I Feel Like You Know Me

A beautifully crafted proposal is no substitute for a meaningful relationship with a client.

You submit the winning proposal, and once the contract is signed, the newly acquired customer takes you aside and says, “We chose you because, through the whole sales process, we felt like you really knew us.”

(Side note, They didn’t say, “we chose your organisation”.)

I think that’s the best compliment a new customer can give you.

Has a customer ever said that to you? They would if every interaction you had with them was 100 per cent focussed on them.

From initial exploratory meetings and ongoing encounters that delve into their problems or goals to written correspondence and face-to-face presentations that speak to their ambitions, fears, hopes and dreams, we should aim to make the customer feel like we know them, inside and out.

If we can do this, it’s tough for the competition to beat us on price or offer a more innovative solution.

Neglectful At Best, Disrespectful At Worst

Alas, in B2B IT, we’re often not that good at taking the time to get to know prospective customers. Heck, we frequently neglect current customers until they release a Request for Proposal (RFP) and let us know about it together with our competition at the public briefing.

In the past, I’ve sat in meetings to help put together a tender and listened as individuals wasted time speaking negatively about the customer instead of focussing on how to enable the customer’s goals. I know then that we're not going to win the pursuit. The team doesn't care about the customer and this is not because the team isn't made up of nice people. Most are lovely and smart individuals. But the problem is that no one (hint, sales lead) has taken the time to help the team truly understand the customer's deeper issues. How can you help someone you don't care about and know very little about?

Also, when putting together deals in B2B IT, many pursuit teams spend more time ‘solutioning’ than communicating the why, who, what, how and the where. Occasionally the what and the how are explained though not very well. And rarely do we eloquently speak to the why.

You Get Me

Why does the client care about you, vendor? It’s not because you’re in the top right-hand corner of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant or you have some prestigious brands as your customers. Sure, these credentials support your persuasive pitch, but that’s not why the buyer picks you.

They pick you because you get them, and their why. You get why they need to make some big changes right now. You know why they’re afraid they might not make it. You know why they’re excited about a risky but potentially lucrative plan to expand a product line. You know why a new technology platform is the secret to their success. You know which parts of that technology platform they absolutely must have and which parts they don’t care for.

We Lack Tenderness

How do you know all these whys and wherefores? Well, you’ve taken the time to get to know the customer. To “love them tender, love them true.”

Well, “duh”, you might say, “I’ve done my research, looked them up on LinkedIn and also searched for news articles about them.” That’s not getting to know the customer; that’s more like speed dating. Two minutes of your time doesn’t cut it; that’s not a relationship. Yet you expect the customer to hand over thousands if not millions of dollars of business.

It makes no sense. But still, we grab the RFP, fill it out and submit. Get nowhere, so we complete another RFP, submit, get nowhere, complete another RFP, and on it goes. Ambulance chasing.

We’re Doing Bids Wrong

First: We get excited about the technology and not the customer. We have a team of technical experts rushing to sit in a room and design the solution before they’re made aware of the client’s business needs, the real needs, not the ones outlined in the RFP document.

And to make it worse, the lead sales executive and their support team are not in a room doing the hard work required to figure out the decision-makers and influencers on the customer side. Occasionally there will be a pursuit strategy workshop, but alas, the sales executive often turns up with scant insight or knowledge of the customer.

My question is: “How can you strategise when you don’t even know where the pieces go on the chessboard?” The strategy session is a “let’s research the customer” meeting.

Also, the pursuit strategy workshop shouldn’t be about listing influencers and decision-makers and then merely assigning to them “Supporter”, “Neutral”, “Detractor.” We should know this extremely well before we get to the pursuit strategy workshop. The point of the strategy workshop is to figure out how to turn detractors into neutrals and turn neutrals into supporters. And then it’s about diving deeper into each individual’s fears, agendas, alliances, business objectives and personal ambitions. “But that’s too hard,” you say. “And we don’t have the time.”

Second: We get excited about the technology and not the customer: No, I’m not repeating myself. The technical stuff comes first and second, and the customer comes third on the list of priorities.

I’ve been to bid kick-offs where there is one slide or maybe two dedicated to talking about the customer, their industry, and their business objectives. The rest of the presentation is loaded up with the technical solution we’re thinking of offering.

I think bid kick-offs should have very little about the technology (the technical team can talk about that when they’re ‘solutioning’). It should be 90% about the customer’s business objectives, where the lead seller takes everyone behind the curtain for an intimate show-and-tell about the customer so that we end up feeling like the customer is our family, someone we care about deeply.

I believe the point of having a bid kick-off is first to help the team understand and empathise with the customer. Secondly, it’s to get everyone to act like a cohesive team aligned and well-versed in the win themes and our unique differentiators (which takes more than five minutes to figure out).

But that rarely happens. When it does (and I have seen this a few times), the pursuit is a joy. It feels like we’re pulling together everything we’ve got and more.

It means that even if the proposal has typos and isn’t beautifully written, or if we’re not entirely compliant, we’re forgiven because the customer feels the love and respect we have when we’re with them in workshops or presenting our proposal face-to-face.

Conclusion

We say we’re customer-centric, but are we?

Think about how you’re doing bids. Are you spending enough time researching, analysing and probing the prospective customer’s business objectives or mapping stakeholders’ agendas? Are you digging deep to understand the individual needs of the users of your technology, or are you mostly ‘solutioning’? If the answer is ‘solutioning’, it could be the reason why you’re not winning as much business as you should.

Getting to know anyone takes time, whether it’s a professional or personal relationship. But the investment in the time to truly understand people pays off.

Often, when I’ve suggested we do more work to dig deep to understand the customer better, I’ve gotten a reply from the sales lead that “I’m too busy, and the proposal is due next week, so let’s just smash something out.”

Sure, we end up being very busy, submitting a lot of RFPs and tenders but with minimal return on the investment of our time and the time of the people that support us.

Getting to know a prospective customer takes time. Getting reacquainted with a current customer also takes time. Rushing doesn’t cut it.

For more about being customer-centric, read 20 Ways To Make Your B2B Sales Conversations And Messages All About The Customer

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This article was originally published on the now-retired relatable.IT blog.

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