those that have implemented a Bid Based Marketing strategy aligned to an effective Value Based Selling approach that will significantly improve win-rates, differentiate propositions and win more business.

  Creating Winning Proposals

• Becoming a Value Based Selling Organisation

  Apr 16th 2010

  By: admin

  4 comments

  By Michael Kleinman

  Selling has never been more difficult.  The challenges of commoditisation, hyper-competition and procurement driven RFPs makes it harder for suppliers to differentiate themselves.  Value Based Selling has been designed to address such challenges by helping suppliers shift the client’s agenda from price to value.

  Value Based Selling can be positioned in at least two sectors of the normal selling cycle. Firstly, where the client has been approached before any formal document (e.g. RFP) has been released and secondly after a formal bidding process has begun. The reasons and metrics used to adopt Value Based Selling are both an increased win rate and more profitable engagements.

  Value Based Selling focuses on articulating unique value

  Generally Value Based Selling means that the supplier has understood the client’s formal and informal selection criteria and expressed the benefits of dealing with them in terms of business and personal benefits whose value is recognised by the client. Naturally, any value proposed to a client must be competitively unique to the supplier or at least perceived as such by the client.  At the level of large or strategic opportunities, it is especially important to recognise that confidence in the supplier’s passion for delivery and personal benefits to the client may dominate the final selection process.  It is often the case that the product or service to be delivered can be provided by more than one supplier, so the final selection is often a  matter of criteria which are likely to reflect more personal or higher level concerns than the original evaluation criteria. A number of such deals in which I have participated were decided on Value elements, ranging from the perceived integrity of the selling team, the deep understanding of the client’s business and competitive marketplace displayed by the selling leads to the willingness of the supplier to accept an equity-based contract. It was always a matter of understanding what the client wanted most deeply. To foster such an understanding, strategic selling stresses the general importance of relationship and of developing inside support, or coaches, within the client organisation. This support is often vital to identifying and gaining access to the real decision makers within the client organisation.

  The obstacles to Value Based Selling

  Well, if Value Based Selling has so much promise, why don’t more companies do it? Firstly, many, many deals are perceived by both sides as commodity deals, where the possible differences between suppliers are slight differences in quality, price or speed or convenience of delivery. Even in complex deals, such as outsourcing, Value Based Selling is not used on the grounds that:

  • Most salespeople are happy to work to the client’s ‘written’ agenda, which in their view is set by procurement and only involves client executives and business users tangentially;
  • The presence of third party advisors / internal procurement usually means that access to those clients who can recognise value is cut off;
  • The supplier organisation and its selling processes are not geared to Value Based Selling;
  • Salespeople complain that the normal components of Value Based Selling (Portfolio, Account, Opportunity and Call Planning) take too much time – in fact they actually save time.

  Becoming a Value Based Selling organisation

  Overcoming these obstacles is not easy; based on many years of sales and sales coaching experience some of the adjustments required for adopting Value Based Selling are setting up, aligning research and marketing functions, training the sales force to deal with client executives and adopting a sales process which provides early contact with the client.  However, the most important changes for most organisations are:

  • Gaining senior executive commitment and alignment (sales, marketing and delivery);
  • Implementing value-based sales training and using effective sales processes.

  Value Based Selling

• CASE STUDY: Using Bid Marking to Improve Win Rates

  Mar 15th 2010

  By: admin

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  By Dick Johnson

  Ensuring a Quality Response

  For professional service providers, one of the most critical parts of the outsourcing process is the bidding and vendor-selection mechanism.  It’s a process that is time consuming, labour intensive, complex and costly; and as the vendor selection is often managed by a third party advisor, this means that the marking is rigorous and the exam-style questions have to be passed in order to progress.  It’s hard to believe therefore that despite outsourcing providers investing huge amounts of time and money into the process, many bids fail due to the response being non compliant.  A simple yet effective way of ensuring compliance is to employ an experienced independent bid marker.

  Bid Marking in Action

  By means of an example, a recent outsourcing project illustrates the importance of bid marking and being able to mark the bid twice.  At the Pink Team review, only 27% of the 300 detailed questions achieved full compliance and to quote the Bid Manager – “The bid marking highlighted how poor our response was at that stage and clearly indicated what needed to be done in the final few weeks of the bid.” By the Red Team Review, just over 90% of the answers had become fully compliant and this enabled “the final push to target very clearly those answers which still needed attention.” The process was repeated again at the Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stage and the bid was ultimately successful.

  Actionable Insight

  The Essential Edge uses a tried-and-tested approach to bid marking, providing a full analysis of each individual question thus ensuring that every facet of every question can be adequately answered and therefore enabling full compliance to be achieved.  This is an approach that has been successfully employed at a number of highly successful tier 1 and tier 2 outsourcing companies.

  Our approach works because the review is performed by highly experienced, independent markers who provide a thorough and truly objective analysis of the bid.  Feedback is provided in a simple-to-use Compliance Matrix with a mark given for each individual answer.  Non-compliant answers are clearly highlighted with detail given as to what needs to be done in order to achieve full compliance.

  Creating Winning Proposals

• Identifying New Opportunities & Getting Senior Executive Appointments: 10 Steps to Success.

  Mar 15th 2010

  By: admin

  No comments

  By Ian Carr

  Two of the biggest challenges faced by service providers today include: identifying new opportunities and secondly getting in front of senior decision makers and influencers.

  There is no silver bullet to addressing this problem apart from deploying an effective closed-loop process that blends the effective use of market segmentation, targeting, positioning, messaging, communication, engagement and follow-up mechanisms.

  One of the tactics often adopted by many service providers has been to procure services from telemarketing agencies which in general has resulted in mixed levels of success.

  Our experience shows that to be successful and maximise your ROI, providers need to adopt a strategic and holistic approach to opportunity identification and senior executive engagement. Part of this approach includes deploying the right individual(s) to make direct appointments. This can be highly effective, however many organisations have been burnt by implementing ill-thought-through tactical, telemarketing engagements which when implemented incorrectly have proved to be costly, ineffective and damaging to brand reputation.

  The following hints and tips are designed to help you optimise your engagement strategy. They are based on our 25 years of experience communicating high value solutions and securing senior executive appointments for outsourcing providers:

  10 Steps to Success

  1. Set clear objectives.
  2. Identify your target audience.
  3. Articulate your value proposition and outline why you are unique from others.
  4. Develop an integrated campaign using multiple communication vehicles where possible.
  5. Select an experienced person to do direct sales/appointment calls. This person should have a demonstrable track record in securing senior executive appointments (remember they are an extension of your brand).
  6. Ensure the campaign is integrated between sales, marketing and delivery.
  7. Implement appropriate tracking and reporting mechanisms so you can demonstrate ROI.
  8. Ensure leads handed over to sales people get followed up and nurtured.
  9. Don’t let sales guys drop a warm relationship just because there is no immediate piece of business. If that sales person has no time, hand over the relationship nurturing to another person if needed in order to maximise your return on engagement.
  10. Communicate your successes to senior management.

  Lead Generation

• Outsourcer Competition Up: The Imperative for Change

  Mar 12th 2010

  By: admin

  2 comments

  By Simon Knowles

  The Growth Challenge

  There are now over 100 major service providers competing for predominately commoditised outsourcing contracts in Europe; trying therefore to differentiate on scale, low cost of service and flexibility is no longer enough to win. With the majority of service providers being operationally led and at best sales led, the provider community is now being forced to start looking at strategic marketing and value-based selling techniques to help differentiate themselves in what has become a hyper competitive market.

  Lessons from the Manufacturing Sector

  Today’s maturing outsourcing provider market is showing similar characteristics to that of the car manufacturing industry in the early 90s. Advanced manufacturing techniques meant that cars started to look similar at a time when competition started to increase due to an influx of low cost, high quality imported cars coming in from emerging manufacturers based in countries like Japan and Korea.

  In response to this, not only did traditional western manufactures start moving their production cost base offshore but the savvy manufacturers started to re-look at the way their overall marketing, sales and delivery functions worked. They started turning to strategic marketing to evaluate customer’s needs and wants, then developed segmented propositions that appealed to different buyers needs. Finally they aligned their marketing, sales and production functions in order to deliver an enhanced integrated customer experience.  In short they moved from being operationally and production led to being customer and market led.

  

  Actionable Insight

  If we turn to the outsourcing provider market today, most firms operate in sales, marketing and delivery functional silos which result in inefficiencies, inadequate coordination and often poor customer interaction and service. In the past few years some companies have strengthened their sales functions and increased their marketing spend, however many of these organisations are still operationally led and at best sales led, with marketing often being seen as those nice folks who produce tactical brochure ware and events. Unfortunately what these organisations have failed to grasp is the value that can be delivered through strategic marketing and value-based selling techniques that are tightly integrated with the overall delivery function. This approach is key to achieving ’real‘ differentiation which ultimately leads to an enhanced customer experience, resulting in positive word of mouth, more sales and improved margins.

  Survive and Thrive – Don’t Dive

  Given the sheer number of providers in the market place today it is inevitable that the myopic providers amongst them will start to see their revenues dive. However the ones that will survive and thrive will be those companies that re-evaluate and change their go-to-market and service delivery models by evolving to become customer-centric integrated ecosystems. They will be the ones that put the customer at that heart of their operations and the ones that invest in strategic marketing and value-based sales techniques to create that elusive edge to win in this hyper competitive market.

  Strategy, Planning and Positioning

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  • CASE STUDY: Using Bid Marking to Improve Win Rates

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