From Flip to BLIP: On Tuesday we covered The Amazing Flip or how a rainmaker can sometimes flip roles with the prospective client and get the client to try to convince the rainmaker of desirability of her firm as a client. Today, we will turn to BLIPs. BLIP is an acronym for Bottom Line Impacting Project, a term which some firms use to describe the largest opportunities they pursue, the ones most important to win. To classify as a BLIP, a project usually must have a fee above a certain amount.

One international firm limited BLIPs to those projects with fees expected to run over $4,000,000. A friend of mine, whom I will call George, was the head of marketing there. A smart man who knew a lot about selling professional services, George believed in the persuasive value of good data and he analyzed the firm’s sales data carefully. Every year he would determine the win-rate on BLIPs. This was an important statistic in a business where all projects were competitively bid, with four or five firms duking it out as finalists. In its best year, George’s firm won over sixty percent, an astounding number given the competitive nature of the business.

Then George did something interesting. He looked through the firm’s old lead lists, which management used to track opportunities the different offices were pursuing, for the date that each one of the BLIPs first appeared on it. He used this data, to determine how many months the firm was actively pursuing each project. He then calculated the win rate for each one and determined win rates by the length of each pursuit to see if there was a correlation. The results were stunning: For BLIPs the firm had pursued for more than a year the win rate was a jaw-dropping eighty percent. This is like a baseball team playing 750 ball; it’s so rare it’s hard to believe when it happens. In other words, the length of time that the firm pursued a project was a major determinant of success. In essence the analysis showed that if you only learned about an opportunity when the request for proposal arrived in the mail, your chances of winning were negligible.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has sold professional services for a long time, but I have never seen it so clearly documented. And, just as George had predicted, the data argued persuasively for learning about projects early. Why should this be so?

There are several reasons. Selling is done through an exchange of information. The buyer gives you information on his needs and you give back information on how you can address them. The more you know about the client’s needs, the more accurate the solution you can frame and the more persuasive the words you can use to describe it. This is because the firm that knows about a client’s plans to hire a professional has more time to find out about a need. The team from that firm can talk to more people about what the client wants and talk to them more often. They may even be able to help the client better understand his problem and the kinds of help the client will need to fix it. The client selects the professionals he wants to work with and justifies his choice with logic afterwards. A firm that has early information on a client’s need has more time to develop an emotional linkage.

Also, as the number of people who learn about a pending project goes up, the more formal and limiting becomes contact between the client and the firms competing to win it. This reduction in contact is required by regulation for government projects. Though less formal in the private sector, as the number of professionals want access to the client rises, it becomes harder for the client to get work done. To avoid this, many clients limit access as the decision about whom to hire gets closer.

Anyone who has sold a lot of professional services knows this. I write this for those who haven’t, for those who see an RFP from a client as a much more promising opportunity than the longer and less direct pursuit of an as yet unidentified project by going out and talking to people who have not expressed any specific need, yet. In many cases the RFP is the illusion of an opportunity. The client has already decided which two or three firms it will choose from, and those firms have been pursuing the project for over a year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Prospective Client, Selling Professional Services, Sales Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.