What am I going to sell?
I am a big fan of Roger Martin’s cascading choices. A must-know for anyone involved in driving business growth. The choices cascade from an organization’s aspirations, to Where to Play and How to Win and then asks what Capabilities and Systems are needed to support strategic choices.
My roles tend to blend strategy and operations and I am often focussed on How to Win choices. Making these choices depends on understanding what your customers believe they need. You have to put yourself in their shoes to truly understand the benefit you can and should offer.
Many professional services companies struggle with this. They tend to sell whatever customers are buying at the time, without worrying too much if this is helping them build differentiated value for their customers (and themselves). This seems to be true across a broad range of professional services companies, from consulting engineering to systems integration and business consulting.
At TeamFit, we are committed to our customers’ success. We support consultants and professional services firms by providing a platform that gives deep insight into how skills are being used to deliver work for clients. This creates value in several different ways. Our customers have told us that TeamFit helps them to
Win More Work
and
Improve Customer Outcomes.
We also improve their operations; specifically, we help them to
Scale with Improved Margins
Accelerate Revenue
Build Capability
Reduce Costs
Use Existing Capabilities to Win More Revenue
In today’s blog, I will cover the first of these: Win More Work.
To increase win rates, service firms constantly need to be able to effectively and efficiently bid on projects. Winning work requires an investment of time and money. Successful companies focus on bidding on the projects where they have the best chance of winning. TeamFit helps them do this.
Positioning Skills, Expertise & Knowledge
TeamFit’s customers win work by demonstrating the skills, expertise and knowledge of their people and teams. To do this effectively, the sales or pursuit teams and the delivery teams have to have in-depth knowledge of the full range of skills and capabilities available. TeamFit reveals the full breadth of projects you can bid on by providing a skill map that shows what the company is good at.
Here is part of the skill map for a management consulting company.
Giving customers a ‘reason to believe’
Professional services firms win more projects when they can demonstrate ability to deliver. Potential customers often ask for a track record of projects. They are looking for projects that require skills similar to their own requirements. TeamFit provides a track record of the projects your people have worked on, the skills that were applied to those projects and the teams that have worked together.
Projects can be analyzed along a timeline so that management can see how the skills applied have evolved. Having this information readily available helps you build your portfolio of credentials for the bid process.
For services companies, differentiation lies in skill sets. Success depends on understanding what skills the company owns, should own, could own. TeamFit gives this kind of deep skill insight.
At TeamFit, we are here to make professional services companies more competitive and to leverage their skills to win more work.