"Quotes are far too important a job for anyone but me to do."

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Hey there,

Putting together a quote for a potential client is one of the processes that keeps business owners like you from taking a longer break from your business.

Get it wrong and you either over-price it and lose the client, or under-price and get a client that actually costs you money.

And because you’re the one that’s always done this job, you’re the only one with the necessary experience to make the right calls.

You’re not wrong about that.

But what you may not realise is just how easy it can be to pass on your know-how well enough to enable someone else to do that job. Not as effectively at first, but just as effectively in a pretty short time.

That’s exactly what one reader of this newsletter found. We’d arranged to talk about it, but by the time we got to speak they’d documented the process, hired someone new to run it, trained them, then taken a week off so the new recruit could practice in peace.

Simply raising the issue prompted them to get the stuff out of their own head and into a format that other heads could follow. They unclogged a bottleneck, and gave themselves more space to take breaks.

They did it by themselves, so can you.

So today I’m going to talk about:

• How to turn your quoting know-how into a process others can follow
• How to make sure you actually hand it over
• How to make sure you don’t waste time on quotes that were never going to lead to business

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How to turn your quoting know-how into a process others can follow

Step 1 - Define the goal of the process

The first step in defining ‘Quote for Business’ is to decide where it ends.

Ask yourself these questions:

What do you want to be true after ‘Quote for Business’ has been completed?

Ideally, the prospect says ‘Hell yes, I’m in’, and proceeds to ‘Enrol Prospect’, where you agree a start date, payment schedule and review timetable.

Or they say ‘Hell no, that’s not for me.’, and all your work is done.

The point is to avoid fogginess. You want the outcome to be clear, they’ve either accepted the proposal or they haven’t. If you’ve qualified them well first, you should more ‘Hell yes’es than you get ‘Hell no’es.

But while ‘Hell no’ may mean the end of ‘Quote for Business’, it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of ‘Demonstrate Value’.

I’m assuming that when you quote, you do so in full confidence of your own abilities, knowing exactly what it’s going to cost you to deliver value to this Prospect, and how much of that value you can expect to retain as profit. At this point it might be tempting to adjust your quote downwards ‘to get the business’, but that would be completely counterproductive. You’d be tying up capacity in a client that is actully going to cost you money.

The prospect’s ‘no’ may mean that you are simply not right for them. You may genuinely cost more than they can afford.

Or it may mean that they don’t yet see the value you can deliver. In this case, it might make sense to follow ‘Quote for Business’, with something like ‘Offer Trial’. Not a free trial, but a short contract that allows them to experience the value for real. Once they’ve done that, you can offer them the original proposal again.

Step 2 - Walk through the big picture of what happens

Now you know what ‘Quote for Business’ is aiming to achieve, you’re ready to describe it.

I’ve always found the best way to do this is to literally talk through it.

Imagine that you are telling the story of this process to a listener, who is going to make notes. Ideally your listener would be the person you’re planning to hand it over to first, but if push comes to shove you can play both roles yourself. Just be prepared for colleagues or family members to wonder what is going on!

The conversation goes something like this:

As Storyteller, you start at the beginning, thinking of how it usually works. You simply tell the Listener the first thing that happens:

• Maybe “I arrange to visit the prospect so I can see their set-up”
• Or “I ask them these questions [list them] to get an understanding of how big and/or complex their business is”
• Or “I ask them about their dog, what breed it is, what temperament it has, how old it is and how it’s health is”
• Or “I get them to roughly describe the processes they want to capture, so I can get an idea of the complexity, and likely ramifications”

As Listener, you write that down, then ask: “What happens next?” , or “Then what happens?”

The Storyteller describes what happens next:

• Maybe “I get together these things to take with me: [list them]”
• Or “I arrange to visit the prospect so I can see their set-up”
• Or “I ask them about their job, and their lifestyle, why they want someone else to walk their dog, and how often”
• Or “I ask them how many people they need to be able to run these processes as well as them”

The Listener, notes it down, and asks again “What happens next?”

The Storyteller describes what happens next:

• Maybe “When I get to the prospect’s office, I tot up roughly how many desks, windows, screens, telephones, etc. they have. I check if they have a kitchen, how many loos they have.”
• Or “I ask for a copy of their current accounts for the last year”
• Or “I ask them where they live, what parks they have nearby, when they leave for work and when they get home, what the traffic is like”
• Or “I ask them what variations might happen”

The Listener, notes it down, and asks again “What happens next?”

And so on,

And so on,

Repeat until the Storyteller answers "Nothing, that’s the end. We’ve got to the outcome.”

Step 3 - Identify the heuristics you use to calculate your prices

You know how your washing machine is designed to deal with a maximum weight of washing? Well, I bet you never weigh your washing before you put it in. You probably use some sort of heuristic.

My mum used to measure washing in shirts or ‘shirt equivalents’. Obviously a man’s shirt was a shirt, two kid’s shirts were a shirt, a cotton skirt or child’s dress was a shirt…

You get the picture.

When you’re quoting, you almost certainly do something similar. You’ll identify something as a peg you can hang a value on, something that’s easy to count without making it obvious to the prospect, or too laborious to calculate.

So, once you’ve got your outline, walk through it all again as Storyteller and Listener. This time, as you go through each step of the process, explain how you use the answers to your questions to estimate costs:

• So, maybe “for surfaces, I think in square metres, a desk is 2, a window is usually somewhere between 1 and 3, a kitchen worktop, between 1 and 3, a loo is equivalent to 3 because of all the fiddly bits…”
• Or “I think in transactions. A simple monthly transaction paid by direct debit will cost x, lots of small cash transactions might add up to the same turnover, but take as much effort to record and more effort to reconcile, so I actually count them as one and a half x. If they want payroll I have different figures for how they are paid - monthly, 4 weekly or weekly, and simply mutiply that by the number of employees on each scheme.”
• Or “Actually, I’m not using this information to price, my prices are fixed. But I do use it to decide whether the prospect might be too far outside my catchment area, to get a feel for which other dogs I can put their’s with, and where thay might fit onto an existing ‘round’.”
• Or “I know that each process costs roughly x to build, and each variation adds another half x to that.”

You should end up having surfaced a whole set of heuristics you’ve probably almost forgotten that you use.

Step 4 - Identify the Props people will need to run the process as well as you do

Read through your ‘Quote for Business’ narrative again, and this time, pick out the names of things that get mentioned along the way. These will become ‘Props’, like the theatrical term for “an object used on stage or screen by actors during a performance.”

A ‘Prop’ is anything a team member needs to successfully play a Role in your business. Just as in the theatre, without the right Props, ready to hand when the action requires them, a player will find it harder to fulfill their Role to the best of their ability. So part of defining the process is defining which Props need to be available and when.

The ‘Star’ Prop:

There's one Prop that should stand out in particular. It is the thing that the process exists to create, transform and ultimately dispose of. The star of the process, if you like. For ‘Quote for Business’ that’s the ‘Quote’ or ‘Proposal’.

Note that ‘disposal’ is part of the process. What do you do with a Quote that’s been accepted? What do you do with one that’s been rejected? At a minimum I’d suggest you file it somewhere for reference, or archive it.

Heuristics Props

The heuristics you’ve identified in step 3 are not in themselves Props as such, but they should prompt you to create one or more new Props you can use to support anyone running the ‘Quote for Business’ Process.

Remember, you have all this information in your head, because you’ve been doing it for years. Your team doesn’t. And it’s unfair to expect them to read your mind to find it out.

So find a way to turn your accumulated heuristics into a practical tool anyone can use to run the process as well as you can.

This could be anything from a simple checklist to record, for example, prospect details, the number of desks, windows, screens etc., that a person doing a quote visit can use to jot down their results, to a simple app that calculates prices as they go along, so that a Quote can be generated quickly following the visit, or even at the end of it.

Step 5 - Draw the flow

Now you can use your narrative, together with the lifecycle of your Star Prop, to draw out your ‘Quote for Business’ process.

Your Star Prop - the ‘Quote’ itself, will help you identify the key Activities that make up the process, because it is what gets created, checked, submitted and accepted or rejected as part of this process. Each transformation of the ‘Quote’ Prop becomes a separate Activity, with an outcome that is either true or false. You have a Quote or you don’t, your Quote has been checked or it hasn’t, there is no halfway house.

In this way, following the lifecycle of the ‘Quote’ or ‘Proposal’ Prop will help you to clarify both the Activities that make up the ‘Quote for Business’ process, and the order in which they must happen.

Any other Props you’ve identified will find a home inside one or more of these Activities, which of course may themselves be a process.

You may well end up with a process that looks something like this:

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I like to think of a process as a bit like a river. You start with the straightforward case - the main, well-worn channel, but there may be parts that break off and loop round before coming back into the main flow.

For example, what happens if you don’t get to gather all the information in one go? Or the client doesn’t bother to get back to you with a response to your quote? The process needs to deal with these possibilities too.

These become alternative routes through the process - loops in your process river if you like. And that’s exactly how I like to represent them:

How to make sure you actually hand it over

You know what I’m going to say here. I’ve said it many times before.

Train your team, then let them have a go.

Your first draft will be wrong. Mine always are.

Your second draft may well be wrong. Mine frequently are.

Your third draft may not be quite right. That often happens to me.

But you won’t find any of your mistakes unless you have a first, second, or third draft to work with.

It’s very hard to follow a process that’s in your head. Much easier when you see it laid out as a map in front of you. That’s true for you and for your team.

Which means that when it comes to capturing how things should work for your business, the most important step is to get it out of your head, and into a form that you and others can reason about, re-design and improve.

You don’t even have to wait until you’ve identified all the possible loops. Put the first iteration out there and get someone else to try and run it.

Then improve it.

Keep practicing, keep improving.

In time, you’ll get better and better at capturing everything first time.

How to make sure you don’t waste time on quotes that were never going to lead to business

Now consider where ‘Quote for Business’ fits into your business system:

It’s part of what I call your ‘Share Promise’ process, which looks like this:

Specifically, I’d say ‘Quote for Business’ is actually part of ‘Demonstrate Value’, where you give a prospect a taste of what it’s like to work with you. Your quote may not be the only way you do this - you might offer a trial period, for example, but it will be one of the ways you do it.

An important thing to note is that it comes after ‘Qualify Prospect’.

You want to be sure that the prospect is someone you really want to work with before you spend time and effort putting together a quote or proposal.

The qualification is of course, mutual. A prospect also wants to be sure that you are right for them before they move forwards.

So having a simple but robust ‘Qualify Prospect’ process pays off for both of you. exactly what goes into it depends very much on what you offer, and you own unique ‘way we do things around here’, but here are some questions to get you started:

Is there a minimum value that makes taking a client on worth your while?

If so, how can you estimate that easily, without doing a quote? For example, my dogwalking client only takes on owners who want at least 3 walks a week. Some accountants only deal with businesses under or over a certain turnover, or number of employees. Some accountants don’t work with cash-businesses. It pays to be very upfront about this. Mention it early on in a conversation. Even better, publish it on your website and in your advertising, so that you qualify people out as early as possible.

Do they share at least some of your core values?

How could you find that out? What questions could you ask as part of an initial conversation? What evidence could be a proxy for one of your values? Perhaps you’d want them to pay the real living wage, or employ their staff directly. Perhaps you could look at their reviews on Glassdoor. Or talk to some other suppliers.

Are they just going through the motions?

Are you being asked for a quote just so someone can say they’ve got 3 of them? When they’ve actually already made up their mind who is going to get the business.

To be honest, I don’t know how you would find this out without asking directly (and people might lie). But if this happens to you a lot, maybe you could set yourself another qualification rule that you’ll only take referrals from previous or existing clients, then work on how encourage those referrals. If you have an answer for this one, I’d love to know what works for you.

What does your gut tell you?

Every business owner I’ve spoken to can tell a story about taking on a new client that they knew they shouldn’t have. Everything looked OK on paper, but their gut told them ‘No!’. And they regretted overriding it. Trust your gut.

The reason this matters is because if you always dive straight into putting together a quote or proposal, you may end up doing quite a bit of work that is just going to be wasted, because the prospect was never right for you in the first place, or was never really considering you as an option.

So, if the way a prospect starts a conversation with you is to ask for a quote or a proposal, make sure your ‘Quote for Business’ process actually starts with some kind of ‘Qualify Prospect’ activity.

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That’s it.

Here’s what you learned today:

• You may think you can’t possibly teach someone else to do what you do, and it is true that if you’ve been doing a job yourself for years, your know-how is deeply embedded. But fear not. Digging it out to share is easier than you think. Especially if you get someone to help you do it.
• You already know how to train your team to run a new proess and how to monitor how it goes. So the hardest part is already done.
• It’s important to put any process you work on properly in context. To see where it fits into the overall system your business runs. That way you won’t miss Activities that need to come before or after the specific process you’re trying to capture.

I hope this means you can get on and record your own ‘Quote for Business’ process for your team. But if you’d like some help, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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When you’re the boss of a business you’ve built from scratch, customer-facing processes, like doing a quote, handling a complaint, or onboarding a new client feel like the hardest ones to hand over to someone else.

Yet handing these over is the key to being able to take breaks. Indeed, the key to growth, if that’s what you want for your business.

Because in order to take a break, or grow your business, or to create a business you can hand over when the time comes, you need people to stand in for you. To behave towards prospects or clients as if they were you.

So, if you haven’t already mapped out your ‘Quote for Business’ process, have a go.

And let me know how you get on.

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Thanks for reading!

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