DHV is a big company that does consulting and engineering for transportation, water, building, industry and so on. One of their 5500 employees rang me up to talk about their sales process. Like most firms they’ve been working with brochures, leaflets and other paperwork filled with endless stories. But unlike most they’d discovered that the people are doing the selling and the leaflets are mostly waste. And they’re right of course.

When you are about to hire someone for a multimillion euro deal, you expect them to have shiny brochures written by copywriters who aren’t engineers or consultants. So the basis of negotiating is usually:

a) trust
b) previous experiences
c) the bottom line: bang for your buck

So out with the old and in with the new. Question for now is, what should the new be? I’ll be working on that for the next couple of weeks.