Crafting Top-Notch Business Proposals with Stephen Cribbett

Mike (01:30.862)
Stephen, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales to the podcast. Very good to see you.

Stephen Cribbett (01:42.912)
Alright.

Stephen Cribbett (01:56.362)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike (01:58.85)
And obviously, Stephen, we've had several conversations over, it must be, I don't know, about three or four years now, I guess. It must be easily. So, yeah, it probably is actually. It probably is way more. You're quite right. So for the audience, do you want to explain Stephen kind of who you are, what you do, and anything unusual about yourself?

Stephen Cribbett (02:04.982)
More, more than that, more than that, way more. Twice that.

Stephen Cribbett (02:17.646)
Sure, yeah. So I, I'm the sort of co founder of a, which is largely a research agency called Versity. We're quite a specialized agency in that we kind of really only focus on understanding the lived experience and the attitudes and behaviors of the UK is kind of marginalized and underserved population, if you like. So we're a group of social and behavioral scientists, researchers and strategists and

I've been doing that for a number of years now. And prior to that, probably going back 15 years and beyond that, my background was very much in business development within design and brand agencies. So although I've not had a kind of formal training in sales and business development, it's something I got into at a very early stage. And my approach to it is a very soft consultative. I'm not a hard sales person.

Mike (03:10.531)
Yes.

Stephen Cribbett (03:12.474)
I tend to listen very hard and probably listen more than I speak. But that approach has served me very well over the years. And I guess in terms of something a little bit about me, I'm a big motorsport fan. I love a bit of a petrolhead, I suppose, and love fast cars. And when I was a teenager, I used to race go-karts against some of the current sort of Formula One heroes, people like David Coulthard, Alan McNeish and...

Mike (03:37.04)
Wow.

Stephen Cribbett (03:40.49)
Also the Red Bull boss, Christian Horner, actually was one of the first people I ever met when I went to the kart track up in Shenington. So sadly I grew a bit too tall to carry that one on and didn't quite have access to the budgets that those guys did in those days. So their careers took a slightly better turn than mine did. I think mine lasted all of about two years.

Mike (03:43.29)
Good grief.

Mike (03:49.114)
Amazing!

Mike (03:55.287)
No.

Mike (03:59.642)
But you still follow it now, presumably.

Brilliant, brilliant. Do you still follow it now? Do you still follow karting now?

Stephen Cribbett (04:09.758)
Well, I live near the car track that I first raced on now actually which is a sort of full circle But also my father-in-law is a professional racing driver He used to be a Formula One driver and he won Le Mans in 1970 in a Porsche 917 So you could say we've got racing in the family. I probably pursued the wrong career. I need to get into that someday

Mike (04:18.883)
Is he?

Mike (04:22.483)
No!

Mike (04:26.342)
Oh my goodness.

He's a professional racing driver and won Le Mans. Really?

Stephen Cribbett (04:33.726)
Yeah, he's 83 now, still races, just about. He does a lot of the historic racing now.

Mike (04:37.854)
Wow! Oh, have you sit so completely different topic to normal listening, but have you seen the film Le 166?

Stephen Cribbett (04:48.094)
Yes, I have, yeah, of course. Yeah. I can tell you a story about that, perhaps another time, Mike. A very real story from that film, yeah. My father was in those races. My father-in-law, sorry, not my father. Yeah. That was his era.

Mike (04:48.586)
on Netflix, amazing film, just what an amazing film.

Oh really?

Mike (04:59.668)
Really?

Good grief. Wow. That was such an amazing film about how Ford won against Ferrari. Just amazing. Just an inspiring film.

Stephen Cribbett (05:10.282)
Yes. Well, I've got to go and see the Ferrari film. That's a new one, isn't it?

Mike (05:15.19)
It is, which again is on my list. Our son wants to go and see it, but he's too young. But yes, I'm definitely keen to go and see that film. Anyway, back to the topic. So audience, we are gonna talk about commercial success for agencies. So that's the kind of first topic that we talked about in the pre-discussion. How do you frame a social science in terms of creating value for clients? And what happens if you fail to do that?

Stephen Cribbett (05:24.25)
Yes.

Stephen Cribbett (05:42.686)
Yeah, it's good question because obviously it's a challenge we've had a couple of times now and probably worth just sort of going back and framing the agency that we have is not a big agency, you know, it's quite a small boutique agency with a with a particular niche. So, you know, we're often coming up against some very big players in the market, who've got a lot of experience in doing, you know,

big tenders and going through the procurement process. So when we started to get some recognition in the market and start to pick up, you know, bigger briefs than we'd ever had before, and one in particular, obviously, that you helped us with, Mike, which was for one of the big automotive brands in the UK. It was a little bit of a baptism. You know, we knew that there was a significant amount of money at stake. It was a significant budget. It was a piece of work that really suited our skillset.

Mike (06:21.861)
Yes.

Stephen Cribbett (06:34.914)
but we were completely naive when it came to the procurement process and dealing with procurement teams for the simple reason we hadn't really dealt with clients of that size before. So obviously you helped us enormously in getting and successfully winning that piece of work. But by and large, you know, where it's difficult for a business like ours, which is a social science

Mike (06:48.902)
Thank you. I remember it well. Yeah.

Stephen Cribbett (06:58.506)
business, or agency, if you like, it's not quantifiable necessarily what we do. So what we bring to the clients is a deep understanding of the human condition, you know, the way people think and why they think and behave that way. And often that goes back to generations, you know, the backstory to their lives and their families, and what went before them. So

We do, a lot of our team have that experience through academic work that they've done over many, many years. So they're not just consumer market researchers. These are academics that have worked in qualitative research, in academia, or often in sort of government-based work for many years. And when it came to this particular tender that we were going for,

We were struck with exactly that challenge of how do we define what value is that we bring? And obviously in the world of research you've got the methodology and there are many different methodologies that you can select.

you've got the sampling, you know, which is, you know, who are the people that we should actually be talking to and studying and observing. But then you've got this, you know, the backstory, which is what we understand the backstory, because we've done so much of this work already with these audiences for many, many years. We've done umpteen different literature reviews of literature going back 20, 30 years sometimes. So when it came to kind of defining what that value was, our approach was very much saying, well,

You know, the other agencies that might have been on the roster and bearing in mind, we weren't on the roster, so we had to give the client a very good reason to go off roster to select us. And our focus is very much on that point, which is, you know, the culture and the background and the backstory of these people that we want to understand, which was a new business opportunity for this brand. Um, we already had a lot of that knowledge, you know, we'd done work with this audience many times before.

Stephen Cribbett (08:59.606)
And if you haven't, as a research agency, often what you would have to do is a what's called a literature review. So you'd spend a number of weeks scanning the Internet, scanning academic sources, scanning news media and building up this body of knowledge around, you know, this particular demographic profile or this group of people that you're being asked to understand.

and their attitudes and behaviors. So because we already had that for us, the value then became this knowledge that we already had pre-existing in our business and in our team and also through how we recruit our team and how we build our team of associates. They all have that knowledge. If we were to go head-to-head with our competitors just based on the sampling and the research methodology,

Mike (09:32.952)
Exactly.

Stephen Cribbett (09:47.53)
We probably would never have won that, but that was really for us how we went about defining the value that we had. And it came down to something almost quite rudimentary in terms of the number of hours it would take for other businesses or other agencies to understand that particular audience in the way that we already understood them.

Mike (09:49.59)
No, correct.

Mike (10:06.886)
And even then, Stephen, I think it's a really fascinating point as an ex-buyer thinking about it, is to your point about, well, other research companies would have to go away and do the desk-based research and do all the reading. And the problem with that as a buyer is I'm like, okay, so I'm now paying you to learn about a segment that you haven't worked on before. And even when you do that, the level of understanding they'll have is relatively surface.

Stephen Cribbett (10:29.197)
Yes.

Mike (10:34.97)
Whereas someone like you that's been in it for 20 years and your team, you've got many, many layers of the onion for me to peel back, where you've got a real depth of expertise and understanding, even down to individuals and behaviors and how they responded and what was on their mind and their emotions, that you wouldn't get from a general roster-based research agency that hasn't studied this particular niche in a lot of detail. Is that fair?

Stephen Cribbett (11:04.99)
It is, it is. And I think, I think what makes it quite difficult though, when you're dealing with procurement teams, rather than necessarily the consumer insight director in this case is where if we were working just directly with the consumer insight director and he was solely making the choice of who to work with, we would probably be working a lot closer with him to, or her to actually define the brief, you know, to say based on your challenge or what it is you're looking to bring to the market.

Mike (11:28.741)
Yes.

Stephen Cribbett (11:32.502)
These are our recommendations on the people you should be speaking to. This is how you should go about it. These are the questions that you need to ask. And these are the observations we need to make of those particular people. When you're dealing with procurement people, that doesn't really resonate with them, because the methodology and that approach to it is less important than the value and the overall kind of approach to the project and the costings.

So, you know, we had to find this sort of balance point between putting forward those recommendations but not veering away from the original brief, which was what was going to be scored and rated and reviewed by the procurement teams.

Mike (12:10.182)
Correct. I mean, so interesting. So that brings us on to the kind of like the next question really. And we'll loop back again on that. How do you demonstrate the value and what happens if you don't, which is the scoring. So when you get opportunities and you know that if you get through to the next round, clearly it's highly competitive and there's no point in being the silver cup winner. Coming second, you may as well not bother in many ways.

So how do you use a kind of a scoring matrix and a more disciplined approach to make sure that those things that you bid for, you've got a greater than three and one chance, one in three chance of winning?

Stephen Cribbett (12:49.983)
Yeah.

Stephen Cribbett (13:15.737)
Well, you

Stephen Cribbett (13:21.28)
aspects of the proposals, other people that are out doing work every day as well. So it's a huge drain on us and I think again off the back of the work we did with you Mike, it gave us a lot more rigor around you know how do we make decisions on what we go for and what we don't because I think prior to that

you know, we'd see something pop in our inbox or, you know, we'd have these various scanners looking at all the tenders that are put out into market. And often it was just really out of passion or somebody saying, I'd love to work on this brief over here, tend to tend it will put tender in with this client, or, hey, we've done a bit of work that's similar to that. Why don't we go for it? And, you know, therein we'd

Mike (13:54.486)
Yes, exactly.

Stephen Cribbett (14:03.83)
periodically try a couple of tenders, never really be successful, and then we just keep occasionally trying them, but never really getting anywhere with them. And I think it took us a little bit of a time to step back, do a bit of navel gazing and say, look, you know, this is a, this is clearly not the best approach to take. We need to get a little bit more serious about this and at least give it a concerted effort to win one by doing things the right way.

And that really started out by using what we call the, the shall we bid matrix? I think it was where we just had a series of questions. I think it was 10 questions on that particular matrix, all around things like, you know, do we have a preexisting relationship with the client? Did the people we competing against have relationships?

Mike (14:39.334)
That's right.

Stephen Cribbett (14:50.542)
had the client even given us information about who we were tendering against and how many other parties were involved in it? And did we have any kind of communication and line into the procurement buyers, for example, and a lot of the time, you know, the work that we do, it's not like ongoing work, we often just come in and do one project, and we may not the client may not need our skills for another year or two. So it's not like we have these deep ongoing relationships with the clients we have. So

We had to get more rigorous with that. We had to remove the emotion and be much more rational about deciding just very simply, shall we have a go at this or not? And subsequently off the back of that, number one, we certainly started to win a number of those tenders, which was great, because we hadn't really been winning any of them up to that point. So we weren't wasting our effort. And when we did decide to put some effort into it, we also then got much more...

serious and considered about the approach we take to submitting the proposal from, you know, triaging the proposal right at the beginning, getting three people in the team who might have a slightly different view on it. And we'd have, you know, team meetings around that triage session, creating, you know, different roles within our own internal bid team as well. So we're kind of sharing the work that's done to put a document together, because often there is a huge amount of information that we have to pull.

from suppliers as well as internal members of the team to put these proposals together. We didn't even start putting together our own internal timeline. So we organized who uses what, who's doing what and when's it deliverable. You know, so we had platforms like monday.com that we configured to help us manage the workflows there.

And sure enough, you know, over time we got better at it. Again, you know, we were a small agency at that time. So it wasn't like we were doing multiple numbers of these each month. It may be one every two or three months, but just having that lens to manage the internal dialogue around should we go for it or not was really helpful.

Stephen Cribbett (16:55.082)
and then having the processes and described processes, which also, when new people came into the team, it was a much easier way of letting them see how we go about it rather than just letting them come in and do it the way they've perhaps done it in a previous agency, which is often not the best.

Mike (17:10.054)
Exactly.

Stephen Cribbett (17:12.438)
the best way for our business. So yeah, that's a lot of that rigor was really instilled into the team. And also down to, and we talked about this, didn't we, about how important all of the questions were on the on tender documents and procurement brief. You know, we often would brush over questions. We were like, oh, you know, that's not really important to the research process, or that's not important to us. But the fact that the question is on there.

Mike (17:29.495)
Exactly.

Stephen Cribbett (17:41.002)
we need to give it the best possible response we can. And I think that was something we'd sort of brushed over in the past to our detriment, clearly, because we hadn't been winning anything. But now, whether or not we like the question or the way it's asked us, we know that we have to respond in the way that the procurement teams want us to. So being a little bit less naive to those things, it was something that was...

Mike (18:03.66)
Exactly.

Stephen Cribbett (18:10.67)
tripping us up and certainly has helped us move forward with more success.

Mike (18:14.286)
I mean, I think, I mean, interestingly, so again, for kind of people listening, it's counterintuitive, but the more things you qualify out, because it's not absolutely in your sweet spot, the higher your win rate will be, because you will focus on the things that you really can knock out of the park. And then the second thing is, when you've got the RFP or the less formal client brief, which is still competitive.

Stephen Cribbett (18:28.715)
Yes.

Stephen Cribbett (18:32.688)
right

Mike (18:42.39)
answering all the questions, there's almost like this kind of, I always think there's three parts to it. You've got to answer every question, because as you say, they've been asked for a reason. So answer every question. For the key questions, provide evidence on top of answering the question. So if you say something, back it up with some evidence. And then if you want to really score 10 out of 10 for that question, you have to add insights on top that the writer, the buyer, hasn't thought about. And that's where

If you ask me about what are the outstanding RFP responses and why did they win? Because they gave deep insights into something I had no clue about and they challenged my thinking and that's the mark of a winner.

Stephen Cribbett (19:24.446)
Yeah. And I think the other thing really around this as well is, you know, and it's interesting that we're a group of social scientists, but actually is mindset. You know, the mindset of just doing another tender or another proposal when you've been losing several in a row is your mindset is we're probably not going to win this or we're doomed to failure and we can't be good enough. We're not good enough. The minute you start to change that cycle and that little kind of internal voice to

Mike (19:32.965)
Yes.

Stephen Cribbett (19:50.646)
We got a good chance of winning this and we can do this and we've done it before. The team galvanizes around that and suddenly people put more effort into it. They pay more attention and you just get that wave, you know, you hit that wave and you start to ride it. So, you know, it takes a little bit of time. It is a bit of a learning curve, you know, and, you know, bringing in, you know, yourself, Mike at the time was, was fantastic. And.

Mike (20:00.812)
Exactly.

Stephen Cribbett (20:13.938)
still learning from you every day and hence why we're talking today. You know, you're the first person we would bring in if we have something that needs a little bit of extra attention to it or needs a particular approach.

Mike (20:23.654)
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. No, and I think you're spot on. That mindset, the winner's mindset, I've got some clients at the moment, and they've gone through a bit of a bad patch in terms of their win ratios. But once you start, we're turning the corner, they're starting to win more. Once the team gets that feeling of, we're more focused. We're qualifying things out. We're answering the RFPs in full. We're showing all of our best capabilities in the best light.

We're giving insights. Now we're starting to win more and then the team get a real buzz. Now they're excited to fill in responses that they're qualifying in and it becomes self-fulfilling.

Stephen Cribbett (20:59.37)
Yeah.

Stephen Cribbett (21:06.626)
Yeah. And

Mike (21:14.252)
Exactly.

Mike (21:23.32)
Exactly.

Mike (21:32.054)
And linking this back to the value question, when you focus on the right RFPs and you demonstrate your full capabilities, in terms of creating value, what you're doing is you're saying, we are experts in our field. If you want the experts expert, then buy us, but we're not discounting. You know, we charge a premium because we've got tens, if not hundreds of years of expertise in this domain. And that's why you pick us.

Stephen Cribbett (21:51.118)
Correct.

Stephen Cribbett (21:59.882)
Yes. And, and, you know, I mean, subsequently, again, because of our reputation, now, you know, we, we are getting pulled into some incredibly high profile projects without tendering, or without, you know, putting in proposals, we just brought in because the expertise has been recognized, and has been demonstrated for some very high profile clients in the past. So, you know, it all snowballs really down the line.

Mike (22:13.785)
Exactly.

Mike (22:26.006)
It does. And in fact, so Blair Ends, who I've done some work with in the past, the whole win without pitching approach, which is exactly that, which is when you become known as the expert in a niche and I'm a big believer in niches, you become the go to people. And for certain types of work, there won't be an RFP because you are the candidates they're going to work with because they've got deep relationships, they've got huge respect for your expertise, your thought leaders, your recognisers thought leaders.

Stephen Cribbett (22:32.692)
Yeah.

Mike (22:55.63)
You've got all of the thought leadership papers that go with it, and you're a conference speaker. All that can add up to, we're not going to RFP this because it's a pointless exercise, because it's a one-off situation and we need the true experts in this domain to solve this problem for us.

Stephen Cribbett (23:05.74)
Yes.

Stephen Cribbett (23:14.642)
Yeah, I think I think, you know, just a thought that occurred there while you were saying that as well is research being what it is, often the work that goes on and the outputs from it are very confidential, they don't really enter into the public domain. And clients are quite rightly are very protective over the insights that they've spent a lot of time and money investing in. So you know, it becomes very hard as a research business to then go to the next client and say,

Mike (23:28.323)
Absolutely.

Stephen Cribbett (23:40.234)
this is what we did for this client, these are the results and these are the outputs, because you can't show those things, you know, you're really very rarely allowed to speak about it unless it's something, you know, in the public domain. I mean, we've just finished a piece of work with the England and Wales cricket board, which was as a result of the whistleblower a number of years ago, and we had to do a root and branch review of the lived experience of people in cricket from the grassroots up to professional players.

Mike (24:06.5)
Right.

Stephen Cribbett (24:07.926)
And that's in the public domain, you know, that's gone to the parliamentary select committee. There is a paper and the research, a 200 page document that is available online, but that's very rare in our world. So demonstrating value again becomes hard, harder and harder when you can't talk about the work that you've done with a previous client. It's not like performance marketing or SEO, for example, you know, we just have to take a very different approach.

Mike (24:13.107)
Okay, yeah.

Mike (24:21.475)
Yes.

Mike (24:31.739)
Correct.

Mike (24:37.966)
So just to kind of like round off the discussion, since I'm conscious of time. So for agencies, you know, there's kind of like niche agencies, niche agencies can be anything from five people up to, you know, up to 50 or 100 people. For those kinds of agencies, do you think RFPs and competitive pitches are a good way of winning new business, so new logos? And if so, kind of, you know, what do you do as a pitch team to maximize your success?

I think you've talked about maximizing your success. I think let's focus on the, for an agency that is niche and it's growing, are RFPs and competitive pitchers a good way of winning new business and growth?

Stephen Cribbett (25:21.734)
Yes, I think they are now. Obviously, having gone through that experience, I think, you know, another thought starter really is around the people that you have in the business that around are involved in those briefs. I mean, we were very new to the kind of those kind of tenders and that procurement process. But I would say, you know, as a growing business, if it's your ambition to win bigger ticket items through that approach, then

it's also a thought to the people that you bring into the team, you know, looking for that experience in previous roles that they've had. But, you know, it's, as I said, you know, I think the point really is, once you get a bit of a head of steam and the right mindset and the right processes and professionalize your approach to doing these sort of tenders and responding to these briefs.

it certainly becomes a lot easier. And you will tend to find that obviously the bigger ticket projects over 50,000 pounds in our world, with sort of the sort of entry level. So anything over 50K, most organizations will, need to put you through a competitive process. So, you know.

It's very few businesses who wouldn't want a project over 50,000 pounds in our world. So, you know, in a way you have to do it, right? You don't want to be stuck at that sort of 10, 12,000 pound project mark, particularly when projects are, you know, not, uh, flowing freely out of one client. We're always having to build new relationships with new clients. Such is the nature of our work. So, you know, it just came to a point where we had to start looking at that as, uh, as an avenue for the work.

Mike (26:56.119)
Exactly.

Mike (27:03.598)
No, and I think it seems obvious to you and me, but it's not obvious to agencies that haven't gone through that kind of journey. It's that if you want to acquire enterprise-level logos as clients and work with them over many years, but it might be project-based over many years, if you want to do that, then you've absolutely got to get good at doing RFPs.

Stephen Cribbett (27:20.896)
Yeah.

Mike (27:32.346)
Because anything over 50k, as you say, I mean 50k, 75, 100, whatever the threshold is, any of those, it will be competitive. It will go to RFP, there will be a process. It will go to other agencies. So if you're going to win new logos, you've got to get excellent at knowing which ones to bid for. And then when you do bid, winning them.

Stephen Cribbett (27:32.767)
Yes.

Stephen Cribbett (27:54.538)
Yeah, I think also there was Mike, there's that mindset that the procurement guys are the enemy, right? And many, many agents sit there with that sort of mindset. And I think you've got to change that mindset and turn them into the frenemy, really, is probably the best description. Because they work across specific categories.

Mike (28:04.74)
Yeah.

Correct.

Mike (28:11.735)
You have.

Stephen Cribbett (28:22.034)
That research buyer will know what all of your competitors are doing, how they're selling themselves, what their proposition is, what their value proposition is. So actually get to know that person, go out for dinner with them or lunch with them and or coffee in the same way that you would in our world with the consumer insight director. Because actually if you build a relationship with them, that information will start to flow back to you and allow you to build a better business.

Mike (28:25.889)
Exactly.

Mike (28:46.278)
Correct. I mean, interestingly, I'd say one of my recommendations to everyone that I talk to that wants to talk about procurement people is, as you say, don't treat them as the enemy. They're just another stakeholder. Engage them as you would have the stakeholders, professionally. Outside of a procurement RFP process, build a relationship with procurement people. I've never understood, Stephen, why agencies, professional services firms don't run campaigns.

for procurement people, like running breakfast events. Run a breakfast event about your industry and what your industry does and your niche and how it works and what the dynamics are. Don't treat it as a sales pitch, just an education piece, awareness and education. And they will come back to you because if it's a niche area on something that I don't understand that we need to buy, well, I'll remember the conference or the seminar or the breakfast you invited me to, the conversation we had.

Stephen Cribbett (29:17.13)
Yes, yes.

Stephen Cribbett (29:27.693)
Yes.

Mike (29:43.61)
the deep insights you had and I'll think, I'll talk to Stephen. Even down to, I've got to write the RFP brief. I'm not quite sure how to do this. Let me ask Stephen some advice. Before I write anything, I'll send it out. Let me just pick his brains. And then you're starting to form the RFP.

Stephen Cribbett (29:56.354)
That's right. Yes. That's right. And yeah, and if you can get to that position of writing the brief, or almost even telling them what the problem is before you start, which we do that a lot with our clients, we go to them, when we see things that are not right, or a problem that might be occurring that they've not yet seen, we'll go to clients and tell them that beforehand.

Mike (30:08.432)
Correct.

Stephen Cribbett (30:21.014)
And that gets you in through the doors much earlier. And that obviously then allows you to sort of, you know, knock out some of the competition very early on.

Mike (30:24.493)
Exactly.

Mike (30:28.878)
Correct. Stephen, very conscious of your time. We're at the half hour point. It's been brilliant. Thank you ever so much for joining me on Higgle the B2B Sales for Podcast. Where can people find out more about you?

Stephen Cribbett (30:43.05)
It's been an absolute pleasure, Mike. Yeah, the versity is the agency. The website is versity.co.uk that's spelled V E R S I T I.

Mike (30:57.134)
Brilliant. Stephen, it's been a real pleasure. Thanks ever so much for joining me.

Stephen Cribbett (31:00.982)
Thank you. Thanks, Mike.

Mike (31:03.03)
Right, let me just stop the recording. And what it should say is.