April 18, 2008

“Don’t get anyone involved until we are sure it is something worth wasting your time on.”

So how familiar does this sound?  Even if you have never heard this quote, you must certainly be familiar with the experience.  You know the scenario all too well…

In this situation, we had a process that needed to be followed.  Nothing else mattered.  The process was king, queen, and potentate.  As long as compliance was documented, outcomes were insignificant.  Good decisions were routinely trumped by procedure. 

And so there we were, trapped in the operation of trying to make a bid decision on a deal that our company had no business chasing.  My vote was to scrap the deal and move on.  The sales team had no real relationships with the potential client.  The services to be provided were outside of our core competency.  The deal provided no strategic advantage.  We could not be price competitive for the services to be rendered.  Unfortunately, the deal (for one brief week) had been listed as viable in the sales funnel.  The process needed to be followed.

You know the story from here.  Charts were prepared.  Charts were reviewed.  Meetings were scheduled.  Preparation sessions and briefings were calendared to preface the real meetings.  The process required a high level solution be presented.  Time was invested to create a straw man solution.  Adding insult to the injury the process had already inflicted, the senior executive responsible for bid decisions of this size postponed the meeting for a week.  With more time to prepare, more time was expended on refining the charts and honing the straw man solution for a deal that never should have had two minutes of attention.

Soon, the team even began to worry that a “yes” decision would be pronounced at the bid review.  They humbly began to ask for resources to start working on a proposal response.  Time was of the essence.  True to the process, a staffer verbally responded to the team’s request, “Don’t get anyone involved until we are sure it is something worth wasting your time on.”

The staffer didn’t realize the profundity of his response.  Wasting time was okay as long as the process was followed.  Unfortunately, you know the scenario all too well…