Too many cooks?
I’ve just got back from Vietnam (awesome BTW – highly recommend), where amongst eating an entirely unreasonable amount of food, I did a Vietnamese cooking course.
A few things stuck out. You need the right ingredients. You need them in the right quantities. You need to do certain things in the right order. And, ultimately, you need to produce something consistently good enough that people want to come back for more.
Get any of those badly wrong and, well, it can taste like shit.
Here are three things cooking in Vietnam reminded me about winning and keeping work. Enjoy.
#1. Get the ingredients right
Balance matters. Individually, most of the ingredients weren’t particularly remarkable. But get the right combination, in the right quantities, and suddenly you’ve got something delicious.
Too much of one thing? Not enough of another? Completely different result.
Winning work is much the same. For a significant opportunity, you need the right ingredients around the table. The person with the relationship. The technical expert. Someone who genuinely understands the client’s sector. The BD person who can orchestrate everything. The junior who actually knows more about what’s happening day-to-day at the client than anyone else.
And more isn’t necessarily better.
Eight partners turning up to a pitch because everyone wants their face in the room is the sales equivalent of emptying the entire spice rack into your pho.
Try this: Before your next significant opportunity, forget hierarchy for a minute and ask: what ingredients do we actually need to win this? Then build the team around the answer.
#2. Follow the recipe
Sequence matters.
You can’t just chuck everything into a pan and hope for the best. Some things need preparing first. Some ingredients go in early. Others go in right at the end.
There’s a methodology behind something that, when done well, looks incredibly simple.
Sales isn’t massively different.
Research. Qualify. Understand the need. Build the relationship. Shape the opportunity. Propose. Negotiate. Close.
Yet in professional services we’re remarkably good at leaping from:
“They mentioned they might need some help…”
straight to:
“SHALL WE SEND THEM A PROPOSAL?”
Slow down, Gordon Ramsay.
Skipping steps doesn’t make the sales process faster. Quite often, it just means you arrive at the end without having done enough to win.
Try this: Pick one live opportunity and ask where it sits in your sales process. Then identify the one or two things that need to happen before it should move forward. Don’t skip three stages because someone wants it in this month’s pipeline report.
#3. Give them a reason to come back
While we were in Vietnam, we went back to the same restaurant three times.
Not because we’d run out of imagination. It was just consistently good. And not just the food. With three crazy and energetic rugrats, the restaurant were VERY accommodating with impromptu football games and hide & seek between the tables!
And consistency is perhaps the most underrated ingredient in professional services sales.
Clients don’t need every interaction to be Michelin-starred. They need confidence about what they’re going to get.
Good advice. On time. No surprises. Calls returned. Commercial answers rather than theoretical ones. Bills that bear at least a passing resemblance to what was agreed. And people they actually enjoy working with.
Do it once and you’ve delivered a good piece of work.
Do it again and again and you’ve built a reputation and, most importantly, TRUST.
And that’s when clients stop wondering who they should instruct next time.
Try this: Write down the three things you want every client to say about working with you. Then look at your last three matters and ask yourself whether you consistently delivered them.
Chat to Tina by voice, when you’re between meetings, on the commute to/from work, or heading into something you’d rather avoid.
The takeaway
Great cooking isn’t magic. It’s the right ingredients, in the right quantities, put together in the right order and delivered consistently.
Great sales and BD isn’t magic either.
People. Process. Experience.
Get those three right and you won’t just win more work. You’ll give clients a reason to keep coming back for seconds.
We’re building a team of voice enabled AI assistants to support you with BD activities and allow you to spend more time being human. Interested? We’d love to chat.
