Neutral Navigators

Sharon Drew Morgan has a post in her blog with this fascinating passage:

``...it’s quite possible to have an understanding of the decision making process – the route that buyers must make through their unique decision criteria – and recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators – Buying Facilitators if you will – much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend who knows where they want to go but doesn’t know the exact route to get there.``

I have often tried to be this neutral navigator to clients. There was a European client who rightly decided to save a pile of TPA (Third Party Advisors - see here for what a TPA does and one TPA´s recent perspective on their changing role ) consulting money by attempting to do an outsourcing deal with internal staff. They formed a project team and gave them sufficient operational freedom to do what it took to get the project done. The only problem was, the project team did not know how to do it. So, they took their time, met with vendors who gave them bits and pieces of information and over time, put together a solution they could bid out.

As bid manager for one of the vendors in the fray, I recognized a great opportunity to be the ´neutral navigator´ or ´buddy´ to the project team. While I still had to manage my bid and my deliverables, I realized I could play a strategic role for our company by advising the client as a truly neutral party. I would help them with templates and checklists and processes and frank advice (even things which would place our company on a weaker wicket competitively) on a variety of topics without selling them anything, activities which would appear to be strictly not in my role as bid as a bid manager. Over time, the client´s project team began to trust me and would take my opinion seriously before deciding something in the project.

Following that phase, the client bid the solution out to 4 vendors including us. What I noticed, when for example I was defending our proposal, was the amount of credibility I seemed to carry. I could coast through some of the uncomfortable moments (gaps in our ability to deliver, our readiness to deliver and son on) because of the trust the client seemed to place in me. We won almost half of the business eventually bid out.

When I look back, it was not the proposal or the bid documents or the pricing that made the crucial difference in that bid, it was that short period playing neutral advisor to the client...