Professional Services – The Winning Pitch

The days when work walked through the door are long gone. Lawyers, accountants, bankers, consultants – in every profession pitching for business is now the norm. Want to win new work from a new client? Start writing that proposal because you will have to pitch. Even your existing clients, who know you and have worked with you for years, put you to the test.

As the client, it makes perfect sense. You want to drive down costs, enhance the level of service, increase quality and get more for less. As the provider of professional services it makes for significant amounts of non-fee earning work. Do you know the answer to this question – what is the total cost of the investment you make in taking part in formal and informal pitches?

Marketing, document design and production, fact-finding and research, the work of your colleagues in support areas - all these are part of your cost to acquire new business in a competitive tender. But the most significant and substantial cost is the time spent by your professionally qualified people. To ensure our clients maximise the return on the investment they make in pitching for business we help them get three things right – process, content and communication.

Process is about the journey you make from invitation to tender to that, we hope, happy moment when you win the business. Treat that journey as a project and bring to it the disciplines and rigour of high-quality project management. Define your timeline and milestones, map out all the work you need to do, get your project team in place, agree roles and responsibilities.

The key to creating pitch-winning content is clarifying the client need. What is their vision of success? What is their desired business outcome? What will be better and different? What is the value they are seeking to create? What are the benefits they want to enjoy? Be animated by a lust for clarity. Abolish ambiguity. Map out the unique particularity of their needs, wants, expectations, concerns and aspirations. Client focus is a cliché of all professional service firms. Make it a vibrant reality and you will win the pitch.

Next, create a solution that is fresh, distinctive and comprehensive – one that exactly matches the complex geography of your client’s needs. Create time in which you can bring the collective intelligence of your people to bear. Cut-and-paste is the enemy of success. Assemble your solution to the client’s needs from a rag-bag of work you have done for other clients at other times to meet other needs and you are doomed to fail. Recycling may save the planet. It will condemn your proposal to oblivion.

Your proposal document is a silent ambassador. It must stand alone. On the train going home, in a busy office, in time snatched between meetings, the decision makers will read and decide. Does your document speak to them? Do they hear your voice, loud, clear and confident, telling them you know who they are, you understand what they want, you can give them what they need?

And then there’s the pitch presentation. You have made it to the shortlist. Your client wants to see if you are someone they can do business with. Understanding what you are there to do is crucial – and it’s not to deliver a word-perfect iteration of your carefully rehearsed PowerPoint presentation. Your success depends on connection. Can you connect with your client? Can you make that connection at both the intellectual and the intuitive level? Can you make a clear and convincing connection between what they want and what you have, between their needs and your solution?

Your formal presentation is, of course, important. But you live or die in the Q&A. The quality of the dialogue you create, your ability to listen, to hear and to respond, the clarity of your answers, your empathetic understanding of each question and of what lies behind each question – all these things are crucial. Your stand-and-deliver monologue is but one transmission in a world full of words. Communication that really counts is what happens between you, those moments of contact and exchange, of recognition and rapport.

At JSB, the work we do with our clients to support them in the pitching process is based on simple, fundamental principles:

 

·         Drive everything by the client need – in all its multi-layered, nuanced and unique complexity.

 

·         Bring rigour and discipline to managing every aspect of the pitch.

 

·         Manifest in everything you do the quality, insight, expertise, client focus and commitment to excellence the client will enjoy if they choose you as their provider.

 

·         Invest those things that really make a difference – fresh thinking, energy, intellect, commitment.

 

There are no guarantees. There is no absolute connection between effort and reward. Sometimes you give of your best and you lose. But bring these fundamental principles to bear in the way you pitch and you will come across, not only as a credible and competent supplier, but as the obvious choice. Who wouldn’t want to work with someone as good as you?

 

Matthew Solon is Director of Learning and Development at JSB. He has more than fifteen years’ experience in delivering training and consultancy in all major aspects of business and professional communication skills.