How to outsmart your competitors (2)

I once worked with a new company: three partners in a complex reinsurance business. They were confident that they could do whatever it is that reinsurance businesses do.

But they had no clients. They needed to win a lot of business pretty quickly. They asked me to help them get started.

So we had a think about what could make the difference: how could they stand out against their established competitors? As with most B2B professional services, it’s very hard to offer anything different about the service itself. Marketing professional services comes down to relationships. They had some relationships with potential buyers. So we realised that the single best thing to work on was their pitching skills. Not documentation or tenders but the physical pitch itself – whether it was an impromptu elevator pitch or a formal presentation.

How could we improve their pitches beyond what their competitors could do? We worked a bit on the theory of making great pitches – reading articles and books, listening to experts – but you can’t capture everything about the topic verbally, so we also practised.

When we talked about pitching, everyone was an expert. But when I got them to practise, everyone was hopeless. They banged on like arcane professors, talking far too much, obsessed with the details of their subject, barely aware of anyone else in the room.

We decided to focus solely on this one issue. Everything else was set aside; everything. If they couldn’t pitch successfully, everything else was irrelevant anyway.

They practised every single day. I’d video their attempts, and we’d study the results together.

At first, it was excruciating. They were so far out of their comfort zone, it was out of sight. One of them told me “I can’t watch another video of myself. I hate my voice, the way I look, the words I use, everything. I just can’t watch.”

But we persisted. I would create scenarios with fictional potential clients. I invented all sorts of characters – tough, nervous, ambivalent, sociopathic, chatty, arch, spivvy – a whole galaxy of rogues, and all sorts of scenarios – formal, chance, posh, leisurely, dodgy, rushed – every possible environment in which a pitch could take place. And for at least an hour, every day, the three guys would roleplay these scenarios.

Then they won their first client. That distracted them for a while. It took a couple of weeks for them to get a grip on the new business. But they knew that they needed more, so we re-started the practising.

The pitching practice took a step up in quality. Perhaps they felt more confident having a real client on the books.  So I invented ever-more challenging scenarios.

They practised and practised and practised. And they learned. They learned how to connect with people. They learned how to ask good questions. They learned how to turn pitching into a conversation. They learned how to summarise what they did, in a way which got people interested. They learned how to build in emotion. They learned how to suggest a next step. They learned how to ask for the business.

And then… they started winning business. Lots of it. More than enough to justify stopping the roleplays.

But no, they kept at it, with more and more challenging scenarios. Just to keep them at the top of their game. They agreed that they would practice for 30 minutes every single work day.

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There’s a phenomenon in operational science called ‘the experience curve’. It’s closely related to the learning curve. It suggests that every time we double our experience we can cut the resources we need to achieve something by some predictable proportion. The ‘doubling’ bit implies that it gets harder and harder to achieve more effectiveness.

What I loved about this client was their preparedness to focus on one thing, and double their experience. And then double it again. And then double it again. And again, and again, and again. They overtook their competitors but they weren’t satisfied with that. They made sure that they put more and more distance behind them.

Getting from average to good takes some effort. Getting from good to great takes a whole lot more. But it is perfectly possible if you’re prepared to make that effort. Focusing on one thing (and it better be the right thing) and working hard at it will give you a competitive edge.