Opportunities

How do you embrace a mindset of sustainable value creation and use it to win complex deals?

There is no question that sales remain at the heart of business success. However, in the digital age, sales are more challenging. Organisations are looking for real value and transformation, and deals are often more complex, with more stakeholders involved. These changes require a genuine mindset shift from the old paradigm of sales.

We do what traditional sales coaches can’t: we bring together a deep expertise in storytelling with a sophisticated understanding of value, transformation, partnerships and organisational motivation to help companies create winning propositions that are genuinely needed and wanted.

We spot and shape exceptional opportunities that deliver value for both parties, helping companies stand out from the competition.

How is our work in opportunities differentiated?

We start with the human dimension.

Typically, deal pursuits might include a cursory consideration of people. We go deeper, helping teams think about their customers as individuals and as a constellation, considering how power and influence moves within a group. We guide teams to genuinely understand the world from their customer’s point of view, to define value in their customer’s terms, to create irresistible propositions for their customers and to tell stories that excite their customers.

We create custom methodologies.

We have amassed years of experience, guiding thousands of deals and have a strong framework for how to guide teams through complex deal processes successfully. We always bring this expertise to bear and we also look fresh at each opportunity we work on, tailoring our approach to the specific teams, content and challenges. We bring academic insights from the fields of behavioural economics, literature and philosophy to our opportunities work.

We ground our solutions in reality.

Our opportunities work must be grounded in reality to have any value, as the impact of it becomes clear quickly in the success or failure of a deal pursuit. We go deep into the detail of the deals we work on, learning about the customers, the offerings, the commercials and the legals so we can bring it all together to create winning strategies, processes and stories for our clients.

Read a case study on our work in opportunities

How do you reposition a traditional partner who is now seen as tired and lacking in relevant skills to win a trailblazing new opportunity?

We created our opportunities offering ten years ago when we were working with a professional services firm that had developed an image issue with its clients. While clients still respected the firm, they were starting to question if it was fit for the increasingly digital future. In reality, the company had been building many of the new skills it needed to be relevant but hadn’t been successful at conveying that to its clients. We began working with the commercial leadership of the company to help them win an important and very complex deal with a client who was growing bored of them and was leaning towards giving a lucrative new piece of work to some digital start-ups instead.

We worked with the firm to understand the needs and motivations of their key client stakeholders, and helped them tailor their pitch to cover off all of these angles to create something the client would be genuinely interested in. We pushed them to consider different sorts of value from their client’s perspective and bake this into their proposition, to make it irresistible. Together, we defined how they were different and better than the competitors they were up against to make it seem like they were the only logical choice for the client to make. As a result, the firm went from being a forgotten longshot to winning the deal and reshaping their overall relationship with their client.

Results we achieved:

Secured victory of a $250 million deal, in a come-from-behind win

Initiated an important image change for the client that was vital to their evolution and continued success

Created a fresh approach to dealmaking that is continued in the organisation to this day

We started with the human dimension.

It’s common practice in deal work to consider buyer motivations – but we encouraged the firm to go beyond this and really consider their buyers as people. This forced them to think through more deeply what mattered to the people they were selling to and how this needed to influence their proposition. We also got them to think through the web of relationships between the clients they were dealing with, and the impact that might have on perceptions of them and what it might mean for who they needed to approach and how.

We created custom methodologies.

We used concepts from psychology, literature and neuroscience to figure out the best ways to craft the firm’s proposition and approach the clients they needed to sell to.

We grounded our solutions in reality.

We got into the full details of the deal – from finances to operations – to make sure the firm was crafting a genuinely valuable and unbeatable proposition. We tested different deal shapes to arrive at the best option for them and their client.

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