“I could have sworn I had them on my desk in front of me two minutes ago, but I just can’t seem to find them…”
No, I’m not talking about your keys, business cards or antacids; I’m talking about your billable hours. It is nothing short of astounding how many billable hours are left in various conference rooms and colleagues’ offices every month in spite of the increasing pricing pressure customers are placing on your entire industry.
Sometimes you were forgetful, and just dropped them. Other times you were robbed of them, practically at knifepoint. And, all too often, they funded an investment that simply did not pan out. I am not in the business of selling fanny packs or self-defense classes, so will not be of much help on the first two, but in my capacity as an advisor, I can certainly speak to the third.
Every service business looking for growth relies on its ability to generate more business from new and existing clients thereby presenting its leaders with a constant challenge: The best use of their time. Is it new business initiatives, which continue to grow the company? Or should the time be devoted to fulfilling current engagements (on which the firm’s reputation is already staked)? Hopefully you were not expecting an answer here, because it is a very complicated matter. What I would like to examine, however, is how time on the former is actually spent.
What’s in a new business pitch? Is it really that time consuming? Even if the client is all the way in Albuquerque so what; it’s 36 hours away, only 10-15 of which are billable anyways, right? If only…
Sure, you could employ a “spray and pray” strategy, where you use essentially the same material, with the same tired anecdotes, for every single new business pitch. But that is best left to the commodity service providers, and chances are you do not wan to be viewed as commoditized. Or you could hop on that plane and completely wing it in the room, which, for 99% of people, 99% of the time, is the epitome of stupid. No, to deliver a meaningful pitch a good deal of (otherwise billable) time goes into the making of that pitch.
The bulk of that time should be spent on the meat of the pitch – the story of why you can solve an important problem for this client. In short, it should be different than every other pitch you have ever delivered. Some large firms have entire departments devoted to strategizing for new business pitches; professionals who not only manage the process, but who develop unique value propositions that form the basis of the eventual “script” and do so for every new business initiative of sufficient value.
Smaller firms, serving the middle market or looking to grow their way into the big leagues, however, typically lack that capacity. Therefore, the most senior practitioners are spending their billable hours on something likely outside of their specific domain expertise. So what are they to do? Shrugging and saying “meh, stagnation is the new growth” is one option, but chances are those pursuing that path stopped reading a while ago.
Bringing in an outside expert, who lives to strategize about winning new business and sending you into the room as well armed as possible, is another, much better, option. It’s better for two reasons: it’s what keeps me in business, and it affords you pitch-specific expertise without the overhead of a full-time proposal management team.
What does pitch management expertise look like? Equal parts problem solving, story telling and information synthesizing for starters. Add in a passion for developing business cases and identifying value propositions, then top it off with an ability to translate all of those into terms aligned with the customer’s point of view. If you are in a professional service business and want to reclaim your billable hours, I look forward to hearing from you and working with you to develop the most effective new business pitches you’ll ever deliver at a fraction of your current opportunity cost.
Dan Palay is a Chicago-based consultant, specializing in marketing and business development for early-stage and business service companies. Please feel free to contact at [email protected].
