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Opportunity Pursuit – part 3, keeping a finger on the pulse!

Written by: Phil Shipperlee

Article Overview: As stated previously, opportunity pursuit is different and separate from the creation of customers; it is driven by a process which draws on information gathered earlier and continually evaluates the health & development of an opportunity right up until the contract is secured.

Opportunity Pursuit – part 3, keeping a finger on the pulse!

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

As stated previously, opportunity pursuit is different and separate from the creation of customers; it is driven by a process that we call Quantification. This draws on information gathered through the earlier process of qualification, and is used to continually evaluate the health & development of an opportunity up until the contract is secured.

Quantification shares one characteristic with qualification in that they both involve asking planned questions in a controlled manner. The key difference is that quantification is about hard facts such as decision and delivery dates, the decision process, amounts of money such as the budget and contractual matters, whereas qualification is more about building the relationship between supplier and customer.

The questioning technique used is known as “extended structured questioning” which involves a series of short sharp linked questions that lead to a specific point that you want to know. This is rather like chess where each move has a small purpose in itself but when linked to other planned moves, and the anticipation of the other side’s moves, creates a linked strategy. Good questioning technique is the ultimate communication tool for shaping and steering the progress of a sales negotiation.

The sorts of questions you ask in quantification depend entirely on your company, your proposition and your target market. In effect, you are taking the criteria from the Market Focus stage, where you defined your proposition and profiled who might buy it - the “ideal” prospect, and those characteristics that define “ideal” create the quantification questions.

Even if the prospect is already at the specify stage when you meet them, you can use good questioning techniques to both fully understand the specification and also to dig behind to find out what issues stimulated the desire to seek a solution. The more you know the more control you have.

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 the information gained from your inside contacts. Again, this is about carefully planned and executed questioning. I know one company who were short-listed from over 20 bidders to the last two but lost at the last hurdle because they had pushed their capability with leading edge technology. All the evidence proved the customer was not that brave and preferred proven technology but the supplier was trapped by thinking that what they had to give was more important than what the customer wanted to receive.

Is it moving ... or dead?

It is often said that if a deal is not moving it is probably dead. Quantification helps you to know where you stand. It also provides input to the probability of winning the deal by addressing such factors as; how well your solution fits the requirement, how well your financial position fits the Customer’s budget and how you are positioned against competition, including recognition that the Customer may be a potential “competitor” with an internally developed solution. These factors are then further adjusted against time – the time until the decision is to be made by the Customer – the further you are away from the decision date, the weaker your position.

Finally, and most importantly, the information collected through quantification tells us what we have to do to win the deal. Too many bids are well planned up to the stage of presenting the proposal but run out of steam when it comes to managing the customer relationship as they go through the process of selection, sign-off and sanction. You must have had that experience of submitting your bid only to find all communication from the customer side dries up. Whilst creating your bid plan ensure you have routes into the prospect throughout their buying cycle and that you have advanced agreement that they will talk to you on specific occasions.

Quantification is not a one-shot activity. It is very important that the factors affecting probability are reviewed, and updated every time circumstances change. The frequency of review will increase as you approach the customer’s decision date. Consequently, the quantification process provides a valuable management tool enabling critical review of the progress of opportunities through the bid cycle. The golden rule with quantification is to ask the same question of different people, to ask the same person the same question in different ways and to re-ask the same questions at different stages of the buying cycle. This process of “triangulation” increases your certainty that what you know is real and true.

Tips:
* Quantification helps to decide whether to “no-bid” the opportunity but more importantly it helps you to decide how to bid – it feeds your bid strategy and plan.

* Short sharp questions are easier for the prospect to answer accurately, and they are less likely to create an unwillingness to answer at all.

* Extended structured questions will help you to discover those things that are traditionally hard to unearth; the names of your competitors, the budget for the work and where you are ranked against competition. But remember the prospect will feel under less pressure away from the bidding process.

* Don’t forget to triangulate - ask the same question of different people, ask the same person the same question in different ways and re-ask the same questions at different stages of the buying cycle.

* The repetitive calculation of probabilities at different stages of the buying cycle, based on quantification, supports decisions about what does or doesn’t belong in the pipeline.

* Whilst delivering your account plan, ensure you create routes into the customer giving you access throughout their buying cycle.

* If you do lose a deal, call the prospect to undertake a loss review. It will provide valuable information that you can use on future bids. In some cases you may find that “buyer remorse” has set in and that they are not happy with the decision they have made – you might just win it back.

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