How to catch a big fish in a big pond

When I was working at Nortel some years ago, we were a startup within a big company. Our small department consisted of a dozen self-driven, young techno-business engineers. At the time, winning a nationwide 2G deployment with a Mobile Network Operator was a formidable achievement, especially as Nortel was much less known than Nokia, Ericsson, Lucent and the likes.

We invented from scratch how to win a big deal. And we went through all the possible mistakes!

• We did not understand the power struggle inside our customers, between the innovation guy who wants to test the solution forever, the deployment guy who wants a smoothly running product, and the procurement guy who wants… a lower price!

• We did not know how to answer a big RFQ. We even once asked an external consultant who helped us winning a major deal in Taiwan… only to discover that they had answered on our behalf “Fully Compliant” to 100% of the requirements, leaving us with a loss-making contract to recover from!

• We thought that working all night to address the customers’ many requests would compensate for our immaturity. One night, I remember lacking pre-punched paper and sitting at 5am to punch hundreds of pages to put in folders (yes, we had CD-ROMs, but customers also wanted physical copies of the bid!).

Fast forward to today. Some of you may face similar issues when trying to land a big contract with a large corporation.

Here are some common areas where lack of experience can lead either to not landing a deal or to landing a bad deal which can jeopardize the whole company:

• Being stuck in “Proof of Concept mode” for too long, delaying the big deal decision.

• Not understanding the “power map” within large and complex organizations.

• Giving away some profit by not strategically pricing the initial deal while protecting the future repeat deals.

• Responding to the letter of customers’ requirements without emphasizing your Unique Selling Points (USPs)… leveraging both your technical and business differentiators.

Here are four ways to address these points immediately:

• Defining your “winning routes” ahead of big sales campaigns. Often, your own sales force will not be enough (like our bunch of young, crazy guys!).

• Addressing the “power map” of your customer, leveraging key partners to help you find the ultimate decision makers in complex organizations.

• Influencing the content of the RFP (Request for Proposal), by demonstrating your UPSs long before the RFP is issued to all competitors.

• Identifying how your can “play judo with your competitors”, taking advantage of their rigidities, especially when they are bigger than you are.

Your opportunity and your goal are to become the de facto choice for the ultimate decision maker, the one with the budget to spend.

A question: where on your customer journey may you miss this opportunity without realizing it?

Thank you.

Philippe

 P.S.1. You may take the “From Tech To Growth^IP” self-assessment scorecard. It is free, it only takes two minutes. It offers some reflective questions on your business growth and provides some tips based on your score.

P.S.2. Whenever you are ready, you can take a short, complementary appointment with me to discuss your business growth issues at hand and how to win deals with large corporations. Go to the “From Tech To Growth^IP” Recognition Call.

Philippe Poggianti, CEO, Poggianti Insights

[email protected]

+33-6-6404-3802