1️⃣ How Our Business Grows
We say that we don’t sell because we prefer that our new business comes organically, rather than through aggressive sales tactics. For example, we will never engage in “cold calls” or anything of that sort.
Yet, we have a very healthy year-on-year growth (48.5% Cumulative Annual Growth).
This is how we are doing this:
A. New clients
A new client might come to us through:
- word of mouth (from a happy client)
- our network
- something we've published (Articles, podcasts, etc.)
- a talk we've given at a public event
B. Growing existing clients
We aim to maintain a selected number of long-lasting partnerships. Instead of focusing solely on the immediate project, we prioritise building enduring partnerships. This involves taking a quick, yet deep look into our clients' entire ecosystem. As a result, our projects often span across various client departments and demand diverse capabilities. We enjoy these long-term relationships as they allow us to create an even greater impact in an organisation.
👉 If you want to know more about how we build these relationships, have a look here.
2️⃣ Our Tools
Credentials
To help potential clients understand what we do, we've come up with a clear approach.
First Meeting: When we first meet a company, we use a simple credentials presentation that takes less than 5 minutes to go through.
👇 You can check it out here - your email is needed for this action:
Personalised Info: If we receive a specific request or learn more about a client's needs, we customise our credentials to fit their needs. We add more details related to what they're interested in and share relevant case studies.
🧢 [IMP]: Anyone in the company could potentially present our credentials.
Our reel & our short documentary
In addition to our credentials, we've put together a reel that not only highlights our past work but also gives a sense of our unique vibe and approach.
Now, we are not going to lie. This project got postponed way too many times - to prioritise our clients 😇
Before the end of 2023, we identified that what we are doing—and essentially how we make things run—was not easy to understand for someone unfamiliar with our projects. Seizing the opportunity to celebrate our 6th company anniversary, we created a short documentary video explaining how we started and how we arrived at where we are today. From a home office to a thriving team of 50, our journey has been all about dynamic evolution. 🚀
In the making of this project, we sought to capture diverse perspectives, experiences, backgrounds, and goals. We were deeply moved by how each member of our team perceives REBORRN, all sharing a common starting point: always challenging the status quo. 🤘
Our website
This tool is of great importance to us. We want it to be the digital face of our storytelling, experience, and design capabilities. Over the past few years, we’ve revamped it several times, even though it often took a backseat to client work.
But when we finally gave it the attention it deserved, we (think we) nailed it. 😎
3️⃣ Sometimes, We May Need To Say “No”
We feel we need to be brave enough to say "no" in case we:
- feel our values are not aligned with the prospective client
- believe we are not the right consultants for the particular challenge
- do not have the capacity
Of course, this always happens in a polite way, and we will try to find alternative solutions for them — even referring to other consultancies that we believe could help them.
4️⃣ Problem Framing Session
It’s not uncommon for our clients to present us with problems that are either unclear or very broad. Defining the challenge is critical not only for us to begin drafting our proposal but also for our clients to understand and articulate what success will look like. There are numerous occasions when our clients have come with a specific challenge, but as we delved deeper, the root cause turned out to be something different.
This is our problem framing session in one picture:
The set up.
⏰ Duration: From 3hrs to a full day 🥷🏻 Team: Max 6 people 💻 Set up: Virtual or physical
👥 Participants: 1 REBORRN Facilitator 1 REBORRN Expert (optional) 1 Decision Maker Max 4 Stakeholders from client
Part 1: Understanding the need. 🔎
This session is crafted to transform a typically broad and vague challenge into one or more well-defined, solvable problems. The first part focuses on understanding the business need, evaluating previously attempted solutions, discussing learnings, and clarifying the ultimate objective. During this stage, we may also employ analytical frameworks such as fishbone diagrams to dissect the problem thoroughly.
Part 2: Empathising with the customer 🙋🏻♂️
The second part centres on empathising with the customer, delving into what motivates their behaviour, and uncovering their challenges and opportunities. The result of this empathetic approach is a collection of actionable 'How Might We' (HMWs) statements that guide our team towards innovative solutions. Examples include:
- How might we integrate our Product Marketing with a lead distribution platform for Microsoft partners?
- How might we empower our Partners to boost their marketing efforts through a scalable approach?
- How might we establish a unified internal process that enables seamless collaboration between marketing and sales?
The Outcome 🎯
The Problem-framing session will generate a list of HMWs. Following that, we’ll need to prioritise which of these battles we are picking first, and then act. This is important since we naturally tend to discuss & reject potential solutions without even looking for data-backed validation. Our approach is all for moving forward to experiment with testable assumptions.
The challenges identified will take one of two paths: the more complex will be channelled into Design Sprints, where we'll rapidly prototype and test solutions in the market. The less complex will be distilled into action plans, directly leading to implementation.
⚠️ This session is inspired by this medium article (We strongly suggest to give it a read before running the session):
5️⃣ First Thoughts
We take pride in our visually compelling decks, but when it comes to proposal submission, we opt for a more detailed approach with a document we call 'First Thoughts.' This format allows us to thoroughly outline our strategies for addressing the challenge at hand, as decks typically do not accommodate extensive text.
'First Thoughts' are just the beginning; they represent our initial understanding and approach, which we continuously refine as we gain more context and feedback.
Our 'First Thoughts' documents typically include the following sections:
- Introduction: Our qualifications and a brief overview of similar past projects.
- What we know: A recap of the brief to confirm our understanding of the challenge.
- Our approach: An explanation of our methodology, focusing on process rather than specific solutions.
- How we can help: The core of the document, outlining the steps we propose to tackle the challenge, potential alternatives, and an introduction to the project team, complete with names and LinkedIn profiles.
- Estimated effort and investment: A summary of the required effort and the projected investment needed for the project.