7
Priority 3 – Externalise business development efforts 125
Not taking enough time
You should be under no illusions that drafting and crafting winning pro-
posals will take time. There are no shortcuts. Decide to do it properly or
don’t do it at all.
Non-compliance
Most ITT documents will set out precisely what is required in the proposal
as well as how it should be set out and submitted. You must observe these
tender compliance issues absolutely or you risk being automatically ruled
out for non-compliance. My advice on this is to prepare a detailed compli-
ance checklist very early on in the process and tick each item off prior to
submission.
How should the proposal be set out?
Begin your proposal with a very brief introduction that summarises
your understanding of the objectives and requirements and your
enthusiasm to work with the organisation.
Give your summary of benets as mentioned in no more than one or
two sides.
Answer all questions, dealing with all issues that the organisation
raises, using its language and phraseology wherever possible. Also use
the headings and any numbering sequence that it uses.
Include any examples, case studies and testimonials that you can, in
order to illustrate the benets your goods and services have brought
others in the past.
Include a conclusion that is short and to the point, which draws all
your benets together and provides a powerful assurance of your
condence.
Brand your way to business development
success
We live in the ‘brands age’. Everywhere we look we are surrounded by busi-
ness, product or personal brands. Make no mistake, however cynical about
them you might be, in the absence of specic business recommendations
or very strong past loyalties you will almost always end up buying from a
known brand name.
126 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
With this in mind, if you want to develop your business, then it is clearly
a massive advantage to be able to develop a brand. By the way, having a
small business or providing a personal service under your own name is no
barrier. It is still perfectly possible and indeed desirable to establish a brand
around you or your enterprise. Good branding can and will drive potential
customers and clients into your ‘enquiries and leads bucket’.
Research the subject of branding and you will encounter a huge amount of
academic wafe. For example, my own reading on the subject brought up
this little gem that talks about branding, ‘as a supporting theoretical frame-
work that postulates a differential brand message’ and goes on to ‘discuss the
historical setting of branding and the link to linguistic paradigms’. This unneces-
sarily complicates the topic.
On the other hand there are those folk who take an oversimplistic approach
and say all you need to do to create a brand is get a decent logo. Hence,
I have seen many organisations decide to go through a branding or re-
branding exercise and simply change their name, design colour or logo.
If you had an unsuccessful business before, then if all you do is change the
name and symbol, the likelihood is you will have an unsuccessful business
in the future but with a glossy new logo that has cost you money to get
designed.
So with this in mind let’s get real and practical.
Your brand is essentially what people say about your
business when you are not listening
If they don’t know who you are at all, or if what they say about you is not
what you would like them to be saying or feeling, then you either don’t
have a brand or you have one that is not doing the job. Think about this
carefully. The creation of your brand and what it conveys is absolutely
within your control and there are a number of things that you can do to
build a strong brand in order to have the level of inuence that you want
in the market place.
What word or adjective immediately jumps into your mind at the mention
of the following brands? Apple, Rolls-Royce, Skoda, Poundstretcher, Rolex,
Timex, John Lewis, The Financial Times, Primark, Harrods. The phrases
that immediately spring to your mind represent the brand message behind
these operations.
7
Priority 3 – Externalise business development efforts 127
Five ways to ‘BRAND’™ whatever you are selling
If you want to establish a strong brand, then the issues that you must
address can be remembered by my acronym BRAND. Here is what it stands
for and the things you need to strive to do. The more of these you can
achieve the better.
B = Bold positioning statement
Have a bold statement about yourself and make sure you constantly
reinforce it very openly and uniformly in all your external and internal
communications. It might even be in your promotional information or in
your strap-line.
In the early part of the book I mentioned Viking River Cruises that has the
strapline ‘the world’s leading river cruise line. . . by far’. With this message
constantly repeated in everything it does and alongside its logo, it no
longer becomes mere promotion but almost a statement of fact that gets
into the consciousness of existing customers, prospects and staff.
R = Realism
Your brand message must reect reality and honesty. The worst thing you
can do is to position yourself as one thing when it is demonstrably obvious
to all that this is not the case. Thus positioning yourself at the premium
end of your market as a luxury and high-quality supplier is pointless if the
goods and services you offer are incredibly cheap and poor.
A = Association
What ‘mental association’ do people have with your brand name? What
is the ‘feeling’ the name or brand gives the moment you see or hear the
name? Is it luxury or value; great service or style; reassurance and comfort?
Having made that decision you need to ensure that all business develop-
ment initiatives are in line with that thinking in a very real and practical
way. This then should inuence your decisions and actions on recruit-
ment, design, levels of service, quality control, operational functions
and pricing.
You should also know that your brand is the sum of the associations and
experiences that people have had and heard, relating to your business.
With this in mind, make sure they are good ones!
128 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
N = Name awareness
You have to take steps to ensure your target market instantly knows your
business name. Your name needs to be out there in as many relevant places
as possible. It needs to be visible and frequently seen, and encountered by
your potential prospects and targets.
That is why merely focusing on one medium is not enough. Have an
integrated approach so that your name and brand identity are used both
online and ofine. Ideally your prospects should be seeing your name pop
up wherever they go in a variety of different contexts.
For example, I have previously mentioned a new brand in the legal market place. . .
QualitySolicitors. This morning I read a discussion about it on a LinkedIn group;
yesterday I saw an interview on television about it; and when I picked up my news-
paper over the weekend the rst thing I saw was a large advertisement. If that wasn’t
enough a few days later I walked into WH Smith to buy a bar of chocolate and guess
who had a presence in the store offering me information?
This gives a sense of familiarity with the rm and begins to establish it in my con-
sciousness as a major trusted player and prospective supplier of legal services. As
mentioned earlier, in the absence of a strong, personal, past relationship, with this
level of branding there is every chance that QualitySolicitors would get onto my
mental shopping list next time I need some legal support.
D = Distinctiveness
Regardless of whether it is a product, a business name or even an indi-
vidual, it helps branding if it can be associated with some very distinctive
or memorable image. This might be a logo, a name style or even a personal
photograph or something that makes the image instantly recognisable
within your target market. If I were to show you just logos and even ‘house
colours’ of some leading brands you would immediately be able to mention
the name or product and in turn that would trigger the adjective or ‘asso-
ciation’ mentioned earlier. For example, if I were to show you the colour
purple and ask you to think of a brand of chocolate, what name would pop
into your head? I’ll bet you can even taste it, just from the mere thought
right now.
If there is nothing visibly distinctive about you or your business at the
moment, create something and use it often. Being distinctive and memo-
rable is important in any branding exercise.
Jonathan Straight, chief executive of Straight plc, the UK’s leading supplier
of waste and recycling containers, claims:
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