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Opportunity Pursuit – part 2, making sales

Written by: Phil Shipperlee

Article Overview: Getting over excited that there is an opportunity to bid can be dangerous as it could distort your objectivity. This article identifies key factors in mounting the response.

Opportunity Pursuit – part 2, making sales

Finally! This is the stage where you get to make sales, take orders and earn money for your business.

The first article on Opportunity Pursuit highlighted the distinction between identifying and creating opportunities. This article identifies key factors in mounting the response, and in the next article, I’ll cover the mechanism of Quantification for ensuring a more productive bid.

Getting over excited that there is an opportunity to bid can be dangerous as it could distort your objectivity. Creating a plan to cover the whole bid cycle will help you to avoid this trap.

Bid/deal plan

Once you reach the stage of actually planning a bidding campaign, you are past the stimulation and specification stages of the buying process.

The prospect is now moving into the three final stages of their buying process; search for and select a supplier, substantiate the selection, and sign-off and sanction the decision. Your bid plan must include everything that you need to do to meet the customer’s timetable for the buying cycle, and also how you will manage the customer relationship as they go through the process of selection, sign-off and sanction. You also need to agree with the prospect exactly what form your proposal will take.

I cannot over emphasise the importance of good quality information to underpin your bid plan and proposal. The result of incomplete information is imperfect opinion that will lead to poor judgement in how to mount your bid.

Account planning and Account networking

We previously talked about the different roles within the account, the key ones being; gate keeper, influencer, information provider, coach, buyer, decision maker, user, and budget holder. During the customer creation process you will have identified and got to know these people and they will have helped you to understand how their organisation functions. Now, these people will be very useful to you, and the relationships built up over time will prove invaluable. For example, anyone wearing the hats of influencer, information provider and particularly coach will clearly be of great value to you. However, if you do not know who these people are, it is too late once you have an opportunity to work on, perhaps with only 10 – 14 days to respond. Knowing these people in advance is not necessarily enough, you must gain their agreement that they will continue to talk to you once you have submitted your proposal.

The account plan comes into its own now as the repository, collecting and collating all the information you will need when bidding for an opportunity.

A valuable selling process involves anticipating and pre-empting objections. By providing your proposed solution in a form that includes answers to questions and objections that you expect the prospect to raise, you are controlling the high ground when it comes to the negotiation stage. You can only achieve this if you have good information and you can only gain good information through careful research cross-correlated with your inside contacts.

Value Propositions and ROI

During the process of creating a customer, you can help them to understand, in general terms, the value of your proposition and the value of their relationship with your company.

For an individual opportunity you need to establish specifically what really matters to them and why. What is it that they will be prepared to pay extra for? It could, for example, be about a guarantee of on time delivery, it could be about the quality of your creative work, or it could be about risk mitigation. You have to establish all of their buying and selection criteria so that you can present your solution in the most favourable light when measured against their buying criteria and your competitors.

If you do not do the work to ensure you are perceived in terms of value then you will probably be perceived as a commodity and the decision may well be made on price alone.

Win/Loss Review

Whether you win or lose, find out why. Understanding fully why you win, as well as why you lose, is vital for future planning for other work both with the individual customer and with other prospects as well. The output from the win/loss process should be fed back into the qualification and quantification process for the individual customer, and also for other suspects and prospects in similar market sectors and segments as there may be common lessons to be learnt.

The win/loss review process should not be undertaken by the sales person who was involved in the bid as they are too personally involved for the customer to be completely honest and objective. For important customers, it is very impressive if the CEO of the supplier takes the time to undertake the review. It can also be done by an external company or someone other than the sales person from the supplier; perhaps the quality manager, technical or financial director. You should create a simple check list to ensure you ask all the questions you want answered.

Tips:

* Create a bid plan

* Include a resource plan to ensure the right resources are available at the right time to work on your bid.

* Create a multi-skilled bid team for both creation and review; use people with different skills from within your business, plus external experts where appropriate, to review the bid. Several pairs of eyes are better than just one.

* Include a networking plan to cover all relevant contacts within the prospect’s organisation.

* Ensure your bid plan covers the whole buying cycle – don’t be left wondering what is going on because the customer clams up having received your proposal – ensure you have contacts who will keep talking to you.

* Ensure you have as much relevant information as possible; gleaned through Qualification and Quantification.

* Do not be seduced into using too much standard material in your proposal – customers will spot boiler-plate a mile off and it will leave them feeling less than special.

* Don’t assume you know what will impress the customer – ask them what criteria will really count when they are making their selection.

* Understand and then pre-empt their likely objections.

* Present value or be treated as a commodity.

* Win or lose, understand why and make good use of the information for future bids.

Copyright © Performative plc 2001-2006. All rights reserved.

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