There are legitimate objections that arise at the last moment, along with not so legitimate ones. There really are no objections you haven’t heard before, so it’s negligent not to be ready for all of them. You may not win every battle, but you should give a good fight.
Last-minute objections fall into these four categories:
1. Genuine misunderstandings.
2. Legitimate intervening events.
3. Resistance encountered from others.
4. Illegitimate fears.
1. Genuine Misunderstandings
The buyer may have said that sales could be improved by 15 percent, but the client meant over two years and you thought it was over a single year. Hence, the returns may seem overly optimistic in your proposal. Or you may have said that your company would run all focus groups (meaning subcontractors or employees you routinely utilize) but the buyer thought that you, personally, would conduct them all. These things happen in all business meetings and there is no malice or incompetence involved (unless they repeatedly happen to you).
The cure here is to ask the buyer what would make him or her happy, and see if you can accommodate that. Compromises are fine. You want to try to avoid lowering fees. For example, lowering the return to the first two years rather than the first year is not so debilitating, and may mean a 14:1 return on investment the first year instead of 20:1, which is still impressive. And it may be possible for you to agree to do half the focus groups or personally conduct interviews or convince the client that your people are better at focus groups than you are, which is why you have them conduct the sessions. No harm done.
Take the responsibility for all misunderstandings, whether your fault or not, and try to preserve your fees by offering compromises or showing the buyer that there’s nothing to fear.
2. Legitimate Intervening Events
A company plant blows up. (It’s happened to me.) The buyer’s boss is fired, or re- placed, or leaves on extended disability. There is a purchase or divestiture announced. A company employee is kidnapped overseas. There is a major technology crash. A competitor gains a huge leap.
These things happen regularly, so the odds are that they will happen in between the submission of your proposal and its acceptance at some points in your career.
Be prepared.
My recommendations:
- If you hear through other channels, phone your buyer immediately. If your buyer tells you, then suggest that you immediately confront the issue.
- My favored alternative is to suggest that the causes and reasons for the project haven’t actually been changed by anything that has transpired. So there really is no good reason to stop, just as there is no reason for the organization to suddenly stop doing business.
- If the change is too severe for the project to persevere, suggest to the client that you reorient your work within the budget of the first proposal (and options) to help with the issue at hand. The buyer has designated time, money, and you, so why not capitalize on those resources to at- tack the new challenge?
- If the first two don’t work, force the buyer to agree to a specific date to talk again to review the status. Remind the buyer that the current terms and conditions are good for 90 days only. (Some consultants actually put time deadlines in their proposals. I don’t because I want to encourage clients to act immediately and not believe they have a 90 day window.)
3. Resistance Encountered From Others
On many occasions, others will know of the pending project and proposal. Monies may have been budgeted, people’s opinions sought, a gaggle of consultants brought in, and so forth. Some of those people want to undermine proposals be- cause they are threatened by the intervention.
The best preventive action for this is to apprise your buyer in advance of this likelihood. (This is especially important if you’re asked to chat with subordinates by the client.) Tell the buyer that people tend to be threatened or offended that they aren’t called to take the lead internally on such projects.
If the resistance still arises, suggest to the client that there are two options:
1. Co-opt the resistance. The buyer can talk to those involved and ensure them a role (and credit) in the implementation aspect.
2. Overwhelm the resistance. Tell them it’s a fait accompli and they had better get used to it, because they’re all expected to float on this boat.
Finally, point out that the decision is strategic, appropriate for the buyer, but not for people who are the tacticians and implementers. Sometimes tough decisions are required to effect the greatest positive change.
4. Illegitimate Fears
Your buyer and those around him may fear the following:
- The unknown
- Failure
- Embarrassment
- Bruised egos
- Significant change
- Going “public” with a new initiative
- Risk
- Fear itself
Fears aren’t uncommon, but these I call “illegitimate” because they really shouldn’t derail a significant buyer oriented toward improving his or her operation. The recipe for dealing with this is simple: Isolate the actual fear from my list above (it’s not all of these, after all); then ask what is the worst that can happen; demonstrate that you have preventive actions in place as well as contingencies; and point out that any new venture entails some degree of acceptable risk.
So if embarrassment is the issue, demonstrate that continued performance at the current level without any visible attempts at improvement is much more embarrassing, and that even modest improvement would look very good, and that the two of you are prepared to handle whatever arises through additional training or a slower pace (the benefit of value-based fees).
It’s darkest just before the dawn.