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An approach to match the times
Fee-earners, currently less busy, can be put to good use to support an initiative designed to enhance sales precedents, partners are more receptive to changes which help them work more efficiently and business support teams are keen to engage on work which is focused on sales activity improvement.
Repackage text as diagrams or charts, as visual information will help differentiate your pitch and get messages across.
Technology increases your ability to streamline and manage all your sales precedents. Workflow software, if used smartly, can effortlessly link matter management systems, deal collection and information updating. |
Innovative ideas
Record Associates has led bid improvement projects at Wragge & Co, Osborne Clarke, Dechert & BLP.
It also undertakes projects within professional services firms on:
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client collaboration
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sales campaigns
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high value tenders
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pricing
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client listening
Contact us on:
+44 (0)1444 811 269 or
or visit our website at:
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| Greetings!
With most BD teams in professional services firms feeling stretched and under resourced, is there a hidden danger that initiatives to improve the support they provide will get postponed? Partners are undertaking increasing amounts of sales activity so are more likely to judge whether the BD team provides value for money.
This email focuses on how to support partners' sales activity better and reduce 'waste' in them - through the reduction of time invested in winning sales opportunities and improving the effectiveness with which that time is used. |
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Access, quality and content
A common complaint amongst partners is that they feel pitch materials are not readily available, inaccurate and poorly written, resulting in them rewriting pitch documents & reducing confidence in your role.
A comprehensive bid library, managed in a similar way to a precedent bank, reduces the time it takes to assemble a pitch and increase the quality of its content. Then make it accessible to the whole firm.
- Audit what 'sales precedents' are available across your firm and identify where gaps exist
- Give documents common naming profiles
- Catalogue these precedents into your file management system and/or intranet (so document ownership becomes unimportant)
- Establish a process to regularly update and control precedents by allocating responsibity and time periods for there review
The building blocks for pitches, such as credentials, track record, case studies, testimonials, CVs, templates and league tables, need careful and regular management. Out-of-date and inaccessible precedents dramatically increase time and effort to assemble pitches.
Access through your firmwide IT systems also encourages self-service and frees up the time of BD teams to focus on other activities. |
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Pitch toolkits
Clients frequently site a firm's lack of understanding of their issues as the reason they didn't win a competitive pitch. This can be because lead partners have a particular view, often related to their own practice area, of those issues. Making tools available to partners will help them (and you) systematically analyse the commercial issues that clients face, weed out opportunities that you shouldn't bid for and package your solution most attractively.
A recent project with Wragge & Co led to a cultural shift in the partners' use of pitching tools and the support they were able to access from the BD team. According to Nicola Lynch, BD Director at Wragge & Co:
"The work Matthew Record did has really helped us to make a step change in how we approach pitches. We are more effective at opting out of pitches we are unlikely to win which saves us wasting time. We can devote this time to pitches where we have a greater change of success." |
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Enhance skills and confidence
Sales precedents and pitching tools enhance the confidence of BD teams as they have objective ways to determine the right amount of time to invest in a pitch and the value proposition that will make the biggest impact.
The ability to constructively challenge partners and quickly assemble pitch documents will increase the perceived value of the BD team. If a pitching methodology is also developed then skills learnt in sales training programmes can be linked to the toolkit and bid library. | |
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