The pitch doctor

WE HATE tenders don’t we? Let’s be honest here. Most of the time we would prefer to win business by another route, any other route than tendering. Why is this? It’s because the majority of tenders are poorly constructed, frequently highly repetitive, and written in a bizarre form of business English that puzzles even those of us of claim to know the language well. Perhaps it is the temporal shifts that accompany the changing whims of large and small corporations, which after three mostly happy years, tell us a tender is now needed in the next four weeks and then soon after postpone the unwelcome feast for another year. Then, next year becomes next month. Dr Who as business consultant? He’d be the first recruit to any tenders team I picked.
Or is it the painstaking gathering of facts and figures and the drain on hard-pressed resources that sets the pulse racing and the fear centre into overtime? The very mention of the word tender can make halitosis appear desirable and you can see the pity in your colleagues’ eyes when they hear this chalice is yours. And yours alone or, worse still, with a team that you did not pick and which despises producing text and won’t read the document, even once, thoroughly.
No, surely it must be this awful marketing game we are compelled to play. Say positive and exciting things about our business and people and bring this alive according to some language template devised by PR types over cocktails? No thank you. Or dread of dreads, list our accomplishments – and positively too – without boasting. Not the law firm way.
And we haven’t mentioned the speculative aspect yet. This is a zero sum game. Winner usually takes all and there may be no return on our considerable investment. Ever. Then there is the human cost, the highest one of all. Losing occurs in public with the results published for all to see and savour. As said in Germany, Schadenfreude writ large.
What happened to the upbeat column of tips and insights? Down enough yet? Let’s flip the hate to love, close bedfellows as they are. A simple shift in attitude is all that is required to transform your approach to tendering and ensure that you win frequently. At the heart of any successful medium-term business development strategy that I have observed in over twenty years of tendering, is a very simple proposition: connect your tendering strategy to your business-development plan. Nine words that properly understood and implemented can evolve into a formidable approach to tendering, which will almost guarantee success, but only if you can also say yes to all the following:

1. You want to retain or win the business; love doing it, it is mutually profitable, and you have done the sums to prove this;
2. In addition, you have conducted a proper, dispassionate pre-bid analysis of your chances and you have over a 30 per cent winning chance, or have been genuinely invited to bid not make up the numbers;
3. The bid also fits closely with the ambitions and current skill set of your proposed team and it is work they really are passionate about and capable of doing extremely well; and you like or love working with them and there is a tight cultural fit between your businesses and your shared future plans, or you a sure this would be the case and have some evidence and facts to back this up.

I leave the debate around business planning to the other wonderful explanations elsewhere in these pages, but you must evidence why you plan to win this business and what connects it to yours. Desire is not enough. The tempting scrumptious cake in the delicatessen window cannot be reached through the glass. You must find the door.
Mutuality is key to your pre-bid work. Smarter buyers now want synergy and real value from their legal business partners and you must have worked through this in your go/no-go analysis. Number one: they know about you, already love you (most of the time) or want to meet you and you have done something significant to warm them up. Cold-call tenders lose fortunes; they rarely win them. Reject any proposal based merely on ‘so and so in the firm said we should’. And you won’t ever damage relationships with current or potential partners if you honestly explain why you are not competing on this occasion. They want your wider smarts and are waiting to hear and see what makes you special and desirable. Look at it from the buyer’s point of view. Making the right buying decisions can secure my future, increase profitabilty and reduce risk. Do you bring that to the party? Yes? Then you can have your cake and eat it.

Peter Rush is a freelance pitch doctor and tenders consultant. He can be contacted at thepitchdoctor@gmail.com