A Bidder's
Dozen: Golden Rules for Winning Work
After all of the years my Lore colleagues and I have spent winning
clients and working with them across the industries and around
the world, every time we collaborate once again, we seem to return
to certain basic and relatively simple concepts that drive what
we do. We call them the Golden Rules.
Are You Differentiating Your Organization
On Price Alone
There is always one differentiator in the client's mind:
price. So if features, quality, cost of ownership, performance,
and other critical factors are all essentially the same for competing
solutions, then only the fool would buy anything other than the
lowest-priced solution. Your first-tier competitors all have tremendous
expertise and, although their products are not going to be direct
replicas of yours, theirs are just as acceptable to the market
in general and clients in particular. So with equal talent and
capability in front of a client, why will they choose you?
Behavioral Differentiation
It is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate goods and
services in the marketplace today. When your company innovates,
your competitors quickly assimilate those innovations and level
the playing field. One area of differentiation, however, is difficult
to copy. That area is behavior.
Checkmate! How Business Development Is
Like Chess
Chess is a revealing metaphor for business development,
including what needs to be done and won. Business development
is like chess in that it has a clear opening, middle, and ending.
It demands a thorough knowledge of the rules of the game and of
the opponents. To win, you have to understand the situation as
it changes from one move to the next, and you must develop and
execute an effective strategy that evolves dynamically as positions
lead to opportunities and opportunities become contracts.
Designing Technology Proposals for Mixed
Audiences
Technology—no matter how advanced or "cutting
edge"—doesn't communicate itself and, if poorly communicated,
may be partly or totally rejected. This means that technology-based
solutions get funded, built, or otherwise adopted only when decision
makers have clear and compelling reasons to endorse your proposal—as
opposed to your competitors'—about those solutions. In today's
brutally competitive technology markets, technology is not just
having a great product—or even a great message—because
all technology leaders do. For bottom-line customers it's not
enough to know some technically elegant solution. Customers need
to know why they should buy it and why they should buy it from
you. Such a crucial message may be anything but technical.
Selling the Sizzle, Not the Steak
It's hard to find heroes in the world of sales and marketing,
but Elmer Wheeler may, in fact, be a sales hero. Before writing
my first proposal, I held the typical view of salesmen: loudmouthed,
overbearing, full of hype, lacking subtlety and substance. Then
I began writing proposals—losing proposals. And I asked
myself why I was losing them. I learned slowly and painfully that
proposals are not engineering documents. They're not technical
reports, specifications, dissertations, or treatises. They are
sales tools. Their purpose is to sell something to somebody. Understanding
that distinction made all the difference in my proposals. Now
I think Elmer Wheeler's dictum—In proposals, you have
to sell the sizzle to sell the steak—is at least half
right. Although I believe Wheeler was right about what you sell
to buyers, I frame this advice a little differently: I tell them
to write customer-oriented proposals—written from
the customer's point of view.
Telling a Compelling Story in Your Proposal
Many proposals are not compelling. At least 80 percent
suffer from a common problem—they are feature-rich descriptions
of the proposer's products and services but do not link those
features to the customer's goals and key issues and do not substantiate
their claims. To tell a compelling story in a proposal, it must
speak to the customer's problems, needs, and goals. The solution
offered must answer that customer's needs and must show why the
chosen solution is best for that customer.
The Kickoff Meeting
Of all the milestones in the proposal process, none may
be more important than the kickoff meeting: important for the
company; for the proposal core team; for each contributor; and,
ultimately, for the customer. Properly conceived, the kickoff
meeting is not just a symbolic gesture whose real purpose has
long been forgotten, leaving little more than a standardized ceremony
of corporate cliches before the storm. The kickoff meeting is,
or should be, the moment of truth for the people who must plan
and execute the proposal effort because it allows you to begin
applying three principles fundamental to proposal management:
Teamwork; Project Plan; and Process.
What It Takes to Win
To win a competitive bid, you must build preference on top of
two solid foundations: credibility and acceptability. You must
have a credible solution to the customer's problems and needs,
and you must be acceptable to them as supplier. However, credibility
and acceptability alone will not seal the deal. You must also
establish a preferred position with the people in the customer's
organization who will make or influence the selection decision.
How do you establish credibility, acceptability, and—most
importantly—preference?
Why You Will Lose If You Wait
According to an old adage, "If it weren't for the last minute,
a lot of things would never get done." Does that describe
your business development efforts? Do you typically start late
and not finish the proposal until the last moment? Does this describe
the way you normally work? My point is not to make you feel guilty
because you procrastinate. There's always so much to do that you
can never get ahead; you can only keep from falling farther behind.
Still, would anyone argue with the idea that you should start
early when pursuing new business development opportunities? It's
self-evident that starting earlier is better.
Winning More Than Your Share
Barely a day goes by that I'm not working with clients
one way or another to address their most urgent business goal:
build market share. In one instance, a global engineering firm
submitted approximately 100 proposals during their fiscal year
and didn't win a single project. They went into an intense strategy
session and when they emerged, their strategy for the new year
would be to submit 200 proposals. When they called me to get my
opinion, I said, "Well, with any luck, you'll double your
win rate." So after that, I suggested a different approach:
Instead of pursuing opportunities, you need to pursue customers.
Achieving the transition from opportunity selling to behaviorally
differentiated customer relationships, leads to time share, mind
share, wallet share, and market share—resulting in winning
more than your share.
|