If your SALES plan fails, change the plan.

Last week I spent some time in the air for business travel. Not a novel concept or unique to anyone, really. What was unique for me, however, was that it was a day trip to Cleveland, Ohio.

Out of all the places I have traveled to, through, or visited, Cleveland was a place I simply never had been. So I had an element of excitement for the normally mundane task that’s called ‘business travel.’

I was so excited about making this trip, that I took the laptop out and crammed (literally) almost two hours of thought and strategy into my plan.

What plan?

The plan I have for winning (selling) at least $5M in new revenues from Amazon during their most recent global - RFP - request for proposal, happening right now!

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But never change the goal.

What’s up homies! Hope you had a great weekend and are recharged for a new week.

Now, back to my story.

Two years ago, my company was invited (for the first time) into the security staffing services Request for Proposal (RFP) from Amazon. Almost all Amazon facilities employ a contracted security officer team to help with internal Amazon associate loss prevention and general access control for each facility.

We were both excited and overconfident in our previous bid, which produced a result that none of us expected.

We didn’t win ANY business.

For any locations (there were hundreds…). Hundreds of millions of dollars of a category spend for Amazon, and we weren’t awarded a single dollar’s worth.

^{Never be confident with your prospect knowledge; seek more.}

Two years ago, a sister company of mine (within the same Enterprise of companies, but a different service line; janitorial cleaning services) had been adding to their Amazon relationship without skipping a beat.

Naturally, I dug into the particulars and summarized my thoughts with overconfidence because, “Heck, if we (our enterprise company) is already serving Amazon well, we’ll easily pick up some of their business (security staffing services),” I thought.

I was dead wrong.

You see, 21+ years in SALES, and still learning things.

My overconfidence swayed me from really digging into Amazon’s current issues, and I placed my focus on simply being connected to another company that was already serving Amazon.

Fast forward two years, and we’re back in the same game, but with a different plan.

^{“Cleveland Rocks!”}

Two years ago, we didn’t attend any site walk-throughs. In this industry, a site walk-through is gold for multiple reasons:

• You get to engage with a member of the customer team.

• You get to ask those customer team members questions on any part of the process, and/or their current operations.

• You get to start to build a relationship … with someone, which is important when you’re dealing with the size and scale of an Amazon.

• You get to tangibly taste, touch, smell, and feel the type of environment that you’d potentially be servicing.

As I mentioned above, I haven’t ever had a reason to go to Cleveland. I was on the ground for less than 24 hours, but, the trip was rationalized for really one reason:

Get closer to the operations at Amazon and understand how their business works.

^{Start small; grow from there.}

The biggest change to our strategy for this RFP is to focus on efforts on winning business in and around our core markets.

We made the mistake in 2021 to bid on business in markets that we weren’t currently servicing. But, knew we wanted to enter those markets. And we thought we ‘were so smart’ to use that RFP as the means to do so.

Big mistake.

We went away from our differentiators (localized support services in each market that we operate and serve) and tried to ride the coat tales of our sister company to slay the mighty Amazon dragon.

Additionally, if we would have won large amounts of the portfolio, we would have severely changed the percentage of our business tied to one customer. And 99% of the time, in business, that’s not a great idea.

^{Strategize on your deliverables.}

Two years ago, I didn’t rely on internal partners to help with researching the various costs that it would take to operate the business. I did market intel and came up with a one-sided opinion on our largest cost as a staffing organization:

Wages.

When we bill a customer, 70% of that billing rate is tied into what we pay an employee to work that shift/post.

Amazon sent our RFP submission back to me and asked, “Is this really your submission; are these really your numbers?”

Almost insulted, I said yes. But what I failed to realize is that the estimations for the wages to pay our staff in each market were too far below market. In fact, even below the current incumbent’s pay scale (which doesn’t happen that often; normally a vendor bidding blind will err on the high side for large cost centers).

My assumption that price would be Amazon’s biggest decision factor immediately blew up on me.

They allowed me to resubmit our numbers detailing higher wages, but even then, I knew we were toast. They weren’t going to truly consider our submission. We displayed a level of overconfidence and a lack of research.

^{To Be Continued…}

Our bid is due this coming Friday. I’ll do my best to keep you in the know on how things progress and shake out.

This time around, we have a solid footing on where our costs need to be to both be price-competitive and ‘informed.’ We’ve engaged with Amazon like never before. We got to ask the important questions and received answers from the horse’s mouth.

To be Continued…

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The moral of the story? Business plans fail. What worked before, or for the last bid, doesn’t always equal success on the next.

With Amazon, we’ve had to rethink our strategy. And even then with a new submission, it doesn’t guarantee a different result. However, what it does prove is that we’re still not afraid to learn, grow, and develop. To change our path. To adjust our strategy.

But what always will remain is the goal.

And that’s to add at least $5M of new revenue to our business from Amazon.

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