In most commercial businesses new business is vital to sustained growth, longevity and success. Central to any management team is the New Business or Marketing Director…Often supported by a large team, it is their responsibility to bring in the new clients and revenue…they have annual targets and the pressure to succeed can be immense…so when the big opportunity comes their way ,it is vital everything is done to convert it…but so often the biggest factor in any future contract or new client relationship is overlooked…the personality of the individual who always ends up making the final decision, no matter how consensual or collegiate the appointing team may appear…so often a pitch/tender appears and the team appointed to win it burrow into the detail right away…they trawl the target company’s website, gaining a thorough appreciation of its mission, vision, values. Its business performance and its likely growth potential. They get as much data as they can on the company …they read equity analyst reports and market research documents…But they fail to look at arguably the most important factor in the award of the contract…the personality type of the person awarding it…They fail to take into account whether that person is a radiator, drain or gatekeeper…Are they optimists or pessimists…The direction of your tender and the personnel involved in its successful outcome will depend on getting this right.

At DVC we believe passionately in this so we have devised our own methodologies for assessing this. Based on the personality profiling learnt from Myers -Briggs and Enneagram we help our clients identify exactly to who they are pitching. If you are going to be sitting across the table from a Enneagram Type 8 The Challenger (self confident, decisive and confrontational, a natural born leader) your pitch is going to be very different from that to an Enneagram Type 2 The Helper (Caring, collegiate, generous and consensual). Likewise if you look at (MBTI) The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the end decision maker is an ENTP (The debater- who enjoys shredding arguments and beliefs and is the ultimate devil’s advocate), your tender/presentation will be very different than to an ISTJ (The inspector-introspective, a keen sense of right and wrong, devoted to duty and very responsible). At DVC we help our clients make sense of all this which means whether you meet radiator, drain or gatekeeper you are already prepared.


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