FOCUS solely on winning a piece of business.
Now this probably catches peoples eye the most.
We are in a company to make money right? The whole point of going for the pitch is to win – right? This may be so but if your staff as so focused on this, it will come across, albeit subtly that they care about ‘winning’.
I’ve even said myself in presentations a long time ago ‘I want to win this’ which I thought was the right thing to do – and sometimes that one liner, in the right context, with the right audience, might be what they want to hear.
But I think that if we just tilted our ‘hopes’ and ‘expectations’ a few degrees to be about ‘what the client want’s’ and them ‘winning’ the right solution you will come across as being more in alignment with their needs and ultimately that will come across in all your communication. I now say at the end of my presentations ‘ultimately this is about you finding the right solution’ which is truly what I feel. Long term this makes us smarter at sniffing out what they really want (so we can be the company that helps them) and having longevity with the client.
So as a test, if you have picked up a piece of business after a pitch do your team jubilantly bounce around at ‘winning’ it? Which of course means if your team didn’t get it they would feel ‘down’ at ‘loosing it’. Ask yourself if this up and down is really healthy and what message it’s feeding staff morale?
I can help you find out more about what the client needs in a pitch and all areas of the pitch presentation – including the language your team uses to focus on. Ultimately putting them in a better position to align better with the client’s needs and getting the result you want – but using a different mindset to get you there.
