Pitching to Win

Bid improvement projects

Pitching requires a combination of good organisation, objective decision-making, understanding, delegation and finesse to make it a successful and profitable exercise.  Clients are increasingly putting (even minor) pieces of work out to competitive tender, often to benchmark providers, and their expectations are increasing in how they want advisers to respond to their needs.

Record Associates undertakes bid improvement projects with the following outputs:

  • A structured approach to pitching across the whole firm so that partners, associates and BD teams (and other support functions) have a common approach to winning work and how they can work together
  • A toolkit which helps them assess different opportunities and enables objective decision-making so they can focus on responding to the real needs of clients
  • A central portal to hold information, templates and tools so that pitches can be created quickly, by everybody, at any time and which reflect the needs of the client.  This will encourage greater self-service and enable BD teams to undertake more pitch coaching
  • A review of 'sales precedents' that sell the firm, its capabilities and experience - team sheets, case studies, tombstones, credentials documents, etc.
  • Added confidence for fee-earners, BD teams and PAs in how they work together, support sales opportunities and the value each party adds to the pitch
  • A link between what training is already provided to the firm, these resources and the structured approach so that there is consistency between them
  • A reduction in the amount of time that is spent on pitching by ensuring that the right balance of time is spent on the different stages of a pitch

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    This approach helps firms bid for work where they stand a far better chance of winning (and making sufficient profit from) by clearly differentiating their offering from other bidders.  Bid documents will provide a genuine insight and understanding of the business issues that clients face and a solid, good value proposal of how the firm will help them to achieve their commercial goals.

    Internally it helps produce pitch documents in an efficient and timely manner, encourages fee-earners to engage in the pitch process actively (particularly around discovering client needs and drivers), be able to objectively assess and create value propositions, and be supported by BD teams who can really add to the pitch.  BD teams will have more confidence in advising partners without them consuming excessive amounts of time and resource.

    Lastly it helps firms get greater return from the investment they have made in pitching skills training.

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