Part 3. Contract Revenue Like a Pro

Mitigate risk and navigate the contracting phase effortlessly

In Part 3 of this deep dive into the "Create, Choreograph, Contract" framework, John and Mark break down what happens between a verbal agreement and a signed contract. They look at the emotional and practical aspects of risk in decision-making processes, how both clients and consultants can manage and mitigate uncertainties, and how to handle other parties like legal and finance in the contracting phase. In this conversation, you'll learn:

• How to manage and mitigate risk without dropping price
• How to understand—rather than handle—objections 
• The importance of maintaining focus on results
• How to approach legal and accounting during contracting
• Negotiation strategies to anticipate potential issues and ensure progress

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhwainwright/
Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

www.breakingbizdev.com

Transcript

John Tyreman: 0:20

Welcome business developers to another episode of breaking biz dev. This episode is part three of our mini series where we're going to break down the contracting phase of the business development process. I'm John Tyerman. As always, I am joined by my trusty cohost, Mark Wainwright. Um, before we dive in Mark, I just wanted to say one thing over the course of, you know, doing these podcast episodes, I think your sage advice has really helped me kind of navigate my own. business development, endeavors. And I just closed a contract last week on boarded a new client and it went so smoothly. And I owe a lot of that to you, Mark. So I just want to say thank you.

Mark Wainwright: 0:59

You are, you are too kind. congratulations. That is exciting. The most exciting thing about all of this, obviously, New clients, new revenue is fantastic, but just the opportunity to put this into practice is so much fun, you know, whether it's you, that's, that's fantastic. Or other people, either that I am working with as a consultant or other people just out there that start to. Be able to implement some of this stuff. And when I mean implement, we're not always going to be successful, but we just have to practice. And I think when we practice, we get, we get better and better. So just the opportunities we're presented to practice, practice this stuff is fantastic. So that's great. That's, that's good news. this, this third part, this contract part follows up on the first part that we talked about, create, how do we create new opportunities for our organization? choreograph. How do we guide and lead those new opportunities, from a maybe to a contract and make that seem effortless and smooth and really enjoyable for both parties? And now we've arrived at the contract and either people are really interested at this point or they're checked out because this part can sometimes be kind of brutal and, and, you know, there's the agreements and the other stuff and it's important, but yeah, we're, we're, we are, we are in the weeds at this point for sure.

John Tyreman: 2:29

And I think we've all been in this scenario where you get that note from an opportunity point of contact that you've been dealing with, you know, going back and forth for months and they finally say, okay, let's move forward with option two of your three options. And, it's such a great feeling, but there's still, you know, the race isn't finished yet.

Mark Wainwright: 2:48

it's so true. I, you know, and this takes a little bit of time and maybe I'll have an evening where I, you know, head out for a, for a beverage with my, my buddies and I'll say, Hey, I got a great opportunity. It's really fantastic. It looks like it's, you know, things are, things are moving ahead. I'm really excited. People are congratulations, but then I'm always thinking. But it's not done yet, so yeah, I'm excited to celebrate those, but, it usually takes a little bit longer than everybody wants, but hopefully, if we're doing this right, the vast majority, turnout. Well,

John Tyreman: 3:22

and we want these deals to continue to move. And I think that's one of the biggest kind of like points to this, this mini series that we're doing here is just this business development process. It's a dance that needs to continue to move along. And the process that you outlined, today for today's episode covers that final stretch between that verbal agreement and assigned contract. for our doer seller friends and all of the business developers listening right now, what should they expect to happen? Just kind of like give a high level overview of that part of the BD process.

Mark Wainwright: 3:54

Right. So, hopefully, like you said, we've gotten that indication that they're interested in, in moving forward with one of our proposed options. And if we've done it, right, John, we've proposed a nice three option proposal. We've articulated our understanding. We've had conversations all the way through. So now we're, we're ready to kick into this little, little final part. And this is the part that that connects the, the selling to the doing. Right. This is hopefully at the very end of this process, we are, you know, rolling our sleeves up and kind of getting into the, the doing part. So, after, after, and part of this is informed by my experience, but I would imagine that a lot of people out there have very similar experience. When I, when I have that conversation and individuals, you know, organizations indicate which way they want to go. This looks great. Let's move ahead. It is on me to develop a contract or or an agreement. The way I approach it is I usually have two sort of separate documents. one is a contract agreement. It contains a ton of sort of standard contract language, and we'll talk a little bit about that. And then I have sort of an attached sort of statement of work varies significantly relative to, to the different elements of the work for different clients. So I'm going to produce that. And ideally then present that right. And then we're going to talk it through. Sometimes those conversations can be a little laborious because, you know, walking someone through a contract, is, is, is kind of a drag. You know, it's kind of a slog to kind of move, move through it. I don't generally obviously go word word for word. Sometimes I'll highlight specific areas. but. Nevertheless, it's a conversation. Then the, the client typically is going to have some, some comments and they sometimes bring in other folks into the conversation. And we'll talk about that. And that can get a little tricky. Then we need to continue to have conversations to address their concerns, comments, markups. Whatever else, maybe you do that whole thing again. and then we finalized with, with signatures. Everybody uses digital signatures these days. And then we start scheduling our first few steps together and everything I just kind of ran through there can take. A few days, or it can take some more time, longer than people expect. So, and it's difficult to maintain focus because you just want to get going. but this is really important.

John Tyreman: 6:27

Yeah, it is important to keep going. Like you said, and it can take, it can happen really quickly and it can happen. Over a long period of time, which can be kind of painful. but you mentioned in the last episode, when we were talking about choreograph, some of the, like the mindset that you need to have, during that part of the business development process, I, I'd venture to say that a lot of those same kind of like paradigms for which like you look at business development need to apply here. What are some of the different, Kind of mindsets just maybe like to reprise some of the things we talked about in the last episode,

Mark Wainwright: 7:01

right? Yeah, first and foremost, we talked about curiosity and inquiry That helps you build an understanding Upon which you build your approach now, we've got sort of a selected approach. Okay. This is the scope This is the option we want to keep Choose, but curiosity and inquiry are super important to continue through the contracting process because they're going to start coming up with questions. And some people refer them to as as objections or whatever else. And so we need to continue to be curious about why people have concerns about things, why people are perceiving risk, you know, in certain, certain situations or, or, you know, in the contracting process. Et cetera. Low, low self orientation is important. and, and that is as important now as it was previously. We have to develop a really deep sense of empathy and kind of understand that as the pen gets closer and closer to paper, people get nervous and squirrely. So that's important. continuing to focus on results and we'll touch a little bit on, on a number of these synchronous communications that we talked about before, continuing to have those live. You know, conversations throughout this whole process is really, really important. So, and there's a number of other ones that, that I listed in that last episode, that you need to continue to maintain throughout this whole process as well. So that's a good, good episode for people to listen to in preparation for this, but yeah, all those, all those, those checklists sort of mindset sort of threads that get pulled through this whole. Sales process need to continue now.

John Tyreman: 8:37

Thank you, Mark. So folks that are listening, go back and check out that part two of this mini series on choreographing your business development efforts. Okay, cool. So this I think this is a good outline of the process and the mindset that, you really need to bring. To get these deals to the finish line. So let's flip it on its head. You know, what can go wrong in these final stages? Maybe what are some of the warning signs that folks should be looking out for? Maybe what are some of the curve balls to watch out for?

Mark Wainwright: 9:06

Yeah, people can, can start to get a little weird. you know, people that you've had really reasonable, rational conversations with, maybe in tandem with that, you're having good communications back and forth, maybe by email. maybe that. gets a little irregular and in an unexpected way, maybe, you just sense that the great back and forth, the great sort of connection you've had starts to fray a little bit and people are busy, but also, typically in professional services, we are selling complex things and when complex things get unclear, get foggy, decision making slows down. So you start to see it now, right? Things are getting real. The dollars and cents are on it. pieces of paper. people are needing to sign not just themselves, but really more importantly, sign their organization up for this, for this work with a consultant, whether you're an architect or an engineer or you know, whoever else, and things are getting real, right? So things can start to start to change a little bit. People can start to experience buyer's remorse. You know, that moment before you buy something, you think, Oh, was that other. Choice better, right? So that starts to slow us down a little bit. And as we'll touch on, I think a little bit more, there's new people that start to get introduced either kind of in an expected way, maybe, but oftentimes in a little bit unexpected way. And that can throw things off where you've developed this great relationship with maybe two or three people in an organization. things are working great. Communication has been good. Then all of a sudden, new people show up and you're looking around saying, Hey, who are these folks? Right? So that, that can totally, totally happen. I mean, they could be new decision makers that they should have made you aware of, or you should have dug a little deeper and understood who those decision makers are. It could be people in sort of finance and accounting, and not the least of which John, our friends in legal, right? They can show up as well. So things can get a little messy. Yeah. A little foggy and a little confusing at this point.

John Tyreman: 11:14

let's put a pin in those other players. Yeah. And we can, we can come back to those later on.'cause I've got a few thoughts on those, but, um, it, a lot of the different sales trainings that I've been a part of, in, in my time, over the years, it's typically, there's this like handling of objections that happens and. You know, typically like there's like, okay, here's the objection and here's the talking point that you need to have to handle the objection. but you have a slightly different take on handling objections that I think our listeners will find a lot of value in.

Mark Wainwright: 11:47

Yeah. And this does not deviate from everything that I've spoken about, uh, to date on this, in this episode on this podcast, rather than sort of a Approaching objections and objections are often, you know, sometimes irrational, but typically rational concerns that your buyers have. and if you, you can google it, right? It's everywhere. Every sales blog, every sales trainer, every, everything out there has this whole sort of how do you handle objections, right? And they have that as a specific step in their sales process. I prefer a shift to think of it more as, rather than addressing objections, understanding objections, right? So if people start bringing things up, asking questions, raising concerns, raising objections, your job at this point is to really dig into those and understand where they're coming from. Yeah, get to the root cause, you know, whether it's the five wise or whatever process you use to get to the root cause of this, you know, it could be, look, I'm, I'm, you know, when you dig deep enough, you could realize that just some individual is concerned that they might make a bad choice in this process. And put their job at risk, right? It could be, their finances are tight right now and they're really having to make this, this, you know, kind of squeeze this whole sort of consulting work that you're doing into, into their, their budgets or their available dollars and cents. and they have to really make the organization believe this is a wise use Of, of the dollars and cents. So you know, there could be a whole bunch of things that are just hidden in it. And instead of, you know, addressing and handling those objections, you have to understand them and just uncover them and have a good conversation to kind of work people through it because, you know, like I said, a lot of these are very kind of reasonable, rational concerns and you just have to find out what's driving them. Yeah,

John Tyreman: 13:49

and there's, There's tools and I see you've got some examples here. there's like different tools that you can use to kind of get at what that understanding is. Like, I think we talked about on, one of the earlier episodes in this mini series about mirroring and reflecting. I, I, I like to, I like to use the, the phrase, it sounds like, or it seems like to kind of mirror back to them and reflect what, what I'm hearing. And what that kind of like pain is or that emotional trigger is, are there other kind, different kinds of tools or techniques that you would recommend for folks that are trying to understand objections?

Mark Wainwright: 14:30

Right. The, the two you mentioned are, are great and there are a lot of them, but, one I use is look, if I heard you correctly, You are concerned about this particular part of the engagement or, this particular element. Did I get that right? Am I hearing that, that correctly? Sometimes you get the yes, but sometimes you say, no, that, you know, slightly, slightly off. A little, little bit different than that, Mark. But, but yeah, any tool that you can use to, here and then reflect back what you're hearing and understanding, helps them further clarify. And inevitably when you ask them that, if I hear you correctly, you're concerned about X. Is that right? They'll make, they'll, they'll acknowledge your response and then they'll probably dig even deeper. Right? So you're, there you go. You're uncovering more and more layers, behind their, their concern or their objections. So, I really think at this point, people just want to be heard. Right? They just want you to understand that. You know, they're sticking their neck out a little bit, whether it's, a single family homeowner hiring an architect or a large organization that's hiring some, environmental engineering firm to come in and assess, um, the, environmental conditions on a large sort of, you know, Brownfield site where they want to build their new corporate headquarters, there's a, there's a risk involved. You know, and, you need to uncover kind of where that's coming from. You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 16:01

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 16:15

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 16:25

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 16:31

and now back to the show.

John Tyreman: 16:34

Yeah. Well, let's, let's talk about risk and let's break that down a little bit. So listeners can understand what risk looks like in their counterpart. so how do you approach assessing and addressing risk?

Mark Wainwright: 16:47

Risk is, is, and to clarify, When I talk about risk, it's a little bit different. The terminology and the definitions are the same, but it's a little bit different from, the conversations that you will hear the information, out there about sort of legal risk or, or liability and things like that. Right. Organizations, need to have. You know, proper insurance or, you know, proper, proper safeguards to kind of, you know, mitigate sort of professional risk, financial risk, that sort of stuff. The risk that I talk about more often is that kind of really kind of nasty feeling that we all get in our, in our, in our bellies about. These types of decision making processes, you know, it's just the, your guts telling you this is the right choice or this is not the right choice. And it's, and it's, it's, it's concerning. Sure. A lot of this can can find its way to, you know, financial risk, organizational risk. That's, that's totally connected to this. But when people are in these decision making processes, these questions are You know, this risk starts popping up all over the place and it's really, people have kind of an emotional kind of reaction to it. So, that's, that's how I define risk. And it's also important. I think when we talk about risk is to understand that risk is kind of like water and it flows. just between both parties. And the, the goal here, if you're kind of picturing this along with me is to, to find a, kind of an, a level waterline for both parties to kind of work with, right? It's, you don't want someone to be bearing too much risk or not enough risk. Clients perceive risk in that we're going to hire this consultant, but we're not entirely certain that we're going to get what we want to get out of it. Right. And we're not going to achieve our goals. They might not get what they paid for, right? They might wrap the whole thing up and say, boy, that was a rip off, you know. Consultants on, and there are other risks, other risks involved. Consultants on the other hand, may not get the level of support and buy in and engagements and everything they need to be successful. So a consultant stepping into this consultant client relationship, hoping for the best may not get what they need to be successful. So the whole thing kind of blows up. And you know, another way that consultants bear risk is they might not get paid. there's accounts, their account receivable could were 30 days out or 90 days out or 150 days out. We're thinking, are we ever going to get paid? Right. And untypical in my, my profession, my practice way more typical in others, unfortunately. And that's one of those things that is devastating. You know, you do great work for a client, maybe things went well, but. Yeah. who knows what happened, right? We're just, they're not, they're the checks in the mail, right? Not getting processed, whatever's going on. It's just things get lost. And you're thinking, I can't believe this. We did great work and we're not getting paid. So there's some risk there. So understanding that risk is born by both parties is critical. And the whole concept behind, managing mitigating risk is addressing it from a, from a both party standpoint and trying to find that equal waterline, where people are, are each dealing with an acceptable amount of risk.

John Tyreman: 20:10

I love that visual of an aquarium and you know, you're going up and down and the water is just sloshing from left to right and you really just need to, you slow it down and you find that equal waterline. Right, right. I think that's a great

Mark Wainwright: 20:23

visual. It's it's fun because it's, you know, you're never actually kind of, you're never really getting rid of it. If you find yourself in a situation, we're like, oh, this is a risk free situation. Trust me, it's elsewhere. And it's probably on, your clients, shoulders, right? Or if the clients walking into this thing, look, we are going to shed as much risk as we possibly can in this process. Guess where it ends up. It ends up on you. So, yeah. That's, that's that sort of empathy and that mutual sort of understanding that we need to need to have kind of coming into this.

John Tyreman: 20:55

That's good. So what are some ways that during this contracting part of the business development process, what are some ways to navigate and possibly mitigate some of those risks to your client and then also to yourself?

Mark Wainwright: 21:08

Yeah, so some of the, the, the work that has been done to date in this whole process in the choreographed process where you're taking these maybes to this contract point, there's some really powerful things that happen there in order to mitigate perceived risk at the end. One of them is obviously offering great options, offering great options lets the, lets the client sort of. co create and choose, right? So, so the client being their, their own sort of, you know, being self determinant in this whole process, lets them know that that you're just not coming in sort of offering one option and take it or leave it, right? You've co created this together. That helps mitigate risk. being honest and transparent through the whole process that helps mitigate risk from the very beginning. You're developed, you're being open and honest. You're developing this deep understanding. You're constantly reflecting back to them what you've heard, what you've, what you've understood. That's super important. And when it gets to kind of these final steps, I think there's a number of things that you can do in this last little negotiation contracting that helps, that helps kind of continue to mitigate risk without Having to drop price, right? And I think a lot of times consultants, that's their knee jerk reaction. They enter the negotiation phase, which is effectively, you've presented, you know, your options to your clients or maybe heck, you've done it wrong and given them a one and they go back and, review, talk to, you know, they have to run it by their boss. What, you know, whatever the, whatever the language is. And they come back to you and say, it's too much. We need you to do it for this. Sharpen your pencil, sharpen your pencil, right? Sharpen your pencil. here's a, here's some simple, straightforward things you can do to kind of avoid that, right? You can offer. Service level agreements. You can offer money back guarantees, things like that, right? Service level agreements are, you know, this will be the level of service that we provide to you and we will not drop below that, right? whatever it involves, you know, whether it involves, time that you spend with them or just level of effort. If you can kind of gauge and measure that sort of level of effort, here's our service level agreement with you. Money back guarantees sound kind of funny and they sound kind of salesy, but they really help mitigate risk. You know, and one of the tools I use quite often in my engagements, when I sense that things are starting to slow down in this contracting sort of negotiation process, when people are just him in and on a little bit, I don't drop the price. I say, look, if we walk through this together. For the first three months, because my engagements tend to be a little bit longer. If we walk through this for 90 days and there's not a fit, we're not making progress. People aren't engaged. You're sensing some internal mutiny in this whole process that, you know, we're not, we're just not achieving what we want to achieve. We'll call it done. I'll write you a check and. We're all done. So I would refund everything that I had been paid to date. Fortunately, that hasn't happened yet. Who knows? It may at some point. I think if you put things out there like that, inevitably, something's, something's going to go sideways, right? It's good to anticipate, but generally speaking, I hope never to be in that situation. I may, but, I believe in the work that I do. So that fortunately hasn't happened. you can, you can contract, you know, kind of codify a regular cadence of progress checks, you know, just making sure that, that things are, things are moving in the right direction. You can change timelines, you know, you can say, okay, so, you know, you wanted to do it in this amount of time for this amount of money. We can do it in a longer time, so we'll have a lower burn and we can do it for different dollars. We can do that, or you can negotiate availability, the high option, that you could choose, you know, has us setting up shop, you know, we'll move into the, to the empty office space right next to you, right? There you go. So we will be there. We will be right alongside you. You know, that's kind of an, that's, that's an absurd example, but availability is something it's like, you know, we're, we're either just, you know, Touching you here and there at these, at these particular moments during this engagement, or we are living with you. you can negotiate team members, right? And this one sounds a little bit weird, but you can, right? It's like, this price is a team. This price is B team. You can, you can kind of do that. You can negotiate anything, but price. You just don't want to, because inevitably when you get to this point, the client has signed off on the, the, the outcomes they want to achieve and the sort of work involved to get there. But now they're coming back and asking for a lower price and you just can't go there because, you know, you've dug into your margin. You've put the team under kind of, you know, the pressure cooker and dropping price doesn't set a long term sort of consultant client relationship up for future success. It just says every single time we're going to do 100 percent of the work for. 80 percent of the dollars.

John Tyreman: 26:33

and then when you go back and you look at the numbers and you identify that client as, oh, why didn't we hit the margin on this revenue while we made concessions during the contracting phase?

Mark Wainwright: 26:43

Yeah, we wanted to we wanted to, to land them as a new client and then the next project will be profitable. Actually, what's going to happen. The next contract you set a precedent, it's going to come back and say, Hey, you did a fantastic job of sharpening your pencil last time. Let's see how sharp you can get it this time. Right?

John Tyreman: 27:04

Oh man. So that's, that's a great point. So negotiate. but price. Yeah, that's great. That's great advice. Let's throw a new wrinkle in the mix. We touched on it earlier. So what happens when your main point of contact starts bringing in other people from the organization into the conversation? Like, let's, let's talk about how we can handle that.

Mark Wainwright: 27:26

Yeah. So the, the, the first one I mentioned is, you know, bringing other decision makers in, this is something that needs to be uncovered and sorted early on in your sales conversations. You must be talking to the decision maker or the decision makers throughout that whole process. otherwise, you know, you don't have the level of support and buy in and engagement from the people who are ultimately going to say yes or no. And that's critical. But the two other ones that I mentioned are people that quite often are not involved in those early steps. And that's understandable. And they are, you know, our friends in professional services often. legal and financial, right? So, so the, when the, when the lawyers finally show up, stuff's going to get serious. Right. So, you know, and there, you know, and, and both, you know, lawyers, accountants, financial individuals, you know, in professional services, They're, they're good at what they do. They have a job. They need to do their job right from the lawyers need to Reduce or eliminate risk you know with the with the firm that they're that they're working with right? That's their that's their job, right? So they're going to come into this with a completely different perspective they're not really going to have the perspective of This organization needs to solve these business challenges and to do so they need this consultant. They're going to come in saying You How much risk does the introduction of this third party consultant introduce to our organization? How much risk does this process introduce? And how do we Mitigate that. So they're just doing their job, but yeah, this is, this is challenging. I would love it if legal was engaged in the process. And one of the most challenging things I find about legal is the way legal, at least this is from my experience and others may have different experiences, but I have a feeling this is very similar. One of the ways that legal engages with this process is, you know, word documents that are. Redlined and sent via email, right? You rarely have the opportunity to create this nice synchronous communication with legal. They get your document, they mark it up, they send it back. You know, please let me know if you have any comments. It's like, yeah, actually I have a lot of comments because you just added three new clauses and you wiped out two other ones. Like what's going on here? But the same thing rings true. There's something behind. There's something behind all of this, right? There's something behind their comments. There's either something that they're reading into or something, maybe something that was missing. and, you know, so that, so all of this underscores the critical need to have very clear conversations, continuing to have those live synchronous conversations, because inevitably. When you get to a certain point where the legal stuff kind of stacks up and the decision making slows down, you say, okay, I'm pushing the pause button. We have to have a conversation. And you know, your main client decision makers get on the, get on the call. You're on the call and then legal gets on the call and everybody's fine. Right. It all kind of, you talk through things and everything works out. Okay. And here it's a lot of times it's just critical that everyone feels heard and legal wants to be heard. Right. Legal, wants to be heard kind of initially through their red lines and their word documents and their emails and things, but there's, there's more communication there. So you need to have a live synchronous conversation so everyone can be heard. And ultimately, I think when that, when that conversation wraps up, the ideal scenario and the likely outcome, if you've done this right, is that everyone perceives that they're in kind of a win win situation, right? That, that legal has understood that they can't just throw all this risk. On the consultant because, that's going to threaten the engagement and then they're maybe their boss, you know, the main decision maker that's been involved in this process isn't going to get the business results they want to get so legal has to understand it says, Oh, Great. The consultant needs to bear some risk. And so do we, in order for our organization to achieve what it wants to achieve.

John Tyreman: 31:46

I like to think about legal and accounting as what I call technical buyers. And so they have the ability to say no to a deal. they don't have the ability to say yes. to a deal. And I like the way that you walk, you walk through that. They want to be heard and that the, the ultimate outcome is for them to feel like, feel like they've been heard, but then feel like that they've, come to this like win win, outcome. Yeah. And I like the give and take example that you said. So let's, we, we talked about legal. What about accountants?

Mark Wainwright: 32:17

Yeah, the, maybe it's the CFO, maybe it's, another sort of internal final financial resource, maybe someone external. Yeah. Yeah, controller, sure. you know, inevitably they're going to come into the process looking for really specific stuff. They, they're, they're the ones on the hunt for the spreadsheet. Right. They want to know the deliverables. They want to know the hours. They want to know the rates. They want to know all that stuff, right? Again, they're just doing their job, right? This is the language they speak. This is the air they breathe. Right. But the whole time in the conversations that you've been having, if you've been doing it right, you've stayed focused on outcomes. This amount of work over this amount of time is going to result in these organizational outcomes, whether you've assigned dollars and cents to that, or, you know, behavior change, or, you know, whatever your consulting work is, or a new house or some engineering work, whatever it is, you're, everybody's staying really nicely and tightly focused on these outcomes. And all of a sudden, you know, the financial folks show up and say, show us the beans to count. So it's, it's, it's tough, right? Still, we need to have conversations and it's critical to pull their eyes up off their desks and off the spreadsheets and have everyone kind of aligned on results. So you need to kind of bring those folks along. If there's an opportunity to do it early on, great. Everybody needs to get their eyeballs on some desired future state rather than just, You know, counting hours, checking the checkbox on deliverables, things like that. So, you know, so, so that's another part in, in the financial end of things, you know, there, there are things that they will respond to as well because they are, you know, they want to mitigate risk as well and they want to get the biggest bang for their buck. sometimes if those individuals come in to the conversation and they're concerned about the dollars and cents, maybe you can. Talk through some potential, you know, payment options, you know, if they're the ones that are driving the whole sort of sharpen your pencil conversation, you can say, sure, absolutely. Absolutely. I will reduce this price by X amount. You need to pay me a hundred percent upfront. And they say, well, wait a minute. Conversely, you can say, great. How about let's take these terms. That, you know, that I've put out there, these payment terms, whether they're, you know, two week terms or a month or, you know, whatever your standard sort of, there shouldn't be standard terms, by the way, John term should always be negotiated, but whatever your initially negotiated terms, are you like, look, we'll, we'll, we'll blow up in those terms. If you're, if you want to pay me at some point down the road, once you've finally sort of seen these results. That you have achieved. Maybe it's a really long engagement. You say, okay, you're not going to pay me throughout the entire thing. Some organizations, that's a cash flow problem. So that's hard to do. But in some circumstances, you can say, good, you're not going to pay me until the very end. But there's a bumper on that, right? There's a percentage on that because, you know, basically I'm your bank. And, so I'm going to stretch those. I'm going to, I'm going to add some dollars and cents to that. So you're going to pay more. Okay. But you're also going to be able to kind of see this whole thing play out without having invested any money upfront. So the dollars and cents start to make, make, make sense to the financial folks. So even a number of ways we can pull them into this whole sort of negotiation stuff without being salesy or tricky or anything else, just really straightforward. Again, there's that kind of risk thing is that if they pay you upfront, they're perceiving some additional risk. if they pay you in, you know, in three months or six months or whatever it is, you're bearing some risk. So those are, those are both, both parts of that.

John Tyreman: 36:15

Excellent. And then once you get buy in from these technical buyers, the legal department, the finance department, everyone is on the same page. Everyone is aligned. That water line in the aquarium is nice and balanced. Yeah. And you can finalize the signatures. Yeah,

Mark Wainwright: 36:31

I, I, I have not been in this process, where, you know, it has continued to slow down after we've sorted the details with legal and financial and everything else. Once those folks are good to go and signed off, everybody's excited. And your initial sort of sponsor, decision maker that you talk to is excited. They're ready to get, they're ready to get started. So the scheduling starts happening and the, you know, the, the, now you're into it. Right. So super fun. Excellent.

John Tyreman: 37:03

All right. Well, Mark, I think we covered, the general flow of what you outlined in the beginning, developing that agreement and scope of work based on the agreed work and the results discussing the agreement and scope of work with your client. You know, going through the comments, the markups, discussing those markups, having those synchronous decision, you know, conversations along the way, dealing with other parties that come into the contracting process, and then finally finalizing those signatures in a contract and then beginning work.

Mark Wainwright: 37:33

it's the part everybody wants to just breeze through, but it's rarely been a simple process in my experience. And I would say in most, organizations have experienced a similar thing. So yeah, it's, it's worth your continued energy and focus just to get this thing across the finish line.

John Tyreman: 37:49

Well, Mark, thank you for going over that contracting part. The one that's often overlooked in the business development process. This concludes our third part of this mini series on the business development process. So Mark, thank you so much for sharing your words of wisdoms and organizing all of this valuable information into those three buckets. Very good. Until next time, John, until next time.