How To Swing A Losing Deal To A Winning Deal

Coming off a winning streak in the board room pitch competition for our company’s sales training academy cross each ASEAN countries, I hopped onto my last stop in Thailand to facilitate two teams to develop a winning board room pitch.

One of the teams did not make it to the finals and the other team that did make it to the final four slipped shy of clinching the win. 

Here are my reflections of where the misses were and how the teams could have turned it from a losing deal to a winning deal.

1. Increase Revenue vs Reduce Cost: A proposition that helps increase revenue would almost always make the board members sit up over one that focuses only on reducing cost.  While cutting cost result in savings that can be re-deployed, it is important to consider how that re-deployment can increase revenue.

2. Manage Risk Appetite: With shorter management tenure, having a long return on investment period would jeopardize an ability to demonstrate results in critical early years. Break projects into smaller size phases to allow benefits to be realized faster.

3. Interpret The  Vision: With emerging technology and trends, a visionary proposal must be accompanied by clear road maps on what the solution entails.  Often sellers get caught up in corporate terminology and smart solution names that the customer does not recognize what is being proposed.  In painting the big picture with solutions, it does not mean that one should avoid naming the product.  We should balance both in the light of what the customers understand.

4. Assess The Expert’s Attitude: While subject matter experts are important, but if they do not walk the mile with you while constructing your proposal, do consider ditching them.  Experts who jump in and out of a deal can do more harm as they send the team off on a tangent when they do not invest time to understand the client.  Worse, they waste your time when their ego ask to be pandered to. Getting the right experts with the relevant skills and attitude will help you get to your goal faster.

To cross the finishing line to win, let’s learn from successes and also mistakes. Refine and become better each time. Do not give up.