The Value and Disadvantage of Familiarity

My colleagues and I were down in Los Angeles this morning talking with our friends at SMPS about how A/E/C teams can develop winning presentations in this very challenging economy.  One of the participants asked me a very significant question that really made me think:  “How do we design a winning presentation when we are not the incumbent and the client really likes the firm with which they’ve been working?”  Good question.  My answer was fairly simple: You have to work harder than the incumbent. 

Some of my most memorable wins in short-list interviews in the A/E/C industry have been on projects where my team was not the incumbent.  We won because we did more homework and developed a presentation that clearly addressed the real needs, interests, fears, and expectations of selectors and their organizations.  In those presentations, we spent a lot of time on the “alignment” phase of presentation development - getting each team member’s head in the project so that they were fully engaged in understanding the owner’s needs.  This resulted in presentations that were focused on the unique aspects of the project, targeted on solving the owner’s project “pain”, and centered on the advantages they could bring the owner relative to higher value, better quality, and faster delivery.

I’ve found that it’s actually easier to beat an incumbent firm than one thinks because many incumbents get lazy, assuming that the strength of the relationship will carry them to a win. While in many cases this is indeed true, when my non-incumbent teams compete, they always compete “hungry”, offering the client a value proposition that is so compelling, so interesting, and so seductive that we can easily win against a lazy incumbent. Remember incumbents, “familiarity breeds contempt” – this means that in most relationships, partners can get complacent, leaving the door wide open to the new, shiny, and interesting.  Lazy incumbents create an easy space for coaches like me to help teams “steal” the project through hard work, innovation, and creativity.

For my teams that are incumbents – watch out!  Always compete as if you didn’t have the relationship.  Never take the owner and his/her project for granted, especially in this challenging economy. Do more research, make more effort, prepare more for these interviews than for any other because, frankly, these are the ones that hurt the most to lose. You’ve invested time and resources in the relationship; make the concerted effort to maintain the value of that investment by giving interviews with your regular clients everything you’ve got. These truly are the “can’t afford to lose” interviews.