If your firm has never done business with a global brand, to them you are a contender. A critical step  in winning a first assignment  is understanding that the easiest way to get a project funded will be out of a discretionary budget.

 Members of the executive committee have discretionary budgets for mission-critical, short-term initiatives. In other words, discretionary budgets are used to fix immediate problems affecting investor behaviour.

Annual operating budgets, on the other hand, are admistered by department heads and are used to fund ongoing needs such as IT, sales & marketing, training and customer service.

Aiming your offering at initiatives affecting shareholder value improves your chances of getting the attention of a business unit’s head.  How do you find out what is mission-critical this quarter? 

Go to the investor relations part of the corporate website.  Shareholder presentations are stored there. 

C-level executives’ presentations are intended to attract institutional funds and these presentations outline operating plans related to revenue and industry threats.

Investor relations presentations will give you everything you need to construct your “value proposition” for a discretionary budget initiative.

A training client who focused on behavioural change aligned their service with

1. A company frequently announces its intentions to shareholders. Senior officers’ bonuses and stock values depend on successful completion. 
 
Therefore, if you demonstrate how your service can help a company reach that goal, a profitability target, for example, doors will open more easily for you.
 
For instance, a stock offering may be dependent upon maintaining a certain trading price.
 
Read earnings reports, shareholder releases, announcements to the investment community for clues. Then develop a “business case” executive briefing which backs up your claims and use that document to get permission to talk further.
 
 
2. Timelines for delivery on quarterly earnings are often short.   Your value may be nimble, national reach.
 
Or your value may be that your service is completely stand-alone, while offering continual visibility because the work is completed on your clients’ intranet.
 
Companies are doing more with less today and their people are time-starved.  If you can deliver with minimal demands on people inside the company, executives will be listening.

Would it matter whether you used the term  ”customers”  or “KOLs”  (Key Opinion Leaders)?

Would you use the term “KOL” if you were talking to the scientific affairs group and “Customer” if you were talking to people in the commercial group?

Words matter. I was conducting a discovery conversation on behalf of a client.  The audience was the training group in a Biotech firm.  They taught me a valuable lesson.  If you don’t  use the language of your audience, you risk losing credibility.

This is what happened:  I asked about their customers.  The learning leader, who had started her career as a scientist replied,  “I suppose you could call them customers but they’re KOL’s.”

Immediately, I substituted the term “KOL” for “customer” in all my materials and conversations.  We continued to pursue business within the pharma/biotech industry.

Could this explain why a leading biosimilar manufacturer has agreed to consider Big Game Hunting’s client in 4 therapeutic areas?

Words are neuropathways to the heart.

I knew I had to change the approach. This is what I did:

1. Positioned the service as customer experience improvement rather than a training service

2. Began the sales process with business unit leaders rather than the training department. I had noticed that budgets were approved by the business unit, with training being subject matter experts who influenced the decision.

3. Demonstrated the benefit of increased returns on “sunk costs” made in marketing and skills training.

4. Defined a very narrow niche within the procurement group to avoid commoditization.  The service category was defined as “experiential learning in customer experience improvement initiatives”.

We made these changes and within 14 months had secured an engagement with the fourth largest bank in the United States. 
My client has since become a preferred provider enterprise-wide within this bank.
Multiple assignments from this bank has produced double-digit growth.

 A strategic benefit  has been increased credibility within the financial services sector, leading to assignments with 4 of the top 25 banks in the country.
What made the difference? 

1. Positioning the service in terms of its benefits (customer experience improvement) rather than its features (low-cost, telephone-based delivery)

2. Understanding that the real purchaser was the head of the business unit, not the training department, which functions as a service supply co-ordinator.

3.  Demonstrating that the service would amplify the financial return on investments already made by other areas of the business eg. marketing and skills training. 

4. Defining the terms of the service contract very tightly so that there were few to no competing providers.

Owner-managers of business services firms tell me they are on a rollercoaster:  too busy delivering client assignments to go after new business or frantically chasing down the next assignment because there is no work.
When you are  told  “It’s not in the budget”, this usually means not in the annual operating budget.  This is the budget which pays for expenses occuring every year: Cost of sales, Advisory services, Cost of Goods Sold.

Annual budgets are recurring expenses and are administered by purchasing departments.

Discretionary budgets are signed off by senior officers, to be spent on special projects outside of normal day-to-day operations. 

Discretionary budgets support short-term, critical objectives.  Senior executives make commitments to investors and shareholders about these objectives.

The best place to find out about them is quarterly earnings reports.  Look for goals which sound like this:
“2% gain in market share this year”
 “entry into the China market by 2015”
 “move to # 5 position in the industry”
 

Align your firm’s offering  with large, strategic initiatives rather than with general benefits like “we help drive sales”   or “we reduce costs”.

Bwana on smoothing out “feast or famine” revenue cycles