As one of the judging panel for the up and coming Business Champion Awards I wanted to offer my professional advice to finalists to let them hone their presentation skills to share the best of your business to the judges.

The Business Champion Awards are designed to celebrate the best of British business nationwide, but my advice is valid for any business making presentations.

Are you ready to talk about your business decisions, or does the prospect of presenting make you feel nervous? 

You’re not alone in feeling this way and as much as our team of organisers can say: ‘it’s meant to be a positive experience to reward the champions of business’ it’s still always a bit nerve wracking on the day. Have no fear, because there are ways around this though …

Great presentations are made from process, preparation and practice

There is a quote attributed to Dale Carnegie that states,

‘There are always three speeches for everyone you gave; the one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.’

The inference being that speeches and presentations don’t always go to plan, and most of us have sat and squirmed, or maybe even enjoyed a moment of schadenfreude, as a speech or presentation has collapsed into mayhem before our very eyes.  

There are people who will tell you that delivering a speech or a presentation is an art, that some people have it, whatever ‘it’ is, and some people don’t.  But, solely relying on “it” can leave even the most accomplished public speakers scrambling for the right bit of paper, heading off topic and seeing their presentation rapidly unravel.

Like most things in life, the best way to avoid a presentation disaster is to employ a process, prepare properly and practice. Obviously, you must understand the subject matter you’re presenting, but without process, preparation and practice you dramatically increase your chances of acting out Carnegie’s quote.

So here are a few tips that might help you actually give the presentation you planned.

1. Ask yourself why you are giving the presentation?

What is it that you want your audience to do after they have listened to you?  This first step is vital in establishing the content of your presentation and the style in which you will deliver it.

• Is the purpose of your presentation an enthralling call to action?  If so, your style will need to be passionate, motivational and upbeat
• Is it to educate?  If so, do you need to present charts and statistics.  
• Is it to present a proposal or to gain approval for a contract?  If so, the next steps need to be clearly defined.  

Answer the question “why” before you start to create presentation content, otherwise why your presenting, what you present and how you present it are unlikely to be fully aligned.

2. Understand your audience

The smaller the group you are presenting to the easier it is to understand your audience, the larger the more difficult.  That said, no matter how large your audience there are questions you can ask yourself that will help align your content to what they are hoping to hear.

A few questions to ask yourself about your audience include,

• Who are they?  What do they already know about the subject matter you are presenting and how does this inform your content and delivery style?
• What are they expecting you to present?  Have you been explicit enough in communicating the purpose of your presentation to them?
• Out of all the different aspects of your subject matter what do they care about most?  People engage when they hear things they care about and disengage when they don’t.

It may seem blindingly obvious but working out what your audience is interested in is key to the success of your presentation.

3. Have a structure and stick to it

There are numerous presentation structures that can be employed to deliver a presentation, but (in my opinion) the “open, body, conclusion” structure is ideal in 99% of cases, this is also known as, tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them. The process is simple, but very effective and works like this, 

4. Tell them what you’re going to tell them

This sets the scene for the audience and confirms to them exactly what to expect from your presentation, the six points you should cover and the order in which you should cover them are,

1. Who you are (as in “Good Morning, my name is …….”)
2. Your role or responsibility in relation to the presentation you are about to give
3. The specific purpose of your presentation (as in why you are giving it)
4. The main points you are going to cover (no more than 4 or 5 as a maximum)
5. How you would like to handle questions
6. If anyone has any questions before you start.

When delivered proficiently, without notes or reading from a slide, this approach provides an impressive and confident start to your presentation.

5. Tell them

You can open the main body of your presentation by either:

• • Telling a joke – be careful, it’s a presentation not a stand-up comedy routine
  • Telling a story, one that is relevant to your content
  • Making a statement to capture the audience’s interest.

The objective is to grab your audience’s attention by letting them know why they should listen to you.

The body of your presentation needs to contain the (no more than 4 or 5) key points that you want to focus on.  You should present these in a logical order, so that your audience can follow you and your presentation easily.

Trying to present too many points runs the risk of losing or boring your audience.

If you intend to present facts and figures to support the main points of your presentation, make sure you use reliable sources that you can quote and refer to.

6. Tell them what you told them

The words you use to close your presentation should be the ones you want your audience to remember most.  They should be succinct and focused on summarising the purpose of your presentation and the key 4 or 5 points you wanted to deliver.

The structure of this segment of your presentation is,

• Restate your objectives
• Summarise your key points
• State your call to action.

With the “tell ’em” approach, your conclusion summarises the main points of your presentation.  If you want people to take an action, change their view of, or how they feel about something, be specific about exactly what you want them to do.

7. Practice makes perfect

We all know the saying that practice make perfect.  So, if the first time you ever deliver your presentation is when you actually deliver it to your real audience you are setting yourself up to fail.  You should run through it at least 10 times, preferably with a friendly audience (this could be one person) who can give you honest feedback on what works and what doesn’t. 

If nothing else this allows you to check that you can actually delivery your presentation in the time allocated

The truly great presenters make it all look easy, but here’s the secret to their ability to deliver great presentations; they have a process, they prepare and they practice.  That’s why for them, Carnegie would have said, ‘the one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave are all the same.’

Read more:
Get over your fear and be confident making business presentations

One of the biggest misconceptions of B2B selling is that customers invest in new products and services purely to overcome strategic or operational challenges.

Yes these things will have played their part in initiating the enquiry stage of the buying cycle, the market research and supplier evaluation, but they are not why budgets are approved and investments are made.

The only reason organisations gain budget approval and invest in products and services, is to achieve a positive outcome in one, two or all three of these scenarios,

• To increase profitability by creating a competitive advantage
• To reduce cost by becoming more operationally efficient
• To protect or enhance reputation and/or brand.

It’s also the case that without being able to identify and explain how these positive outcomes will be achieved, budgetary approval for any organisation’s investment plans are unlikely to be approved

Whilst all of this might appear to be obvious, it is often the case that B2B sales people confuse their solution to a customer’s problem with the positive outcome, here’s an example,

A customer wants to buy a new telephone system because their existing one can’t handle their current call volumes. It’s fairly obvious that the solution is to provide them a telephone system that will remove the call volume problem, but that’s not the positive outcome, the positive outcomes could include,

• Lower call waiting times, improving customer satisfaction
• Lower stress levels for call centre operators, making it a better place to work
• Reduced costs with better call management, freeing up money for other investments
• Improved reputation as a place to work, improving recruitment and reducing attrition
• Improved reputation for service, improving company value
• Improved profitability, gaining more new customers and less churn of existing ones.

Again, all of this seems fairly obvious, but more often than not, selling organisations fall into the trap of merely selling their solution.

This usually includes, how suited their product or service is to the customer’s requirement, how big and successful the selling organisation is, what an extensive product range they have and how their overall solution is the customer’s best option; though often struggling to explain how they are different from any other prospective supplier.

All of the above may be (to a greater or less extent) relevant, but If you want to avoid this trap and differentiate your sales approach by moving beyond solution selling, here’s three things you need to do to perfect the art of positive outcome selling.

Keep the customer’s perspective in mind

The first thing is to look at everything from the customer’s perspective. For example, the fact that the new telephone system might have twice the capacity as the old one is a solution to the call volume problem, but it’s not a positive outcome, it’s merely a feature of the product.

Take the time to research the customer’s business as widely as possible, don’t get stuck on a single track of finding a solution to the challenge they’ve described to you. Take responsibility to know and understand their business, you may spot a potential positive outcome that the competition and/or even the customer themselves have not thought about.

Keep your focus on why they want to invest vs getting bogged down in what they said they wanted to invest in, this approach alone will differentiate you from your competition.

Recognise that positive outcomes become personal

The second thing is to recognise that the organisational positive outcomes we mentioned earlier, (increase profitability, reduce cost, protect or enhance reputation) hold differing levels of personal value to each of the key stakeholders engaged in the buying process.

We always need to bear in mind that people are primarily interested in how what you are selling will impact them personally, as much (if not more than) as how it will solve an organisational problem.

For example, when proposing the new telephone system to the prospective organisation, the sales director may be more interested in the “gaining more new customers and less churn of existing ones” outcome; the call centre team leaders would be keen to understand how the “lower stress levels for call centre operators” could be achieved and the CEO may be keen to understand how investing in a new telephone system can enhance his company’s reputation and market value?

It’s this level of personal impact understanding that differentiates positive outcomes from merely being a list of benefits (as in features and benefits selling). Benefits are generic, but positive outcomes are specific to the value perceived by each individual.

Go high and wide (but don’t forget low)

The mantra of sell high and wide is well known in the world of B2B sales. However, when it comes to qualifying the opportunities for positive outcomes, it’s a great idea to also spend time with the people (lower down the organisation) who will be using your product or service.

Moreover, it can often be the case that they will give you a better insight into the challenges and therefore more opportunities to identify positive outcomes than someone who does not actually do their job.

So if you’re selling contact centre systems ask to spend time listening to calls in the contact centre, if your selling fork lift trucks go and talk to the fork lift truck drivers and the people working in the warehouse, if you’re selling a CRM system go and talk to the salespeople who will be using it, if your selling project management services spend time with the people for whom the project outcome is intended, not just the people running or sponsoring the project.

By taking this approach, you will not only be (and be seen to be) more committed to finding the right solution, you will also be better equipped to link the investment the organisation is making to the positive outcomes it can achieve, both at an organisational and personal level.

On a final note, “because I’m worth it” (© L’Oréal) might act as ample justification when spending our own money, but it’s unlikely to cut it for any B2B organisation’s major investment approval process. Approval for significant budget expenditure, both in the private and public sector is usually a bit more robust than that.

By doing the three things we’ve covered in this blog, you will not only help your customer identify the positive outcomes their investment will achieve, you will also increase their chances of getting their budgets approved; they might even perceive being fortunate enough to be dealing with someone as professional you as a positive outcome as well.

Read more:
Don’t sell the solution, sell the positive outcomes:  Three things you need to do

If you employ salespeople to sell your company’s products and services, it is more than likely that you have a sales commission plan in place.

If you do and you want to test whether or not your sales commission plan is fit for purpose, there are 3 simple questions you should ask yourself.

The answers to these questions will inform you if your sales commission plan is what it should be, if it would benefit from adjustment or if you need to pull it apart and start again. The three questions are,

Question 1: Is your sales commission plan aligned to your organisation’s financial objectives?

We’ll start with something so obvious that it often gets missed. Are you rewarding people for achievements that directly contribute to the financial objectives and targets laid out in your organisation’s business plan?

For example, if achieving your annual gross profit target relies on a balanced mix of products and services being sold, is this reflected in the plan, are there certain products that you want to sell more or less of?

Aligned to the product mix theme, is your plan operating on a flat percentage of sales value (revenue) or does it reward as a proportion of the profitability of the sale. If it is the former, it is literally costing you more (in terms of commission payments vs profit ratio) to sell your less profitable products.

However, the most important thing in aligning your plan to your financial objectives, is to check if it’s possible for you to pay out 100% or more of your commission plan budget without achieving your organisation’s financial targets.

In other words, could you max out your commission plan budget without hitting your profit target? You should check this at an individual, team and overall company level.

Question 2: Does your sales commission plan promote the correct behaviours?

If your business sells high value and/or complex products with a long sales cycle, it’s probable that the accuracy of your sales forecast is important to you. If it is, have you linked the accuracy of sales people’s forecasts to the payment of their commission?

On a similar theme, but extended to a wider scope, you may be an organisation that struggles to get its sales people to manage their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) input to the standard you want them to.

This could include anything from keeping customer contact records up to date, through to ensuring sales opportunities are staged at the correct point in the sales cycle. If this is an issue for you, have you taken steps to link the payment of commission to the quality and accuracy of their CRM input?

A final point on this section is to check if your sales managers are rewarded with exactly the same commission plan as the people in their teams and consider if this is the correct thing to do? Are there points of integrity, such as ensuring the correct product is being sold to the right customer for the right reasons, which mean your sales managers should be rewarded differently?

Question 3: Is your sales commission plan clear, documented and understood by all?

If you do run a sales commission plan (and if you have read this far I’m presuming you either run or are rewarded by one), have you ever received a complaint from a participant of the plan.

The answer to that question was “yes” wasn’t it?

In my experience the majority of complaints (or to more accurately describe them, disputes) about sales commission plans arise from two sources.

The first is when the plan is changed mid-year; when this happens it is nearly always because the points raised in “Question 1” (alignment to financial objectives) were not addressed in the plan’s original design and a panic measure has been put in place to address a budget issue.

The second is when the plan is not supported by a governance document. Moreover, the time and effort has not been taken to ensure that the plan’s rules are clearly documented and understood by everyone participating in it. These rules could include, thresholds, accelerators, bonus triggers (the aforementioned) product mix and the behaviours we covered in Question 2.

Writing a governance document for your sales commission plan, explaining all of its moving parts, the rules and even producing a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section will minimise the instances of future disputes.

More importantly, it will test whether or not the design of your sales commission plan is robust and fit for purpose. If there are gaps in your plan, writing the governance document will find them before you launch it, so it’s worth the effort.

Getting it Right

The premise of running a sales commission plan is that you are employing salespeople within a risk/reward culture.

A good sales commission plan will align to your organisation’s financial targets and objectives, reward not only sales achievement, but also the correct behaviours and be clearly understood by all those participating in it.

So, when you get a chance ask yourself the three simple questions outlined above and hopefully you can answer them in this order,

• It is
• It does
• It is.

If you can that’s brilliant, if you can’t, you’ve got some sales commission plan redesign work to do.

Read more:
Three simple questions to test your business’s sales commission plan

If you want to evaluate whether or not your business’s organisational design is as effective and efficient as it could be, there are 3 simple questions you should ask yourself.

The answers to these questions will inform you, if your organisational design is what it should be, if it would benefit from adjustment or if you need to pull it apart and start again. The questions are,

Question 1: To what extent is your organisational design driven by legacy culture and practices?

This question is designed to challenge the status quo thinking about your organisational design.

Are your people organised in a particular way because they’ve always been organised in that manner, regardless of changes to your processes, the market you operate in and/or competitive forces? Moreover, was it historically designed to accommodate (now redundant) processes, but hasn’t been updated due to a resistance to change from the people within it?

In addition, have any parts of your organisational structure been designed specifically to accommodate the wishes of a particular group or individuals? Have the demands of influential individuals tilted your business’s organisational design to their personal benefit?

If this this type of influence has impacted your organisational design, you have to ask, how is it affecting the productivity of others and what will you do when that person/people move on to pastures new?

Question 2: Does your organisational design support your business strategy?

Way back in 1977, Alfred Chandler of the Harvard Business School published a book entitled, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. It was this book that gave us the organisational design mantra of “structure follows strategy.”

Whilst slavish adherence to any organisational design ideology isn’t (in my opinion) to be recommended, the “structure follows strategy” principle still makes sense today. It works on the premise that every aspect of your business’s organisational structure design, divisional, departmental and the reporting lines of every person, must be place the strategy and objectives of the business in the forefront of your thinking.

For example, imagine you have decided that your business’s strategy is to differentiate yourself from your competition by providing superior customer service. Now ask yourself, “what provision have you made in your organisational design to align to this strategy, how many people, how are they organised, who do they report to and how will you deploy them to deliver superior customer service?”

Without clarity in the answers to these questions, it’s likely that executing the strategy will prove to be a difficult task.

Question 3: Is your organisational design fit for future purpose?

I once had a neighbour who worked for a steel production company, he told me that the group of people he worked with had not changed, (the actual people, the number of people, the organisational structure they operated in and their reporting lines) for 15 years.

Unlike my former neighbour, for the majority of us, organisational change is as much a part of business as usual as it is of any change project.

However, it’s often the case that many organisations fail to see that there is a huge danger in changing their organisational structure too frequently; without stability you can’t establish traction and constant change will drain you people emotionally. That said, I think 15 years in the same place with the same people and the same boss might have driven me bananas.

With all of this in mind, if you do decide to redesign your organisational structure you need to ensure that wherever possible you implement a new design not just for today, but also for the future.

In order to do this, in addition to answering the first two questions we considered, (on legacy and strategic alignment) some of the things you might want to check for a fit for future purpose organisational design are,

• Will it improve the service you provide your customers?
• Is it flexible enough to accommodate changes? (think Porter’s 5 Forces)
• Does it provide clarity in accountability for processes and outcomes
• Does it encourage cross-functional interlock and communication?
• Do you have the processes and infrastructure to make it work?
• Are the spans and layers of control effective and practical?

There are a few others, but the above list should give you enough food for thought for now.

Getting it Right

In any business the most valuable, most expensive and hardest to replace asset is good people and deploying them in the correct organisational design is a key cornerstone of any successful business plan.

So, when you get a chance ask yourself the 3 questions and hopefully you can answer them in this order,

• It isn’t
• It does
• ·It is

If you can that’s brilliant, if you can’t, you’ve got some organisational design work to do.

Read more:
Three simple questions to test your business’s organisational design

One of the most effective ways to increase your business’s revenue and profits is to upsell and cross-sell to your customers.

Whilst lots of businesses claim to understand the upsell and cross-sell approach, many don’t actually do it as a consistent and planned activity, it’s something that happens sporadically or not at all.  The result is a missed opportunity to increase your business’s revenue and profits.

So if you would like to check you’re doing all you can to take advantage of the upsell and cross-sell opportunities available to you, here’s some tips to help you establish a plan of activity.

Upselling v cross-selling: What’s the difference?

The first thing to clarify is that upsell and cross-sell are two completely different sales tactics.  This is great news because it means that you can both upsell and cross-sell to a customer at the same time, it’s not a case of either or.  The difference between the two is this,

Upselling is encouraging the purchase of anything that would make the primary purchase higher in price, for example,

• Upselling an increase in a life insurance policy from £500k cover to £1m cover, thereby requiring a higher premium
• Upselling an increase in a Business Communications Data circuit from 40GB to 100GB, thereby increasing the rental cost
• Upselling a MacBook Pro 13”, 128GB at £1,299 to a MacBook Pro 13” 256BGB at £1,499, thereby increasing the sale by £200.

Cross-selling is encouraging the purchase of anything in conjunction with the primary purchase, for example,

• Cross-selling a Home Insurance policy to the person we upsold the Life Insurance policy to
• Cross-selling a Unified Communications System to the company we upsold the 100GB Data circuit to
• Cross-selling a carry case to the person we upsold the MacBook Pro to.

So if you didn’t know before, now you know the difference between the upselling and cross-selling.

Why is establishing an upsell and cross-sell sales plan so important?

There are quite a few reasons why you should put some thought and effort into establishing an upsell and cross-sell plan, these include,

• It’s between 5 to 25 times more expensive to find and sell to new customers than to sell to existing ones;[1] So upselling and cross-selling to existing customers is highly profitable
• For rental and subscription businesses, upselling and cross-selling plays a significant role in reducing churn, by displacing competitor products and services with your own
• As long as the customer is happy, upselling and cross-selling builds customer loyalty and increases customer lifetime value
• Both upsell and cross-sell can be initiated and executed at any point of the customer lifecycle.

At this stage, (before you read further) have a think about how upselling and cross-selling might apply to your product or service.  What would your businesses upsell and cross-sell opportunities be?  Once you have one or two, read on and keep them in mind as we go through the points below.

What do I need to put in place to start a successful upsell and cross-sell plan?

There are a number of wider sales effectiveness areas that will contribute to a successful upsell and cross-sell plan.  These extend (but are not limited) to sales organisational design, sale skills competency, account planning methodology, product knowledge, reward plans and sales processes.  For today, we will imagine you have all those areas nailed and we’ll concentrate solely on the six areas directly connected to the upsell and cross-sell plan, which are,

1. For new sales enquiries, don’t be an order taker, be curious: When a customer expresses an interest or wants to buy your product or service, don’t just take their order, ask them some questions, here’s some examples,

• What do they intend to use it for?
• Have they used something similar before?
• What did they like the most about their previous product or service?
• Is it for them, or is it for someone else?

This will not only allow you to build a picture of whether or not the customer is suitable to be upsold and/or cross-sold, it also shows them you are taking a genuine interest in them, which they will appreciate.

For example, if we ask the person buying the MacBook “will you be travelling with it?” and they say yes, we should be cross-selling the carry case.  If they say no, it would be hard to justify the extra spend, it’s as simple as that.

2. For existing customers create an upsell and cross-sell target list: Compile a list of your existing customers and map out which products/service you have sold them and which you have not.  For organisations selling high value or complex products, this information should form part of your Account Plans and already be a day-to-day activity (known as “white space mapping’).

An interesting point here is that trying to upsell and cross-sell to existing customers is a great way to find out whether they are happy customers (who are delighted to hear from you)) or unhappy customers (who would rather not deal with you again).  If they are unhappy, you won’t be able to sell to them, but at least you will know they’re unhappy and get a chance to do something about it.

3. Don’t presume the customer knows your full range of products: It’s often the case (in my experience) that customers can associate your organisation with a single product, this could be something they’ve bought from you before or a product service you are best known for.

This may be because nobody from your organisation has ever tried to cross-sell them to another product or service.  So the reason they don’t buy more than one product from you is that they don’t know or associate you with any other products.  It’s your job to correct this situation, if you are relying on them to learn your full product portfolio, you’ll be in for a long wait.

4. Know how to match your product to their requirement: If you don’t understand (in detail) the product you are selling, you won’t be able to match the added investment of the upsell or cross-sell to the benefit the customer will receive from it.  This is called features and benefits selling; the more you know about a product or service, the more able you are to make the connection between what it can do and what the customer needs.

Ask yourself, how often have you decided to buy from someone because they knew what they were talking about and decided not to buy from someone who didn’t?  Features and benefits selling, (the discipline of understanding everything about your product, service and its capabilities) is becoming something of a lost art, again a subject for another day.

5. Sell the value of the differential

If I cross-sell you the carry case for the MacBook you have just bought from me, I am asking you to pay an extra £75, it’s a small amount to pay to ensure,

• You’re £1,500 investment in the MacBook is protected
• That there’s less chance of you having to pay to repair a cracked screen
• That there’s less chance you have to be without it due to it being repaired
• That it always looks good when you use it in front of customers, for presentations and meetings.

Any of the above could cost much more than £75, so isn’t buying that carry case worth it?

6. Be Honest: As mentioned earlier, you can’t implement an upsell and cross-sell plan to an unhappy customer, they want to see the back of you, not give you more of their money.  It’s equally as important that you don’t turn a happy customer into  an unhappy one by upselling and/or cross-selling them stuff they don’t need and that will not be of value to them.

So upselling and cross-selling only works if you know your products, can match them to your customer’s requirements and have the integrity not to try sell the wrong thing in pursuit of a quick sale.  This also includes knowing when to inform someone that your product/service might not actually be what they need.  Remember, a lifetime of value from a happy customer is always worth more than a single sale.

(Note: Sales reward and commission plans have a huge part to play here, but (again) that’s a subject for an article of its own on another day).

Final Word

If you do all of this already, well done, you’re maximising your revenue and profits, you’re also probably taking a lot of business that may well have gone to your competitors.

If you’re not doing all of this, consider putting it in place, you may be surprised at the results.

Read more:
Upselling and Cross-Selling:  Maximising your business’s revenue and profits

If you could predict with absolute certainty the exact moment each opportunity in your company’s sales pipeline would convert into an order, wouldn’t life be marvellous.

The Hollywood movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn is reputed to have said “never make forecasts, especially about the future’.  Whilst these may appear (especially in current times) wise words, if you’re running a large order complex business, Sam’s quote is unlikely to be an escape route from having to say, “What you expect to happen in the future”  when it applies to your sales (and cash flow) forecasts.

With that in mind, here are some tips that might help you get your sales forecast closer to right than wrong.

Measure your accuracy

If you work in an environment where your forecast accuracy is measured for you, be grateful that someone is helping you improve your forecasting ability.  If you don’t, start to measure it yourself.  Give yourself a (very quick) pat on the back for what you got right and then turn your attention to what you got wrong.

Take out any emotion or defence mechanisms around the things that were “out of your control” and rationally analyse what you would/could have done differently if you could turn back time to when you last updated your forecast.

Acknowledge that it’s important

A forecast is not an administration exercise, if you say you’re “doing your admin” when updating your forecast you may want to reassess your priorities.  Business plans, cash flows, your and your colleagues’ future employment are all based on your company’s ability to obtain orders from your customers.

Being able to forecast when these orders will arrive, how much they will be worth and when they will be invoiced is one of (if not the) most important set of numbers in any business.

Be honest

An accurate forecast depends on an honest appraisal of your sales pipeline, the less honest view you take, the less accuracy you will be rewarded with.  If you want to fool yourself that your sale pipeline is better than it actually is, it’s not very difficult to achieve, just be over optimistic about when your orders will arrive and what their value will be.

It might keep the management or the bank away from you or it might give you the blanket of false security you’re craving.  However, it will be short lived and the only person you are really fooling is yourself.  If your pipeline doesn’t look great, be honest and focus on what you need to do to improve it.

Learn and improve

Accurate forecasting is a skill; there is no fool proof methodology. If there was we would all know about it, I wouldn’t have written this and you wouldn’t be reading it.  Like any skill, the more we learn from our past successes, our past mistakes and the harder we work at it, the better we get.

So apply the learning techniques and the “purposeful practice* to forecasting that you would to any other skill you want to improve.

Find your perfect model and process

If your forecasting systems are not up to scratch, then find a way round them, through or over them: whatever you do don’t let them stand between you and having an accurate forecast.  If the model and process you are using does not work and you don’t know what to do, hire someone who knows what good looks like to redesign it for you.

Take responsibility

It’s your forecast, you own it and you’re responsible for its accuracy, it can’t be delegated, allocated or transferred to someone else.  This is particularly true for those in the sales and business leadership positions.  It doesn’t matter if your forecast is an aggregation of ten, a hundred or even a thousand other peoples’ forecasts; it is still your responsibility.

Of all the factors involved in accurate forecasting, buying into the fact that you are 100% responsible for your own forecast is probably the most important.  Forecasting accurately is hard work, it demands time and attention and a real desire to get it right.

Samuel Goldwyn might not have been interested in “forecasting the future”, but then again he didn’t need to, he was in the movies, he could make the future whatever he wanted it to be.

Read more:
Never make forecasts, especially about the future

This is a subject that I have written about before, but it cropped up again during a conversation with someone I spoke to recently for the first time in a while.

The person concerned runs a B2B field sales team (circa 100 people) and wanted to engage a company that could help them improve the quality (and conversion rate) of their sales team’s proposals.

They had meetings with 3 organisations, all professing to be proposal writing experts. Scope presented, potential suppliers fully briefed, response dates agreed, they waited for the proposals to arrive, here’s what happened,

• 2 arrived later than the agreed response date
• 1 did not include a firm price
• 1 offered 3 different options, but no recommended solution
• 1 did not include an Executive Summary
• 2 had more content about themselves than about the customers requirement.

With a shrug of disappointment, they decided that their own team’s sales proposals were “decent,” not great but actually better than those received from “the experts” and they abandoned the project.

So with this in mind, here are a few pointers from me on writing a good sales proposal, these tips won’t ensure you win every bid, but they will ensure it’s not your actual proposal that lets you down.

It’s all about them

A proposal needs to be focused on your customer and whatever it is they are going to gain by giving you their money. Focus on what they will get, make it all about them and how (specifically) their world will improve by awarding your their business..

Leave the stuff about you, your company and what you are good at until the end. If they think you understand their issues and challenges and you can deliver what you say you can, they’ll get around to reading about you, if they don’t they won’t.

An Executive Summary is an Executive Summary

The Executive Summary of your proposal should be exactly that, an Executive Summary, an overview of the key points of the proposal, nothing more and nothing less.

Make sure you write the Executive Summary with the buyer’s communication preference in mind (see point 4). If you use boiler plate it will stand out a mile and you should not be surprised if you don’t make it past the first hurdle.

On a personal note, I always state the price in the Executive Summary (as well as the Investment section of the proposal). The only reasonanyone buries the price in the middle of their proposal is if it embarrasses them and they don’t think they are really worth the amount they are asking for.

Be specific

It’s not up to your customer to work out which of a plethora of products or services that you “could” offer is the right one for them, it’s up to you to tell them.

If you’ve taken the time to qualify the opportunity correctly, understand the strategic and operational drivers creating the need and the decision makers resonating focus, it should be easy to do this. If you haven’t you will struggle to create a winning proposition.

Communication tendencies and preferences

Everyone you sell to will have their own personal communication preferences.

Some people love to be immersed in the detail and need to know everything about the solution you are proposing, some are only interested in the end result and the benefits. Some people will be concerned about operational risk, some will be concerned about how what you are proposing will impact their people.

The manner in which your proposal is constructed needs to take into account who it is intended for and how the information within it is communicated. If you get this wrong your proposal might not only fail, it might not even be read.

(Take a look at some of my posts and videos on Everything Disc to understand this better).

How much? (coincidentally where I live in Yorkshire the 2 most often spoken words)!

Tell them exactly how much it is going to cost the customer to buy what you are recommending to them.

If you can’t do this then (a) they will struggle to approve or gain approval for the funds they need to place an order with you, and (b) they will think you don’t know what they need and they’ll be right (refer to point 3).

It’s not a proposal if it doesn’t include a price and if you don’t include a price someone can’t place an order with you.

Deliver on-time

Once you have agreed the delivery time for the proposal, make sure you meet it.

If you don’t deliver the proposal on time it will make your customer (a) doubtful as to whether or not you can deliver what they are buying on time and (b) think you have better things to do than meet your commitment to them.

Make it better than decent

The opportunity to bid for someone’s business should never be taken for granted, there’s always plenty of organisations eager to do so. So if you want to give yourself a chance of winning, make your proposal better than decent.

Read more:
Indecent Proposals

There are quite a few things to consider when responding to a tender (RFI, RFP, feel free to insert your own initialisation).

One thing we all know is that responding to a tender takes time, money and resource, both for the selling and the buying organisations and getting it right is a labour of love.

So here’s a few tips to help you make the most of the tender opportunities that come your way, ensuring your (and your customer’s) time, money and resource are used wisely.

Look before you leap

When you receive a tender document, read it from cover to cover to ensure you understand everything there is to know about it. Unless you take the time to understand exactly what the customer wants in terms of product, service level agreements, price, timescales and terms and conditions you won’t be able to structure your response to satisfy those requirements.

Resist the temptation to leap into constructing a response. Time taken reading and thoroughly understanding the requirements will save a lot of work, cost and emotion (if you get it wrong) later on. If there is something you need clarification on or if you have questions to ask, make sure you do this immediately after reading the tender and before you decide to respond.

You don’t have to bid

Probably the most important rule to remember is that you don’t have to bid just because you have been invited to.

After you have finished reading the tender ask yourself if the requirements being specified are aligned to your company’s strengths and if you can win? If the answer is no or you are not sure, then consider the time and cost associated with responding and whether or not your resources would be better spent elsewhere?

In addition, if the first time you were aware of the tender is when it dropped into your inbox, it’s a sign that you are not positioned strategically with the customer and competing organisations are probably more so..

If you do respond, do it to the best of your ability

Responding to a tender is exactly the same as submitting a sales proposal, other than that the structure of how the information is provided is dictated by the customer, not the selling organisation. In my own experience it’s amazing how many organisations forget this and make a poor job of their tender responses.

So, if you do decide to respond make sure you provide the information requested in the format provided. Moreover, be specific with your answers and at all costs avoid generic responses that point towards a lack of understanding or compliance to the requirements.

It’s not always about price

The lowest price does not always win.

The production of a tender takes a lot of time, resource and money for the buying organisation to produce. The customer is trying to achieve a combination of the best solution and price, not just the best price. The more relevant your response is to the customer’s requirements the less relevant the price will be. Even Public Sector tenders are judged on best value not on best price.

Why we lose

When a tender response is unsuccessful it is because (a) you should not have responded in the first place, (b) your response didn’t meet the tender’s requirements in full and someone else’s did, (c) you didn’t understand the customers resonating focus, (d) a combination of all three

Don’t be late

Every tender comes with a deadline for submission, if you can’t comply with the deadline tell the customer as soon as you receive it. The only time you can credibly ask for an extension is as soon as you receive it. If it’s not possible to get an extension, a no bid should be your next course of action. Otherwise you will undoubtedly (a) rush your response, which will result in a loss, (b) miss the deadline and/or (c) both.

Tenders are an invitation to produce a sales proposal for a specific piece of business, albeit in a specific format. As such, they should be loved with the same degree of qualification, care process and professionalism as any other opportunity.

So, if you received one today, hopefully after reading this, you’ll know what to do.

Read more:
Love me tender

When organisational transformation plans are announced, the first thing that happens is an emotional reaction in the people impacted by them.

The first question people will ask (and the only thing on their mind) will be: “How does this affect me?”

It does not matter what level of information you distribute, announcement you make or FAQ document you post: People want to know how the transformation you are planning will affect them.

This is due to the fact that people are primarily interested in three things,

• Who they are
• What they do
• What the future looks like for them.

(More often than not people define themselves entirely by what they do. On a personal note I think there is a real danger in this, but I’ll save my musings on that for another day).

Therefore, when organisations announce transformation plans, it is imperative that the reasons for any changes taking place can be articulated to those affected in a concise and authentic manner.

The key points of,

• Why we are doing this?
• Why we think it is the best option we have
• What will happen if we don’t make these changes?
• And, how these changes affect you?

Have to be at the heart of any Transformation communications plan.

One of the best ways that transformation messages can be delivered, is by presenting the narrative as a story that links the transformation to the goals and objectives of your organisation.

If these goals and objectives are already known by those affected, they provide an anchor point of credibility to which any specific changes affecting both them and others can be tied.

The presentation of the transformation as a story also allows people to visualise what steps the organisation has to take in order to execute its strategy and protect its future success.

The transformation story should start with the goals and objectives of the organisation, which hopefully are known to all. This provides an anchor of credibility, reminding everyone why the company exists and just as importantly why everyone is actually there.

The middle of the story should provide real examples of forces affecting the organisation, market dynamics, competition, the actual things driving the change, be they good or bad news. This sets a present day context, allows considered alternatives to be highlighted and shows why the changes are required. The use of models such as Porter’s 5 Forces and relevant graphs/diagrams can be particularly effective communication tools for this stage of the story.

The end of the story should describe (in as much detail as possible) the actual changes that will take place and by when they will be completed. This is the bit where people get to know specifically what the effect (of the transformation) on them will be.

It may be worth considering involving key suppliers and customers in the exercise, especially when continuity of “business as usual” is at risk.

The really important things to remember are that any transformation story seeking to explain why change is required will only have credibility if it is,

• Authentic
• Can stand interrogation
• Is the same story for every audience
• Is completed before any transformation plans are announced.

If gaps in the story are found, the resultant loss of trust will stop a transformation program dead in its tracks, damage the credibility of those delivering the story and of any proposed future transformation initiatives.

If you don’t have all the detail that supports the story, don’t announce the transformation. Moreover, if you can’t write the story (as outlined above), it’s unlikely your transformation plan is fit for purpose and ready to implement.

Authentic, credible and well-structured transformation stories are not difficult to write (as long as you have a plan and know what you’re doing) and they will always be fundamental to the success of your transformation projects.

The time and effort to write your story is worth it, not only for you, but also for the people whose lives may be impacted by the transformation plans you are about to implement.

Read more:
Tell me a story (about organisational transformation)