Missed Me

It’s been awhile since I did any uploads. Yes I am still very much enthusiastic at school doing a lot of practice on my pedicure and manicure and motivated to improve in every single lesson. With the rate that I am going, I can definitely open a nail spa.
Sparing everyone from the serious stuff, I am sharing an interesting workshop by Stewart Hannay, Acergy's Senior Learning Consultant that I attended a few days back ‘Strategic Business Development Process’.

There are 3 stages in every business development process:
- Opening Game
This is where we look at the market, branding and look into the business plans. This stage carries 20% impact to the overall opportunity.

- Middle Game
Middle game is all about management of account, relationship, perception, information and opportunities. Persuading and capturing the market that we are interested in. This stage carries 70% impact to the overall opportunity.

- End Game
Walking the talk by submitting proposal, presentation and negotiation with the customer. This stage carries 10% impact to the overall opportunity.

Before the next game, debriefing and post-mortem is important to ensure continual improvement that allow us to identify behavioral differentiation and repositioning for the next opportunity to delight customer.

There are 4 different types of customer relationship
1) Vendor
2) Preferred Supplier
3) Partner
4) Strategic Ally

Guess what 60% of our customer that come knocking on our door are just vendor, only 10 % are our Strategic Ally that requires 60% of our time therefore we must know what kind of relationship we have before allocating effort and time on them.

Strategic account planning process requires us to look at 3 major concerns:
Customer
Competition
Self

With that in mind we can list out our vision & objective before coming out with any action plans.

Do note that we have to spend 40% of the time with a client asking those things that keep them awake at night, 50% listening & just 10% informating, positioning ourselves as the strategic ally.

It’s key to create a superior proposal in the less time with less effort with an increase probability of winning more business.

4 questions to produce a good proposal are:
1) Why us?
2) Why not them?
3) So what?
4) How so?

A great proposal must be
- 100% compliance
- Responsive
- Evaluator friendly
- Manifests powerful winning strategies
- Features to substantive bottom line benefits for customers
- All major claims with proofs
- Designed for a mixed audience
- Customer focus
- Honest and straight forward
- Position for customer

Things that you have to note in all evaluations:
- Evaluators are always biased
- It’s an initial review
- There is always hidden agenda
- Most case not all evaluators will read all your proposal

With that a good presentation must always focus on the client’s goals before giving a details breakdown of the issues, features and benefits. Last but not the least always reinforces the client’s goals at the end of every presentation. Do hope you learn a thing or two from this post. Have a good weekend EVERYONE!!!!