14 Win First. Fight Later!

The title for this week's episode is Win First, Fight Later, which is a shortened version of a quote attributed to Sun Tzu, the Chinese military general,  who wrote The Art of War. And essentially what he's saying is , Let's, strategically win the battle before we mobilize our forces and go out there.

 What I wanted to talk about this week is how you can win first rather than scrap and fight later on a price podium. So most deals. Most sales deals are won during the discovery phase.

That early phase where your prospect is asking questions, they need guidance. They're putting their bids together. They're forming their ideas, and the more that you can be involved in this discovery phase, the higher the chance that you will eliminate your competition even before it gets into that competitive bidding arena.

I discovered some interesting data by a gentleman named Chris Orlob. He works for a company called gong.io and they're in the the sales call business and he and his company analyzed over 1 million business to business  sales calls.

What they discovered is that some 42,954 of them were closing calls, in other words, asking for the order. One observation was that the salespeople who successfully closed the deals talked far less and listen to their prospect much more. We've talked about this before. You should be listening twice as much as you speak.

 The successful salespeople were listening 54% of the time, and the unsuccessful salespeople were listening 28% of the time. So they were spending more time talking, trying to sell, as opposed to listening to what the prospect really, really wanted. But that's a bit of an an aside.

In this closing call, what was also rather interesting is we're taught as salespeople to ask questions, but the number of questions asked in the closing phase of the sales calls didn't correlate to success.

So Chris went back and further analyzed those sales campaigns and found that in the early phase in the discovery phase when more questions were asked, It's strongly correlated to a much higher win rate.

So the takeaway from his study was if you can get involved earlier in the discovery phase, ask a good questions, your chances of winning are much, much higher.

Now my observation of the commercial contract bidding process, particularly in the competitive bid space, is a lot of it is managed by  electronic bid boards. And what happens is the bid gets posted electronically, which is great cuz we see there's work available and then some frenetic sales activity takes place.

We put together some estimates and prices and we submit that bid electronically and then we abdicate. Many salespeople abdicate the sales process to that electronic bid board and it minimizes the level of human relax interaction cuz we communicate by email and the relationship building capability during that process is very, very, Very, very low.

It also drives the deal towards the lowest price. They call it bid leveling. And so all bids are reduced to the same degree of blandness. They all look the same.

I see salespeople fighting for this nirvana that they call "last look". They say, Mick, If we, if we get last look, we'll know what we need to do with our price in order to win the deal, yeah, you're going, you're gonna discount, you're gonna discount the price and your margin is going to be much, much less.

Many hardworking account managers and salespeople express their frustration to me that they put a lot of bids in, but they don't get the level of closes that they would expect. So they're pretty fraught putting together these bids and you spend all of your time bidding and not enough time at winning.

 What we want do is win first and fight later. It turns out the primary strategy often is, the. Strategy for winning is this last look.  what I would say is to be a bit provocative last look is for losers.

What? And I comically say that if you've got Google Translate on your computer, you can pick the language that you want to translate the phrase or word from and to.

 Let's say you are bidding to general contractors and you pick the language as general contractors and you put "Last look" into that Google translate. It would spit out the translation of "lowest price".  When you're looking on last look you're fighting later, right?

You're fighting at the very end and your only weapon is, Price.

Having worked with hundreds of salespeople in the competitive bid arena, I see the lowest bid rates win rates are in the 10% range and the highest win rates are in the 75% range.

Wow.

Wouldn't you like to go from, average towards best class and I've written a book that will help you do.

Are you frustrated that you only win one in four or one in five of your competitive bids? Look, I know it takes a long time to prepare them. A lot of sweat equity goes into that. A lot of teamwork. I can help you double that conversion rate. I've distilled the secrets from over a hundred commercial salespeople and put it into a formula that I've put into a book.

The book's called The Ultimate Formula for Winning Work with General Contractors. If you wanna win more, Then this is the book for you.

Go to sell the sizzle.net. Sell the sizzle.net, and you'll see a book button there. You can click on that, get your copy and some bonuses, or go to Amazon and it will be available there. Back to the show.

 It doesn't really matter whether you are bidding electronically  or you're just putting bids out there anyway. The, the difference between , the high win rates, the high, high win rates and the low win rates is, the salesperson is getting, getting involved earlier. I call it first call versus last look

 Get in early in that discovery phase and rainmakers are having questions and asking, searching conversations to help their prospects. They help them create their budget and the bid.  When you do that, you can tilt the playing field to which emphasizes those areas in which you are strong and which you have competence in.

 You want to make sure that your prospective buyer is making sure that those elements are included in the bid, which obviously makes it much more attractive to you. If you've been listening to these podcasts, you know, I have my great crazy sales mentor, Gerry, the dog ate my homework Burke. Gerry told me once, he says, "Mick, if you don't have the inside track, somebody else does".

Which means , if you are not able to pick up the telephone and get the ear of the decision maker very, very easily and have a conversation, then somebody else is having that conversation. And your chance of winning is somewhere between slim and non and slim just rode out of town. Now let me give you a real example.

I was actually sitting in, a pipeline review meeting with a commercial, mechanical and HVAC company. And one of the salesmen was going through his pipeline and was predicting a hundred percent success on a fairly sizable hospital installation. And he was very, very animated. And he said, I've been promised last look.

Now interestingly, there was a new hire who happened to sit in on this meeting, typically didn't come to the sales meetings. It was a senior project manager, and she just joined from another HVAC company. In fact she, she knew of this hospital and of this bid.  She said my old company would always get the critical jobs in this hospital network.

We'd done a lot of work there before, and in fact, the hospital , facilities director told the account team in the competitive company. Look, I've gotta put this out to bid as I'm obligated to, but you are gonna get the job because we know you can get it done.

 Just think about all the work that that salesman had put in to getting that bid together.  Working with estimating, looking at takeoffs, looking at materials, looking at putting that bid together, looking at risk management, having the contract reviewed internally. Huge amount of resource and effort had gone into that job, but had no chance of winning it because the other company had won first and was gonna fight later, and they would get that job even though their margins were much higher because they were the trusted confidant. And, you know, getting the job done correctly with somebody they know who manages all risk was very, very important to that buyer.

The key skill about rainmakers is they engineer early conversations and relationship building to give themselves the chance to ask great questions and demonstrate competence.

They don't wait to be invited to put a bid together. They don't wait to make a call. They are very, very proactive.

 I've talked about this before. People buy three things.

First of all, they buy from people they like.

Secondly, they buy from companies that they like,

and thirdly, they buy the product or the service.

So in this HVAC installation, for example, that's the third thing that they're gonna buy.

They want to be talking to somebody they trust.  That rainmaker, if they're talking to them, spent time with them, they know, they know their stuff and they know they're gonna solve problems. The company is very reputable, which is the second thing. Work with them before or know of them or they have these competencies.

Those are the things that you emphasize that it's hard to put that into a written proposal or a document. It's gotta be conveyed emotionally cuz people make emotional decisions.

 The key sales goal of the rainmaker,  get the prospect invested in you and your bid. So it makes it hard for them to say no.

 When somebody spent a lot of time working with you, maybe it's a financial advisor or maybe it's somebody's selling you insurance, whatever it might be. You're not quite convinced about whether they're doing it or you feel you, you, you, you curl up inside. You don't want to tell them, I'm sorry you've spent all that effort, but I'm not gonna do it.

No, you, you kind of hedge you bet and give that person another opportunity to re-present and eventually they win you over  and you buy from them. You wanna make it really, really difficult for your prospects to say no to you. You do that by talking to them and if you are talking to them, they can't be talking to your competitor cuz you, cuz they're busy people, right?

And if you're taking an hour to talk with them that day, they probably don't have time to talk to anybody else. And while you're talking to them, you're building relationship equity and they become emotionally, Connected and invested with you. Your conversations and questions showcase your expertise, and you start to take on the role of a trusted advisor.

You're not somebody just selling something. You are advising them how they can be successful in this project, in this career, and so, In life, and you get to understand the unwritten goals, the unsaid goals, which allows you to then show how your solution will help them get to that endpoint, and ultimately you make it very, very hard for them to say no to you.

 win first. So now you've won with that fight. Later in that fight later phase, it's very, very difficult to get time with the decision makers cuz everything's happening really, really quickly.  They're evaluating things, they're doing all their paperwork, they're probably talking to multiple divisions of construction.

If it's a big, big job, you're not the only person competing for their time, and so if you don't have that relationship, it's very difficult for them. When you call for them to pick up the phone, you just get dead air If you're just one of the bidders.

But, if you are the trusted advisor, your phone call gets answered and you can talk to your prospect during that very narrow award window when they're going to finally. 

The key message here is you've  you've gotta engineer ways to get in front of your prospects very early on in discovery and ask them questions and guide them through the sales process.

You are the sales expert. They don't know how to buy things, right? You've gotta guide them through the decision making process.

So how do you, how do you get that first?

Hey, Mick, we we're thinking about putting together this opportunity.  You are one of the people or you are the person that you know, we know you understand this environment.

We'd like to pick your brain a little bit, right?

So what you need to do is:

you need to identify the people and the companies you want to work with.

Put together a plan. You don't just look at the bid board and see what's come up today. Oh, I'll bid on that one. I'll bid on that one. When you don't have that same kind of relationship, cuz you need to invest in those people.

So you've identified these people, you've identified the key decision makers that you want to go. I'm not saying don't do any opportunistic work, but you need to have in your portfolio a list of key accounts that you want to penetrate, that you're not gonna just get one job, you're gonna get multiple jobs, and you're gonna get multiple jobs at much, much higher margins.

So those are your people, right? Then call 'em when there's no obvious opportunity on the table. Shock, shock, horror, hold on. Stop the press.

That's called relationship building.

The best salespeople call when there's no sales close date on the horizon, they're providing advice and guidance.

You can send them useful guides and notes and aspects on the particular area of engineering or construction or service that you provide, and you drip that information so they know that you're always around.

You meet with them at a associations in events.

You post things on social media.

You call them up and you ask them how do you need any help with anything?

When was the last time somebody called you and said, Hey, do you need any help? People always come to you with problems or questions about something.

They never, they never say, how can I help?

If you did that and just said, Hey, how are, how can you help? What do you have on your plate? Anything I can do to make your day a little easier?

They would lap that up. You set yourself apart. Huge. And then when, when they do ask,  you respond before anybody else has the time to pick up the phone.

Remember, the time they're most predisposed to talking to you is before that bid fully is baked and goes out. Once it's out you are a power to influence is lessened. You win first. You win in that discovery. Then you fight later and what you're fighting about is this. You've already won.

 It's just semantics at the end.

So if you hear yourself saying, or as a sales leader, you hear one of your salespeople or account managers saying,

""I feel good about this one. They said, I could have last look"

and you weren't involved significantly in the pre-bid discovery.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

See you next time.