Congratulations to our clients and friends!
We believe it’s important to keep score…
Because our business revenue cycles run in four-month increments, we count on the trimester and we just finished our counting.
Using the HBS system, strategies and techniques for large account selling, our clients and friends have closed $171,000,000 in new business in the first four months of the year! That is fantastic and we want to say CONGRATULATIONS to everyone who landed big new deals in this first trimester! There were new sales from $100,000 in the list all the way to just over $100,000,000, a very broad range indeed. This new addition brings the system’s total to over $2.6 Billion in new sales!
We want to get better at keeping score, so we are reaching out to the readers of this blog, the website, Twitter and my newsletter to let us know when you land a deal and feel that in any way our system, thoughts and approaches have aided in winning that new sale. Send me an email letting me know what you landed and how big it is to your company. We will then add you to the score.
Again, congratulations to the big hunters in this first trimester! Listen to the podcasts in the upcoming months because some of the people who have landed the big deals, including the $100M+ deal, will be featured.
Tom,
Sure, my company may work for you but your tips have been invaluable to us along the way. Sometimes I’m not even sure why you pay us (but don’t quote me on that or bring it up ever again
). Recently, as I was going through your RFP book getting it ready for the print version (yay!), I came upon a chapter that started off with this intro:
“Too often in a proposal, presenters begin with a thorough attempt to make the buyer understand the product or service they are trying to sell. So they educate. They may spend a lot of time on small details in an endeavor to make the buyer understand exactly how everything works together.”
The other big project I was working on at that particular time was a proposal for a huge company–an account that could easily propel us to ‘the next level.’ And, of course, the first two-thirds of our proposal was an attempt to educate them. The funny thing is that even before I read this paragraph in your book, I knew our approach was wrong; I just couldn’t put my finger on it. By the end of the chapter, not only did I know exactly what we were doing wrong, I was able to explain it in no uncertain terms to my colleagues who had the exact same feelings but didn’t have any answers either.
I tend to think that the best books and the greatest pieces of advice are the obvious ones that speak to an underlying understanding that’s just not being tapped into. That’s exactly what this was and exactly what all of your practices are.
Anyway, long story short, since then we’ve sent the new and improved proposal over to our prospect–you know, the one that focuses on quelling the big company’s fears and proving our worth as a process-oriented provider. And without a blink, we got an appointment.
Now, for my sake, please write a post about how to make a stunning first in-person impression before June 11th!
Thanks,
1Gretel
Tom,
As always, you are a genius…. Just stopping by to say that I love what you write about here…
DEW
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