Attention Executives: 8 ways your business development meetings are killing your win rate

Most companies have regular business development meetings to discuss the leads they are tracking. These meetings usually do very little to increase the company’s win rate, but give everyone a chance to convince themselves that “they’ve done everything they should.” The reality is that the meetings have been subverted and are doing more harm than good. How did that happen?

It happens when you allow your business development meetings to focus on the wrong things: 

1. How many leads you’re tracking. Most companies obsess more over how much they have in their pipeline and too little on what they are doing to win them or their win rate. This is a symptom of companies that are focusing on lead volume instead of win probability in order to hit their numbers. Should your business development meetings be about quotas, incentives, and your company’s future finances, or about increasing its chances of winning? It's easy to have lots of leads on the books without putting much effort into them. And yet, what will impact the company's finances the most is whether you win them. However, business development is usually rewarded for finding leads instead of closing sales. 
2. PowerPoint slides instead of discussing what matters. Business Development reports usually describe the opportunities instead of whether you have an information advantage that will improve your win probability. When people read their reports they run out the clock by describing the lead instead of anything more substantive, like customer insights, assessments, validation, differentiators, and what it will take to win. Somehow people get away with claiming competitive advantages that aren't differentiators, but instead are the same things everyone else will claim.
3. Status instead of change. It’s too easy to hide behind an acceptable-sounding status. What really matters is what has been accomplished since the last meeting. What matters is change, both good and bad. Has anything new been learned? If not, then nothing has changed and why do you need to talk about it? 
4. Checking boxes instead of passing the "So what?" test. You have relevant capabilities or experience. So what? You had a meeting with the customer and checked that box. So what? You found a potential teammate who answered your call. So what? Following your process does not matter if the things you do don't pass the "So what?" test.
5. What people are doing instead of what they are accomplishing. Another good way to run out the clock on a business development meeting is to talk about what you’ve done instead of the results you’ve achieved and how they will impact your chances of winning. So what if someone called the customer, sent an email, or dropped off a brochure or capabilities statement? What did they learn that’s useful? Or what have they still not discovered that you need to know in order to win?
6. The same-old, same-old. When pursuits become routine, people tend to go through the motions of team building, qualification, compliance, and positioning. They do what they think is expected without thinking about it. They recycle the same worn-out strategies because they are seen as acceptable and never challenged. Your company is what it is, and nobody is going to admit that it’s normal instead of great. What gets lost is differentiation. Normal doesn’t win. What will you offer and how will you deliver in ways that are superior? Are you accepting the status quo and just doing your part, or are you driving differentiation in order to win?
7. Your company’s perspective instead of the customer’s perspective. When your meetings are about what you have done, what you have learned, and where you are at, what gets lost is what matters to the customer. Who cares about you? What matters to the customer regarding their needs? What matters to the customer regarding a potential vendor? Why should they care about you? If you can't answer what the customer needs to reach a decision in your favor, then how do you expect to stack up? Whatever you do, do not let not knowing the customer well enough to reflect their perspective slide by. If you can't even guess, then why are you bidding?
8. Filling out forms instead of developing an information advantage. Are people congratulating themselves for updating the CRM with routine details instead of discovering insights about the customer that will give you a higher evaluation score? Are people claiming to have a great customer relationship because they were able to land a meeting at which they didn't learn anything everyone else already knows? Are all the boxes filled in and every report complete with perfectly acceptable and meaningless babble? You can measure the strength of your customer relationships based on the information advantage it enables you to achieve. Do your meetings focus on pushing paper or on assessing and improving your information advantage? Are you moving that needle in a quantifiable way?

When the customer isn’t talking and you’ve exhausted your other sources, it’s hard to learn anything new. Most companies simply wait for the RFP, holding business development meetings that they coast through. Instead, spend the time thinking about what can you do to better position your company, develop your offering, differentiate, or close the gap between where you are now and what it will take to win. Who else besides the customer could you talk to? Are there any other stakeholders or former employees you can identify? Use your business development meetings to detect when pursuits have stalled and to provide inspiration regarding what else can be done to increase your chances of winning.

Here are some things you can do in your business development meetings to resist the incredibly strong pull towards routine and being merely ordinary:

1. Throw away reports that just describe the opportunity. Create new reports with these items: what changed last month, what changed this month, how has our information advantage improved, and what will it take to win. What will it take to win must be discovered and articulated. Look for trends or stagnation. Make the meetings about winning instead of describing.
2. Stop giving credit for completion. Credit should only be given for insights that will improve your evaluation score. Throw away all the minutia and ask yourself what your insights add up to.
3. Define and continuously debate what it will take to win. Create criteria. List questions that need to be answered. Start with a long list and use it to create a process of elimination. It will help people tremendously to know what is expected of them and what they should be prepared to discuss.
4. Measure yourself against what it will take to win. Your meetings shouldn’t be about what you know or what you’ve done. If you can't articulate what it will take to win you are not even in the game. Once you can articulate it, you can measure your pursuits against winning and not against last month. Do you have an information advantage? A competitive advantage? Differentiators? Bid strategies? Do you know enough about the customer's perspective to write a proposal from their perspective instead of your own? What is the gap between what you know and what you should know? Are you trending towards or away from what it will take to win? Are you going months without any progress? 
5. Require people (including yourself) to read the reports before the meeting. Never spend expensive time sitting around a table reading information people already have. Instead, talk about what matters about the information instead of reciting report data. Talk about the challenges and what to do about them. Talk about what else can be done to improve your chances of winning and how to accomplish those things.
6. Switch from asking “what do we know about the customer?” to “what do we think matters vs. what does the customer think matters?” Don’t let people get away with saying what they think matters to the customer. Push hard for verification directly from the customer. The customer will decide whether you win, and they won’t hand it to you just because you think they should.
7. Recognize that while you will never submit a bid knowing everything you would like to know about the customer, that shouldn’t stop you from trying to discover it. Whether you are making sufficient progress towards being ready to win is a judgment call. The process should deliver the information you need to make that judgment call. You don’t want to make it blindly or simply accept whatever comes in as being all that could be obtained. When someone hits a stone wall, that’s an opportunity for you to add resources, try other contacts, try different approaches, and leverage your collective connections. The reason you should push is to create the opportunities for that to occur.

During the pre-RFP phase, it is critical that you capture the information you will need to close the sale with a winning proposal. Without an information advantage, your proposal will be doomed to being merely ordinary. Your business development meetings should not be about reviewing "status" but about discovering that information advantage.

What you do in your business development meetings can ultimately have a greater impact on your win rate than what you do during the proposal phase. So why do people put heroic efforts into the proposal phase, but sleep through their business development meetings?