Build On Tideway Success

This is not made up. A big ticket UK infrastructure project just got delivered on-time, and to budget.

Albeit with price tag and slight delay caveats courtesy of lockdown disruption and consequent inflation spike.

Still, it is stunning in its rarity.

There are many lessons contained within. Indeed, there's already a book out lauding it as exemplar; Twenty Steps to Better Collaboration.

For now, I shall focus on our Sales angle.

The build was for a new 16-mile super-sewer. Fit for the modern age running mainly riverside, underground. A rump of staff transferred in from a previous similar yet dogged project. The woefully late, runaway costs-ridden throughway of Crossrail tunnel.

The gravy train rolls on?

Yet those at the top consciously elected to be different.

On completion, here's [sub'n req'd] the outgoing chief exec's view;

“We were lucky in that many people, including myself, had come from Crossrail, which was quite a similar project in that they’re both tunnels under London. But this was a chance to put into practice all the good stuff we’d learnt and avoid repeating the bad.”

This seems a central plank for their entire ethos.

Sounds so simple, hey?

Yet I sob to report I note this by its absence inside sales endeavours.

A whale which could be won falls, un-won.

Then another looms into view. Only to befall the same fate.

A dreaded doom loop plays on.

If such pillar gets placed in your selling formula, then each time learnings beget earnings.

Where are you, explicitly, 'putting into practice all the good stuff learnt', whilst also, 'avoiding repeating the bad'?

Such an approach is core to an actual, real-world, winning process.

Don' t pay it lip-service. Don't dismiss it as 'common sense'. Don't assume you're already better.