Follow-Up and Closing

Its been said that consumers love to buy but hate to be sold. Even under the most vendor-friendly situation, thats not the case in the business-to-business world. Its not that personal of a transaction and rarely provides instant gratification. Even once the decision has been made to hire a firm, documents often take weeks to get through the system and authorized before the project can formally commence.

Professional services business developers need to be patient, yet diligent enough to keep the momentum going. Lance Armstrong, six-time winner of the Tour De France, once said, Im a big believer in momentum, and this principle holds true during the proposal process. Even though youve delivered a highly polished proposal on time or even in advance of the deadline, its typical for prospects to inform you that theyll be back to you with a decision in a week, but that decision gets tabled for a month. After all, one of the main reasons they are hiring an outside firm is that they are unable to handle the project themselves, so it should come as no surprise when they get overburdened by keeping the business running day to day.

In the meantime, staying in regular contact with the prospect is critical, while not being perceived as overzealous or even annoying. E-mail serves as an effective tool here, sending notes indicating that you are just checking in and available for any questions, and sending along relevant articles and research when appropriate in an effort to differentiate and continue to add value. At this point, there is little you can do to hasten the process except remind the prospect of the time line or next steps they agreed to in the previous meeting/correspondence.

Managing the Proposal Development Process

The key to managing a successful services firm is staying focused on two initiatives: delivering superior client services and maintaining a steady new business pipeline. Working in concert with lead generation activities, the proposal development process is a service firms gateway to new clients and opportunities. As such, it commands a firms resources in the form of executive commitment, investment, and continuous improvement.

Services firms are generally organized in one of two ways: as a partnership or corporation. New business development responsibilities at partnerships fall on the shoulders of the partners; corporate entities operate more traditionally, employing a salesforce.

An effective proposal development process flows as follows:

1. Management and sales evaluate the opportunity to gauge its worthiness.

2. Assign a point person to manage the process once a go is determined.

3. Conduct preliminary meeting with prospect to present qualifications and gather detailed requirements.

4. Assemble the necessary experts inside the firm to discuss the project and determine the specific resource requirements.

5. The point person develops the proposal and distributes for review and feedback.

6. The proposal is delivered.

7. Negotiation and follow-up questions may ensue, and the point person accesses necessary experts and/or executives to address the issues.

Though the process management is fairly straightforward, a variety of factors contribute to regular and predictable new business acquisition:

Effective lead generation techniques: At-bats are important.

Strong frontline people: The quality of your business developers is paramount, since they are perceived as being directly representative of the quality of your firm (unlike product salespeople, whose wares can stand on their own). Partners selling services they deliver on personally is ideal but costly, especially when the sales cycle for big projects can last months and run hundreds of hours in investments. Nevertheless, smart account managers are what prospects are looking for, not shallow salespeople.

Team involvement: When service delivery professionals are included in business development efforts and have a say in the process, they are much more likely to provide positive support to the ongoing servicing of that new client. They can also offer valuable insights, though they admittedly can sometimes hinder the process as well if not managed properly.

Establish the process and get out of the way: Senior management, if not directly involved in new business development on a daily basis, will often be enticed to become overinvolved with these activities given their high stakes. But this can become counterproductive and hurt morale. Work hard to implement a solid process and then oversee it regularly, but keep a distance.

Related Documents

The main purpose of proposals is to secure new business with a new client. But a variety of documents are involved with either the new business development process or with the working relationship with a new client. These documents are described here:

Request for information (RFI): An RFI is a document issued by larger or governmental organizations that are seeking to establish their short list of vendors for evaluation. RFIs are sent to 8 to 15 or more firms for completion, requesting general information about the vendors, with information organized in such a way that facilitates comparisons.

The first time a firm completes an RFI, it is a time-consuming process. But future RFIs take less and less time because they are often similar in structure.

Request for proposal (RFP): An RFP can follow an RFI process or be issued standalone. An RFP usually provides a fair amount of information about a project-the premise is to provide enough details so that firms are able to develop a proposal in response. However, there are usually holes in the RFP that must be discussed with the prospect.

RFPs are widely used in public work-federal, state, and municipal-where formal processes are in place to try to guarantee objectivity. They are also used in the commercial sector. Because of the nature of RFPs, responding blindly-without establishing a relationship with the buyer-results in low conversion rates. Make every effort to make contact with the buyer and assess the opportunity before walking down this path, which can be costly and rarely yields new business.

Master services agreement (MSA): An MSA is used by many service companies that do business with clients regularly over the long term- consulting firms, IT services companies, marketing companies, and so on. The document governs the overall terms of the relationship between the client and a vendor-issues such as ownership rights, fees, payment terms, termination, confidentiality, and so on.

The MSA is effective because it allows clients to call vendors and request support quickly and easily without having to issue formal paperwork. Many of my firms MSAs specify that any piece of work that requires fewer than 30 hours can be completed based on a telephone call or e-mail, whereas projects that require 30 or more hours require a statement of work.

Statement of work (SOW): An SOW describes a specific project being completed, along with its details. For example, when Pixel Bridge contracts with a new client to build a new web site, it executes two documents: an MSA, which governs the general terms and conditions of the relationship, and an SOW, which describes the specific web site development project.

An SOW provides a blueprint for the project, describes how a project will be completed, and assigns responsibilities. In the web site development example, if the proposal requires 1.5 pages to describe the project and how it would be completed, the SOW requires 6 to 10 pages because of the additional detail.