Kanbanize – Dealing with Large Volume of Items, Tasks

Here is what works for me to get a meeting. I call it “Guerrilla Marketing” technique, in essence, Just Do It.

Email a person (better yet, call a person) but instead of asking for the time/date and doing the endless email exchange on availability, just politely note in your email that you will be suggesting a calendar invite with a proposed date/time.

Then, send a Calendar invite. It’s easier for a person to mentally accept / deny a meeting based on already proposed slot than to think about their availability. Also it’s easier for them to “Propose New Time” in Outlook or their calendaring system.

If the person doesn’t show up, politely email something to the fact that “I’m sorry I missed you on this call and I’ll suggest another time, please stay tuned. Or if there is someone else I should ping to schedule it, let me know.”

For important sales prospect meetings, leads, etc. it was taking me ~3 times of being “stood up” on the call and repeating the process above again and again until they show up.

When it comes time to renewing rates or raising rates annually or per contract, keep the following items in mind to improve your profitability and help you negotiate a better or a win-win deal.

• Communicate Proactively – Communicate upcoming changes to the customer well ahead of the time as you’ll need to negotiate. Don’t just blindly put a contract in front of the customer expecting them to sign it. Give plenty of heads up to the customer about upcoming rate changes 6 mo ahead of the anniversary
• Discounts, Investments – Review past discounts, investments and consider if any legacy or prior deals that no longer apply should be revised
• Cost of Living Adjustments, CPI – invoke those terms on annual basis as permitted by the contract
• General Rate Increase – invoke annual rate increase as permitted by the contract
• Level Ups – if any of your resources received promotions, certification, education levels, additional experience, etc. consider charging different rates for those achievements
• Shadows – if you have any shadow resources on the team consider making them billable or rotate out of the projects, if possible, without jeopardizing delivery
• Team Workload – if you have any un-billable Project, Delivery Managers, etc. consider making them billable
• Rate Card – review if any other locations should be adjusted, add additional roles, bands, disciplines, locations to make ratecard encompassing of all your services that you now offer
• Team Re-Org, Restructure, Optimize, Rotations – rebalance the team, restructure, consider rotating out senior or other resources which are unprofitable or looking for other challenges, etc.
• Grandfather, Effective Dates – You may choose to roll out increases gradually as prior SOWs expire. If you’re still re-negotiating rates and/or MSA but need to execute SOWs, then put language into SOWs stating that once MSA/ratecard is renegotiated, the new rates will go into effect e.g. 6 mo into SOW term or immediately when new MSA is effective

Have this table as your guideline during deal negotiations, on items that are relevant. Keep track of deal points and history of counter offers as the deal progresses until you reach final terms and execution.

You can also use this format (vertical columns) for your Legal team to provide a short summary of deal points after their first readout of the MSA so you can walk through each one with your Legal, Customer and close it out.

	Customer Proposal (date x)	Customer Counter Proposal (date y)	Your Proposal (date x)	Your Counter Proposal (date y)	FINAL TERMS
Additional Notes
Pricing
Rate Card (include full rate card with all disciplines, locations, monthly rates, hourly rates)
Rate Discounts
Discounts, Volume Discounts, Schedule
Rate Increase Language (go for automatic 5% YoY). ELSE, default to COLA, CPI
LoL, Limitation of Liability
Termination for Convenience, Cause
Acceptance Criteria
Warranty
Payment Terms
Penalties
At Risk Amounts
ARA %
Indemnities
Ramp Up/Down Plans (e.g if customer terminates, you’d like to negotiate to roll off team in waves e.g. 30 days 25% of team, next 30 another 25% of team, etc.)
Subcontractors (make sure you can work with Subcontractors, keep it Business to Business so you are not required to pass flowdowns to Subcontractors)
Locations
SLAs
Security, ODC Requirements
PHI, PII
BAA
Audit Requirements
Non-Compete
Non-Solicitation
Removal of Personal
Transition, Knowledge Transfer Cost
24×7 Support
Any Innovation Types Incentive Program/ Earn back

• Have proforma for every deal
• Rates Modeling – Request CM, AM model from Finance team
• Assign someone to assist with merging, creating, aggregating multi-location ratecards
• Keep in mind any model is probably ~5% or more off, e.g. you miscalculate Account Management cost, Direct Expenses, investment resources, reimbursable Expenses, wrong salaries ranges, EUR/USD conversions, etc.
• Include volume discount formulas and bands that can be adjusted
• Discount – Have one cell where you can input % discount and it will reduce rates by that %, one for onsite; use another field to discount offshore in bulk
• Rate Increases on Annual Basis – have a separate input field for that
• Model should be Multi-year
• Salary Increases – With input where you can increase salary by e.g. 2% each year for more accurate forecast. Must include b/c every year salaries rise
• Salary – have input for salaries so you can overwrite them. Include standard salaries in the initial model
• Vacation – include VAC/ILL % of time
• Expenses – include line item to control Reimbursable and Direct Expenses
• Account Manager cost – make sure to have it included
• Onsite/Offshore Growth % estimate (e.g. anticipate resource counts to grow 25%) – have a field to input %
• Include e.g. 5% CPI or Rate Increases YoY on multi-year deal especially if it’s Fix Bid or Managed Service/Support (if that deal is locked for multi-year, your pricing must include XYZ% raises YoY, otherwise you’re locking a 3 year deal with 3 year old prices)
• Blended Rate – output field to show blended rate AND/OR blended rates PER each ROLE row e.g. some locations have knows blended rate ranges to hit, also some customers have blended rate ranges to be within for their budgets, KPIs for team composition, balance
• Monthly/Hourly rates – have the ability to switch between monthly vs. hourly rates
• Include options e.g. drop-down box with different locations tiers so you can model 2-3 locations e.g. Delivery is done only in US, Offshore, Hybrid (onshore, offshore)
• Add actual people names to resource plan model, if known, to understand real cost
• Have resource plans that model $5M, $10M, $15, $20M scenarios
• Currency – include currency drop down to make adjustments and to have input field for rate conversion. Include USD, EUR, and Country Specific
• Have the ability to add additional people, roles to the resource plan