New survey results released today by Alibaba.com found that:

• 77% of Americans believe new entrepreneurs are the key to reviving the economy;
• 42% of Americans have considered starting a business since the economic downturn, with 1 in 10 acting on the idea; and
• 55% of Americans say starting a business is something they have wanted to do.

The term “newpreneur” is a great one. It represents an entrepreneur who is using the recession as a catalyst to start a business or develop an idea. I decided I would make up my own term for what these newpreneurs want: “THRIVAVING.” It’s the combination of business surviving and business thriving.

I have spent almost my whole life either working as an entrepreneur or working with entrepreneurs. So much so that I am the featured speaker and a panel judge for Alibaba.com’s Newpreneur™ of the Year award, presented in partnership with Inc. Magazine.

We all know there are a lot of risks in being an entrepreneur, which is likely the reason only 1 out of 10 who consider taking the plunge actually get in the water. Along the way, I have gone through a lot of those risky situations and have some key principles I want to pass along to newpreneurs…
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Well, everyone, a collective sigh of relief just left the Hunt Big Sales headquarters (or “clubhouse” as we prefer to call it). Why? My new book—which you are all no doubt familiar with, thanks to your immense help in choosing the cover—just came out!

RFPs Suck! How to Master the RFP System Once and for All to Win Big Business is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and a slew of other places. In about a week, it will be available on Kindle so if that’s your format of choice, just let me know and I’ll send you an update when it’s ready. And if its mere existence isn’t enough to convince you to grab a copy, you can find more details about the book at RFPsSuckTheBook.com.

The Vitals:

Hardcover: 160 pages

Price: $29.95
(Yeah, it’s a bit more than your average run-of –the-mill book but that’s because it’s not your average run-of-the-mill book. And anyway, your boss should be buying this for you.)

Publisher: Channel V Books

How you can help:

• Refer it to everyone you know.
• Buy it for everyone in your office. (Hey, it makes a great stocking stuffer!)
• Leave an online review at Amazon or Barnes & Noble if you’ve read the e-book or after you read the full length version. (Links are above.)
• Vote on other peoples’ reviews that are particularly helpful (on Amazon).
• Think happy, positive thoughts about it every now and then.

Background:
As many of you know, this book is the extended version of my e-book Landing Big Sales with an RFP.

[After the jump I’ve included the full Table of Contents so you can view the massive amounts of new information, RFP samples and processes I’ve added to this new hardcover version.]

Sure I kicked and shoved when my marketing team told me that I should write an e-book on RFPs and offer it to readers for free (free?!) on my website. After all, this was the stuff that my clients pay me adult money to coach them through. But I knew that arguing with them would be a losing battle so, like all other battle-scarred soldiers before me, I raised my white flag, buried my head, and jotted down a variety of my favorite RFP-defeating techniques to share with the world.

Thousands of downloads and seemingly hundreds of “Thank You” notes later, and I realized that the demand for this type of material was strong and growing. And so I’ve expanded what was once limited material into what I like to think of as the ultimate guide to conquering RFPs—whether government, private, or public—by adding several additional winning techniques and a number of sample RFP responses (with critiques). I also did my due diligence by surveying my audience about the mysteries and troubles they’ve encountered in their RFP traumas, err, experiences and addressed them here.

Read on for the full Table of Contents…
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I wonder if there is any cash for consultants in facilitating strategic planning these days…

Most of the CXO’s and the executive teams I am speaking with these days are looking at strategy as a 30 to 90 day perspective. The world changes fast, “environmental scans” and “competitive analysis” seem to be luxuries that are for a woebegone time. Nostalgia is great…it brings a tear to the eye and makes you long for a simpler era- even if that era was just two to three years ago in hotel conference rooms and business retreat centers with flip charts and “trust-building” group activities. Gone like three-martini lunches and corporate jets. Sigh.

Strategy is tactical…Like white is the new black for fashion and small is the new big for business partners…
But, what about the day after the day after? The 91st day? Who is thinking past the current 90-day cycle in your company and what are they asking themselves? What brain-food are they eating? What plans are they hatching?

Is it time yet to be looking out 91 days +? Let’s see…have you

• Cut every dollar you can cut?
• Pressed the flesh with every customer you can meet?
• Reassured all of your ‘A’ players?
• Read the Wall Street Journal and every other business source until your eyes bleed?

If the answer is yes, then it’s time.

Let’s start with brain-food- My advice is get out of the echo-chamber. Stop listening to your industry leaders, reading the trade journals and going to the shows. It’s like going to a coroner for a wellness visit. All of the thinking is about what was and it is coming from the people who are huddling in the warm comfortable space called “the industry average.” You have to break free of that group if you want the kind of brain-food that will lead you to the answers you need for the 91st day. Here is some brain-food worth consuming-

• Financial Times – Read it for the cleaner info sourcing. These guys don’t have a seat at the White House Press room- they write what they want and they are forward-viewing with a deeper dive on information. Of course it is more expensive- quality often is. If you read what everyone else reads, you will think what everyone else thinks.
• Google Alerts – Flag the key terms that are driving your business. Think about it- your industry information is trying to get oxygen in-between the important announcements of who Britney Spears is dating or the estate of Michael Jackson. You need the information coming to you as it is happening, not sifting through the packaged and processed filter of popular media.
• TED.org – 18-minute lectures on all sorts of stuff around technology, entertainment, design, futurists, communication and so on. Be selective, there is a library of hundreds of these lectures with the brightest of the bright, but many things aren’t relevant to you- So?  Skip those and find what is valuable to you.  You can subscribe through I-Tunes for easier access.

What about the peeps?… Coach Joe, (writer, speaker, philosopher from central casting), says that our thinking is the average of the 5 people with whom we spend the most time. This may be very scary if you are suffering from some relational arrested development and still hang out with the friends you did beer-bongs with in high school. I would tend to agree with the idea. We get a lot of our calibration, interpretation and mis-digested information from the people around us. This is more true with the frequency and intensity that comes from our most regular contacts. Should we throw out our regular contacts? Well, that question should be considered in therapy. Let’s expand the question to “Who else should I be spending time with that can feed my brain the ideas and information that will take me out past the 91st day?”

• Analysts – Go talk to industry financial analysts and follow them. These are the folks out in front of not only the movers and shakers in the industry who are moving adult-money to make big-things happen, but also the trends and technology that will leap frog your better guesses at the future.
• Politicians and lobbyists – I know…you want this like shards of glass in your eyes. It has been a long time since these people were on the list of future shapers that you would listen too…. But they own big parts of two industries already and they are hunting at least two more by Christmas. These folks are shaping yours and my future at a pace we are unaccustomed to.  If your business is a rock in the river of the stimulus package, then you have been at this cocktail party for a while now. However, for the rest of us, the dragon seems to have an unlimited appetite and is recognizing no borders. Better connect and spend time with them.
• Go up a zero, maybe two – Birds of a feather…I find that most of us hang out with people around our business size or personal income. Your range may go up as high as double to triple your size or down to half your size in either category, and you are still comfortable enough. But there it stops. Go up a zero on the back end- that takes the number up by a minimum of a factor of 10 on you. Two zeroes and you are in a whole new atmosphere. Their perspective and access is different than yours. Tap it.

These are only some sources for brain-food- there are others that I’d like to hear about from you. The point is that you have exhausted the traditional sources for feeding your mind about the future by now. It is time to get new food if you want to change your direction and shape a different future.

Tell me what your sources are to feed your future.

Hi All,

I’m not one to brag (too much anyway) about good stuff that comes my way, but I’m especially excited about my upcoming work with Inc magazine, Fast Company, and Alibaba. Also, this news might be beneficial to you or someone you know, which is why it doesn’t seem too self-serving for me to share it.

In a nutshell, I’m going to be keynoting a seven-city tour along with Tom Peters. The tour revolves around the Newpreneur of the Year program and kicks off in New York on October 6th. (All dates and details are available HERE.) I suggest checking out the cities (and attending) if you’re looking for a great networking and learning opportunity.

The other part of this tour is its namesake event: the naming of the “Newpreneur” of the year. The event sponsor, Alibaba.com, will be giving away five business grants to new entrepreneurs and others with “big ideas.” If you’re interested or know anyone who fits this description, I’ve pasted the entry guidelines below. Just a quick head’s up, though: the contest ends on August 14th, so you’ve got about two weeks to enter.

Here are the details:

Have a big idea or budding business? You could be the Newpreneur of the Year and win one of five business grants from Alibaba.com.

It’s simple: share your story in a short essay on why you should be the Newpreneur of the Year; join us for inspiring discussion and dialogue among experts and peers and celebrate the excitement around entrepreneurship. Top Grant=$50,000, Second Grant=$25,000. Third Grant=$15,000 and two Fourth Grants=$5,000.

I hope to see a few of you at one of these events. If you plan to attend, please shoot me an email to let me know.

Thanks!

The inspiration for this post came from NPR’s “Only a Game”. While I was listening to the program that covers “sports for the rest of us,” it struck me that Hunt Big Sales should create its own set of Olympic events for large account selling. Now, these events may not be as compelling as the “competitive bird watching” or “Winnebego Backwards Blindfolded Obstacle Course Driving” that “Only a Game” covers, but since sales people are competitive by nature, I thought we would all have a good time.

A few guiding principles as we consider the proposed events:

1. Large account selling is a team activity. There are no solo events.
2. No commissions will be paid to winning teams, but you may receive a title-only promotion at your company.
3. It is assumed that all events will take the form of some “real world” exercise. For this reason, food will need to be supplied by the contestants for themselves and the judges. Food points will be awarded and depending upon quality could make up as much as half of all points awarded.
4. Neither alcohol nor caffeine will be considered “performance enhancing drugs.”

Now to the proposed events…
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My last post dealt with the “Problem” problems that cause deals to get stuck. There were quite a few.

As I promised in that post, there are other reasons that deals get stuck besides “Problem” problems. I call them “Us” problems.

These “Us” problems include:

1. No Solution. There are times when we believe that a prospect’s aggravation with the current provider is so acute that they will switch to us at almost any price. But their frustration is really only enough to get us in the door and in contention for consideration. Research has shown that the usual threshold for changing out a major supplier, vendor, or partner is the potential for an 8-14% improvement, or there will not be a deal. This improvement is the aggregate of improvements in price, cost, friction and value.
2. No Credibility. There is another side to the world of big claims: the TOO BIG CLAIM. When we claim that our solutions offer more than a 14% improvement, our credibility goes through the floor. The expectation of an 8-14% improvement comes from a Harvard Business School study, and I have found it to be in line with real world expectations. Though there are differences between industries, anything too far beyond a promise of a 14% improvement is likely to be seen by prospects as BS.
3. No Chemistry. The prospect has to be able to see their people company working with your people. When they can’t, or worse, when they can but they hate the idea, you have a chemistry problem. I have been on the inside of buying groups. Time and again personalities and chemistry have been major factors when value propositions are similar. It has even been the driving decision factor in multi-million dollar deals.
4. No Precision. Using generic answers that focus on what we can do, instead of on tailored, real-world solutions to their problems, issues and time frames create the sense of risk. Our one-size-fits-all approach creates the risk that we will miss something that will limit or eliminate the benefits that they prospect was seeking.
5. Solution Creates More Problems. Every solution holds the potential for greater damage during implementation. For some companies, the problems may be more political than they are financial or operational, but they hold a sense of great risk nonetheless.

With these “Us” problems, we are overwhelmingly dealing with what our solution means to our prospect…
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In our business, more than half of our deal coaching work focuses on “unsticking” deals, and believe me, it’s exactly how it sounds. Sometimes a deal loses momentum, gets lost in the fold, or just gets plain stuck. Some symptoms of a stuck deal are:

These symptoms are measured against my three indicators of the health of a deal: information, people and time.

The reasons that deals get stuck generally fall into two categories: “Problem” problems and “Us” problems. In this post, we’ll focus on the “Problem” problems. Next time, we’ll focus on the “Us” problems.

“Problem” problems fall into these categories…
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I just finished Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, an oldie but a goodie. It tells the story of the Oakland A’s and their manager Billy Beane’s fight against the Conventional Wisdom of professional baseball. Beane guided his team in a battle against the “system”—the well established conventions of what it takes to make a great baseball team (or a baseball team great)—and won. Beane understood that his team was not just a group of players, but a group of people whose individual skills are needed to orchestrate a win. The same can be said for your sales team. The sales person, sales manager, designers, engineers, operations and client services personnel all have a hand in hunting a big sale. It’s the combination of skills they bring to the table that will help accomplish the goal.

What can hunters learn from Beane and his team?

Go Against Conventional Wisdom (CW)
Let’s start with some of the “Conventional Wisdom” that organizations use when fielding their sales teams. Remember, these are the things you’ll be working against when putting together your team.

• “Our team must come from our industry.” I hear this statement 90+% of the time. This is true for some positions, but as I will discuss later, not all. This CW is limiting and can be expensive.
• “Have a set of deep contacts in the prospect base.” People like the idea of having access to large accounts via previous contacts, but with all the turnover and reorganization in the marketplace, this is not as valuable or as relevant as it once was.
• “Sales people are the most important part of the sale.” I have railed against the “rockstar” idea before. In the complex sale, one person may be the most important part of a single step, but is still, in the end, just one part of the overall team.
• Rockstar pedigree. You may be looking for players with the “big company” background, but in what way is experience from a behemoth, matrixed, highly-resourced and deeply branded company going to benefit a company like yours? In other words, how will those players’ backgrounds serve you?
• Look the part. There is a widely-held belief as to what a sales person looks, talks and “feels” like. In reality, there’s no real “look” to a great sales person. It’s his or her skill that will make the sale.

Team Building on Your Payroll (or lack thereof)
Like Beane, small and mid-size companies don’t always have big league budgets to hire the “rockstars” to play for their teams. But since we play in the big leagues, we need to figure out a strategy to win…
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Sometimes I’m shocked by the amount of time it takes for the “obvious” to become apparent to me.

We just completed a review of 100 of our clients as a means of calibrating our Target Filter and determining the characteristics of our most successful clients. We’re always trying to define our best prospects, not just those with the “potential to buy our services with speed,” (although that’s a very important quality), but those with the “greatest potential to implement our system with success.” The latter is the more important quality for us. It’s the quality on which our brand is built. To pick our prospects for the future, we wanted to use our past clients as our base data.

For the sake of the analysis, we defined successful implementation outcomes for our client as having one or more of these qualities:

1. Landed at least one account that was 10 – 20 times the size of their average account
2. Doubled their rate of sales revenue growth in the 12 month cycle following implementation
3. Grew targeted existing accounts by greater than 40% within six months

From our analysis, the companies that achieved these outcomes by implementing the Hunt Big Sales system exhibit the following characteristics:

• Between $5M and $125M in annual revenue
• Privately held with majority ownership in the CXO positions
• Profitable operations over most recent 3+ year period
• Senior management has been working together for 2+ years
• Company has and implements its Strategic Plan
• CEO/Executive Management invests in professional development

This last quality was UNIVERSAL! (To be clear, I’m not talking about their investment in HBS since that was a given due to the nature of the study.) In every case that we’ve seen remarkable success, this quality was also present.

And it makes sense. Just think, Tiger Woods has 5 coaches; Roger Federer – 4; Shaquille – 3. It seems that the best invest…

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Wow. I can’t thank you all enough for the incredible feedback you left for me last week. As a result of your comments, suggestions and votes we’re down to the four final covers—a couple of which are new, slightly-altered renditions of the older ones, and one of which will be the final cover.

I must say, I’ve been staring at these covers for over a week now and they’re beginning to look like one big blur to me, so I’m really, really counting on your help to make this decision once and for all! (This is both my way of guilting you into voting and thanking you immensely in advance for doing so!)

A few notes about the changes we made before I unveil the four final choices:

• We heard pretty consistently that my name needs to be smaller, with which I agree, so that’s going to be a definite.
• A couple people mentioned that the title should be a little bit more professional. In particular, they didn’t like the word “Sucks.” My feeling is that business books don’t have to be boring just because they’re educational. This title is a nod to that as well as to the fact that, well, RFPs really do suck, which is no doubt a sentiment shared universally. I also feel that the title—whether loved or hate—is provocative enough to pull people in for a closer look. From there, I hope the content will speak for itself.
• A couple of you mentioned that you liked the little HBS man inside the “O” in my first name, so we’ve tried to incorporate that more. By the way, this was surprising to me as I didn’t think much of it, but hey, the masses have spoken and I’m going to listen.
• The most popular covers were covers 1 and 6. Before I read your comments, I was dead-set on Cover 6, but your votes have led me to seriously consider Cover 1 (or a rendition thereof). The following options are different plays on those two covers.

Oh, one more thing: I know that a few people liked the covers that featured the title being literally sucked away, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around them so I had to make an executive decision: Vetoed! (Sorry if those were your favorites.)

Now, without further ado, I present you with our four finalists…

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