Winning and retaining clients through a successful proposal campaign is the cornerstone to growing a business. The written bid document represents one critical piece of the tender matrix that, when professionally assembled, will deliver the business to your firm.
We strongly recommend that before investing it is essential that a vendor clearly understands when it should mount a bid effort and when it should walk away before the expensive process of responding starts. A high success rate of bids comes from:
- Aggressive opportunity qualification; and
- Clearly understanding why customers have chosen you in the past – your unique.
To accomplish this, we help our customers develop an “ideal client” or Class A prospect profile that evolves to the building of a detailed qualification matrix. When executed correctly, this process paints a picture of the prospect who will embrace your submission as a best practice proposal from a trusted advisor and deliver a high probability of winning the business.
Subsequent revenue opportunities as they are uncovered are filtered through the qualification matrix to distill a bid or no bid result. A key element of that decision process is the identification of the Win Theme.
- Why – based on our current knowledge of the client, are we convinced that if we respond the prospect will choose us over a competitor.
- What is our unique value to the prospect that will ensure our success and that will justify the proposal effort. Does the prospect agree?
If we don’t know these answers then we encourage clients to either go and find out or choose not to bid until a better opportunity is found to match the Class A profile.
It is better to walk away from twenty opportunities and win every one of the five you choose to pursue.
Having decided to bid, best practice steps to success that we support include:
- Ongoing refinement and validation of the win themes and compelling messaging supporting the unique value delivery.
- Project management of proposal response. Written, visual and verbal. Specific focus on generating a document with a hard hitting executive summary, aligned prospect business drivers to offered solution, clear unique value claim, embedded differentiation and up sell points throughout the document.
- Development of the matrix of strategic sales representation calls on the prospect in parallel to the tender development. Gathering of feedback from these calls to refine and checkpoint the proposal.
- Planning and rehearsal of informal and formal presentations to prospect decision makers and influencers. Coaching for effective personal delivery by customer facing individuals in voice, appearance, structure and body language for maximum impact.
- Internal proposal sign off assurance before delivery.
- Running a simulated loss review before tender delivery to identify areas of exposure and strategies to offset competitive positioning.
- Post decision review and identification of what worked and what dd not.
- Create and capture for the corporate proposal memory the bid, the lessons and to ensure these are available for the next proposal.
- Review and re-validate the Class A prospect matrix given the bid experience.
The Dalsuit Group provides coaching, support, must win and hands on proposal writing services to support our customers in knowing when to walk away and when to commission a truly compelling, pull out the stops proposal campaign absolutely focused on winning.