Your Credentials Are Not a Sales Pitch – or Why Not to Fall in Love with Your Own Story

There’s more information in the market than ever before, but two things haven’t really changed.

The first is that customers really only care about their own pressing problems — the things that they are charged with figuring out or delivering within their own organisation.

The second is that the great majority of suppliers are, naturally, quite keen to sell their own products and services.

So, as a result, there is often a real disconnect in the way that suppliers deliver their message to customers.  Many “proposals” are really just credentials pieces that push the supplier’s story and assume that the customer will be able (and motivated) to read between the lines and see how that’s relevant to them. This is just showboating — it’s not an actual sales pitch.

The rise of competitive tenders has actually compounded this problem, because “proposal production” has become an assembly-line job that is delegated to the least experienced and least knowledgeable members of staff. A lot of the boilerplate information available to cut and paste into proposals is really just white noise to the customer, who is busy being kept awake by problems that suppliers don’t seem to understand and definitely don’t look like they have a solution for.

Too frequently, suppliers often become unhealthily attached to our own story, and it takes maturity and presence to know when it’s time to change a pitch we spent a lot of time and effort on.

In The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, authors Matthew Dixon and Brent Adams describe a pitch that a group of sales reps had spent six months putting together, and that they had to change on the fly to focus on the single issue the customer CEO had most on his mind the day they got a chance to see him.  It’s a good reminder that the sales pitch you prepared is not necessarily the one that the customer wants to hear — or the one that will actually end up closing the deal.

Dear Procurement: all I want for Christmas is…

Last December I ran this letter in the Winning Pitch, and it had the highest open rates of all my newsletters in 2012. So if you missed my Christmas letter to Procurement it, here it is again, with a few amendments to bring it up to date for 2013. Unfortunately, the bad news is that not much has changed in the buyer/supplier relationship in the past twelve months. The good news is that there is still room for improvement!

Here's hoping that the New Year brings more balance for all of us in the tendering system. No matter what side of the fence you sit on, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year :-)

Dear buyers,

You need stuff done; we know how to do things.  We need each other, and we really want to work with you to do great things together.

Unfortunately, the tendering system is turning us into adversaries, not collaborators. Like us, you are probably drowning under a pile of forms and schedules, and you must be wondering if there is a better way to make buying decisions.  We think there is.  Here is how, with only a few small adjustments, we can change this system for the better.

• Let us talk to you again. A tender isn't the only way to scope the market and for complex purchases, it really isn't the best option. So let’s have a chat. Things change quickly and you might be surprised about what we can do for you now that you haven't yet heard about. And, while we’re on the subject…
• Bring back Expressions of Interest.  If you want to assess potential suppliers on paper, why not use an EOI, rather than an RFT? These are short and reasonably straightforward for us to complete. They make us feel like we’re in with chance, and not like we are jumping over a very high hurdle for a very small likelihood of return.
• Say what you mean. Years have passed since the introduction of competitive tendering, but the tenders themselves haven't changed very much in all that time. They are often hard to interpret, and the evaluation criteria don’t always match the questions. With better instructions, any supplier with a bit of common sense will be able to bid confidently. That’s good for you, and it’s good for us.
• Timetable a response period that’s reasonable. We run a pretty tight ship these days; our staff are stretched and it can be difficult to keep up with complex RFT requirements and shrinking deadlines. Crunching us for time because you’re late to market only means you get rushed, poor quality submissions. On the other hand…
• Don’t issue a timetable and then grant a last-minute extension just before the deadline. This unfairly disadvantages (and discourages) the suppliers that are prepared, and have made it a priority to respond to your RFT.
• Please, answer our questions when we ask them. We think very hard before we submit questions about an RFT, because we don’t want to waste your time. But often, we don’t get meaningful answers (or sometimes, any answers). Better information will mean better proposals for you to evaluate.  And finally…
• Have a heart - don’t drop a tender on 21 December.  We know you like to come back to a full inbox, but we would like to see our families too.

There's no doubt the tendering system could work better, and together, we have the power to make it happen. 

You know, at the end of the day, we are all just people. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. So come meet some of us; we bet you will like what you see and hear.

With hope and best wishes for a Happy New Year, Your Prospective Suppliers

The Power Of Graphics For Page-Limited Submissions

This week, I’m coming to the end of a strategically significant bid process, working with a large team on a submission that has been in the making for a very long time. I will miss this delightful, talented and committed group of people very much when we hit “send” on the proposal next week. This is a consortium submission from incumbent suppliers pitching to retain a complex range of services worth tens of millions of dollars, and where dozens of people’s jobs are on the line.

Notwithstanding the bid’s complexity, the RFT response templates are — as always, it seems, these days — highly limited in what they will let us include. In one case, we have a total of three pages to cover our expertise, experience, and understanding of the service delivery need. Getting this message across within such tight word limits is extremely difficult, and we have used graphics extensively in this proposal to help overcome our space challenges.

Unfortunately lack of space in RFT responses is a trend that isn't going anywhere.  (Check out my blog post "Why Buyers Are Asking For Short Proposals").

Last year I ran a short program in conjunction with Colleen Jolly of 24 Hour Company in the USA on International Best Practice in Proposal Graphics.  Today, Colleen shared a link to an article written by Mike Parkinson — her colleague and the author of Billion Dollar Graphics — on the topic of Using Graphics in Page-Limited Proposals.

It seems Mike’s clients over in the USA are feeling the same pain as my team and I are feeling here. Mike says “RFPs often ask for the sun, moon, and stars in 10 pages. The challenge we face is when, where, and how do we add graphics to a 10-page proposal (that should be 40 pages to effectively answer the RFP)?”

If you’ve wondered about this yourself, check out Mike’s article where he discusses the reasons why graphics are easier to understand than text alone; why they get the point across more quickly than words; and how graphics reduce perceptions of risk.

Why buyers are asking for short proposals

Like me, you are probably seeing a lot more word and page-limited tender response requests coming out from the market these days. A quick check of the tenders I worked on over the past six months revealed that more than half had page limits for responding to each criterion. On the surface it makes sense as to why this might be happening. After all, if you're a procurement officer or a buyer and you're expecting dozens or hundreds of tender responses, you would want them to be as succinct as possible so that you don't have to wade through pages and pages of unnecessary information in order to score the response. Page limiting and word limiting proposals might reduce your workload by as much as 50%.

But there's another reason why it's a good practice to ask for word and page-limited responses.

That's because buyers understand that it actually takes much more effort to write something within a tight set of limits than it does when no limits are given.

There's a famous quote by the French mathematician, physicist, and inventor Blaise Pascal, who lived in the 17^th century. Pascal said, "I have made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

To me, that sums it up nicely. When suppliers are not limited in how much information they can provide, it's easy to just throw the kitchen sink into the bid and let the buyer sort it out. This has led to a lot of lazy, assembly line proposal writing.

Buyers know that they will get better quality responses if they force you to think about how you can make your proposal shorter. If you have less space and fewer words to get your point across, the good proposals will be better —and those that were never going to be any good anyway at least won't be as tiring or taxing to assess.

Proposal positioning tip: how to retain important contracts

In contract retention projects, the stakes are very high.  Often there are millions of dollars and many peoples’ livelihoods on the line. My specialty is working on critical bids for contracts that are strategically important to the growth or stability of the clients I work with.  This means I often work on retention projects with incumbent suppliers who are seeking to retain their biggest clients. In one extreme case, I was asked to work with a new client on a tender that represented 100% of their business.  No pressure, then!

In my experience, there are many traps for incumbents, not the least of which involves working with a lot of nervous people who are relying on you.  So if you already have the business, and need to retain it, here’s what to do.

• Sit down with everyone in your organisation that interacts with the customer and ask them a very simple question – ‘If it were in your power to improve only one thing about (customer’s) business, what would it be’?  Really LISTEN to the people at the coal face.  They are your eyes and ears on the ground and they usually have the best ideas about what the customer really wants.  They will also know which of your competitors is talking to them– and the ideas the customer is listening to.
• Approach the proposal like it’s your very first pitch to the customer.  Incumbents get unseated because they lose the fire and the passion for the business.  Prove to them that you’ve still got it.
• Use your proposal to paint a picture of the future, not to talk about the past.  Relying on past successes is a classic mistake that loses business for even the most worthy suppliers. When leading an incumbency pitch, your job is to get the customer excited about why they should sign with you for the next three years and beyond – not tell them what you’ve done for them for the past three years (or thirty).
• Spell out the risks of losing your know-how, your proprietary systems, your people - whatever it takes to make them think long and hard about what it will really mean if they go elsewhere.

Proposal Positioning: Is Your Expert Really An Expert?

Given my background in sales and marketing, I still have a keen interest in what the advertising and marketing industry is doing. One of my favourite things to watch on TV is Gruen Planet, one of the many versions of The Gruen franchise produced by Andrew Denton. I love the way the panellists on Gruen Planet try to get inside the head of what advertisers are thinking when they put certain messages forward. Sometimes those messages can seem very strange indeed.

Recently I saw an ad that - while it wasn’t funny enough for Gruen Planet - certainly struck me as very strange. It's an ad for Sensodyne Toothpaste, and it’s presented by an attractive young woman talking about the benefits of Sensodyne Toothpaste for “sensitive teeth patients”, I think she called them.

The thing that’s really strange about this ad is that this woman is the Marketing Manager for Sensodyne, and they actually say so in the copy. Since when have people trusted the marketing manager’s views as an expert on what makes a good toothpaste? Where have all the dentists gone?

For me, this served as a reminder to be careful about who we put forward as experts in our proposal. Sure, the ideas our experts talk about are generally concocted by a team of people, which may of course include the sales and marketing people. But customers want to hear from experts - the people who have the training and the knowledge to make such pronouncements. I’d be happy to hear the marketing manager talk about marketing, which is what she’s trained and experienced to do.  But when it comes to the benefits of toothpaste, give me a dentist any day.

Context vs content - using your proposal to fill in both sides of the sales conversation

When you speak to a buyer in person, you can tell by their body language and expression whether or not your message has actually landed.  In a proposal, you can’t – and that’s pretty scary. Like it or not, a large part of the sales relationship is transacted through formal RFTs these days, without the opportunity for a feedback loop.  This means your proposal needs to work extra hard to fill in both sides of the conversation – just as if the buyer were in the room asking questions and getting information from you.

Content is what you say in your proposal; it’s your message.  Context is what gives meaning to your message.  Content without context is easily misunderstood.

For example, let’s say you have arrived back in your office after two days on the road presenting new construction techniques to a major client.  Your boss buzzes you and says abruptly “Steve, come and see me right now.”  As you hang up you think “The client called, they hated my presentation, and I’m going to get my butt kicked.”

But imagine if your boss had instead said “Welcome back Steve!  ABC Developments called, and they loved your presentation. Their engineers have raised some questions about the logistics of the new concrete panels.  It’s not a big deal but we need to work it out and get back to them by the end of the week.  Please come and see me now so we can throw around some options.”

What a difference this would make.  Instead of thinking you’re about to get hauled over the coals, you’re straight away thinking about how to answer the client's questions.

Presenting content without context in a proposal is a bit like walking up to an attractive stranger at a party and talking about yourself for 15 minutes without pausing for breath. It's not a great way to start a relationship.

As the expert, you have all this knowledge in your head that the customer doesn't have access to. The buyer doesn’t know what you know; you have to explain it to them. Think of context as a carry-bag for content – context holds your content together and helps it make sense. Part of the work of writing a proposal is to anticipate the questions you are raising for the buyer, and make sure your proposal answers them.

Proposal positioning tip: the tricycle for triplets

The other day I was walking around my neighbourhood when I saw something surprising - three identical 18-month-olds sitting on a tricycle that had clearly been built specifically for triplets. What a great idea! Our customers' businesses are full of opportunities like this; things that they need built to solve problems that they deal with every day, in this case how to manage three toddlers who all want to get on a bike at the same time.

What are the little niggles that your customers have, and that you can provide a solution for?

Not only will they love you for it, this is a great way to build competitive advantage by providing remarkable customer value.

Building a re-election campaign for your most important contracts

In Australia, the federal election is just about to happen.  So for the last six weeks, we have been treated to a once-in-every-three-years display of politicking designed to win our vote. OK, a confession. I’m a bit of a politics geek.  I follow election night stats the way others follow football. And I have been known to engage in a bit of heckling on behalf of causes I believe in.  (I’ll leave it up to you to guess how I'll be numbering the boxes on Saturday!).

Combine my personal interest in politics with a career in business development and you get someone who just can’t help comparing political campaigns to the campaigns we wage (or don’t wage) to win and retain important contracts.

The election campaign takes less than six weeks (though at times it feels like much, much longer). During this time, our pollies have been tweeting, Facebooking, flying around the country and appearing on any TV program that will have them.  Case in point - the TV interviews that Tom Gleeson did with Julie Bishop and Pauline Hanson in his segment “I Hate You, Change My Mind”.  (Julie Bishop’s performance in that interview really did change my mind.  Pauline’s? Not so much).

What’s most fascinating to observe in an election campaign is the way that people behave when they know it’s make-or-break time. Our politicians absolutely understand that what they do now will determine the job they get – if they get one at all - for the next three years or more. Will they be elected? If so, will they be on the winning side or the losing side? How much impact will they really be able to have for their electorate and for the causes they believe in?

There’s a lot riding on how politicians perform in this campaign - and of course, in the weeks and months that led up to it.

In contrast, think about the contracts that you have coming up for bid soon. You’ll have four weeks to respond when the RFT comes out.

What are you doing to get your agenda in front of the customer now, before the probity period locks down? What are you doing to boost performance? To innovate? To leverage your incumbency advantage, and fence off the business from competition?  In most cases, if you’re honest, the answer is probably “not as much as we should be”.

If you have an important contract that’s coming up for bid in the next 12 months, let’s make sure you have a re-election campaign to retain it.  Get in touch and let’s talk about how I can help you and your team to get ready to re-compete.

Spitball podcast: the changing face of positioning value

With so much competition out there, it’s no longer enough to simply keep providing a good level of service. Customers will always be looking for more - and unless you are going the extra mile to differentiate and to position yourself as the as the clear winner, you will find your competitors are pipping you at the post. As a business development consultant working on large bids and tender responses, I’ve seen first-hand the uphill battle faced by suppliers who haven’t put in the necessary work to position against highly motivated and methodical competitors. Unless you take the time to distill down your knowledge about your customer to what they actually need and value, your proposal or RFT response will be just another heavy tome to add to the pile.

In our latest Spitball podcast, Hamish Riddell, Bri Williams and I discuss “The Changing Face of Positioning Value".  Find out why we think that challenging the status quo and nudging the customer to step outside of what they know is a good thing - http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/

What contract bidders can learn from crowdfunding – Part 2

Crowdfunding offers a new model of audience engagement that contract bidders can learn a lot from.  Here are my top four lessons from the most successful crowdfunders.

1. Keep reminding the customer of what’s great about your offer. In crowdfunding, this means up to seven email follow-ups. In your proposal, this means reiterating your most compelling points and spinning them in different ways, not just burying them in the Executive Summary.
2. Make it real. Crowdfunding projects that are supported by engaging video and visuals outsell other projects by a factor of 10 to 1. Successful crowdfunder Chris Thomas, who raised $110,000 through Kickstarter against a target of $10,000 to bring “sleep earmuffs” to market (yes, really), says that there is a direct correlation between “the quality of the video and the bids, and what you end up raising”. Think about how you can elevate your pitch above the usual boring wasteland of uninterrupted words.
3. Make it stand out. In crowdfunding, successful projects tap into needs that customers didn’t even know they had. For example, Patient Zero raised $230,000 through Pozible to stage real life zombie battles, 23 times more than the $10,000 it was originally asking for. In a bid, you’re battling for attention in a crowded marketplace; if everyone can tick all the boxes in the RFT then what makes you any different? Be bold, be an expert, and show the customer a compelling vision of their future working with you.
4. Give something extra. Crowdfunding isn’t charity, and successful crowdfunders recognise that people want to get something back to their investment. A while back, I invested $100 through Pozible in a community project that eventually raised its target of $10,000. In return, I was offered email updates, an invitation to the launch, and my name on the sponsor’s ‘roll of honour’. Rewards don’t have to relate to the project at hand; offer to share your expertise for free on another issue that you know the client is struggling with.

What contract bidders can learn from crowdfunding - Part 1

Crowdfunding offers a new model of audience engagement that contract bidders — who often believe we are talking to an audience that is already sold on what we do — could learn a lot from. Crowdfunding is a social media platform through which millions of dollars have been raised for projects as diverse as a Parma and pot at the local pub ($259 against a target of $20) to millions of dollars of fan funding for a movie version of the TV series Veronica Mars. In the crowdfunding world, the only measure of a project’s worth is whether people will stump up money for it. Most crowdfunding goes to projects that it would be difficult - if not impossible - to get traditional funding for.

There is definite hierarchy in the business of raising money to do stuff.

At the top are products and services that are deemed essential to corporate or public life.  These are funded by governments or businesses through contracts and agreements.

In the middle are traditional grants, where hopefuls parade their wares in front of an entity that has money and is prepared to give some of it away (generally a large corporation, charitable foundation or private donor).

Crowdfunding is at the very bottom of this pyramid.  This is a very interesting place to be, in that crowdfunders are talking to a very wide audience that may or may not have any money - and even if they do, have no intention at the moment of giving any of it away. This forces crowdfunders to put their project in front of everyone they know in a way that is so inspiring that it will prompt them to immediately pull out their credit card.

Check out Part 2 of this article for my top four lessons for contract bidders from the most successful crowdfunders.

Evidence-based Bid Pricing webinar

This month I talked to Greg Eyres of InforValue about how organisations can derive more profit from customer contracts through a smarter approach to bid pricing. The resulting webinar on Evidence-based Bid Pricing is now available to view in Greg’s Resource Centre.

Greg is one of only a handful of specialists in the world that practice in the area of Tender Pricing and his work has dramatically influenced the bid success of some of the largest companies in the world, including Motorola, CSC and IBM. Greg has also developed a number of patents in this space and his articles on tender pricing have been published in industry publications including Informs Journal, Frontiers in Services and Shortlist. Recently, Greg developed KPrice - the world’s only evidence-based pricing tool suite designed specifically for tendering. A Chartered Accountant by training, Greg now consults on Tender Pricing issues around the Asia-Pacific region.

In this webinar, Greg shares a number of interesting case studies that demonstrate the dramatic effect of evidence-based bid pricing on the success of pursuits. For example, Greg and his team were once able to convince the client to increase their $60 million budget by 25%, due to the weight of evidence they had acquired about the true cost of providing the service.

Proposal writing tip: why your great track record isn't a free pass to reinstatement

When you’ve done similar work for a client, and done it well – sometimes for many years – it’s tempting to think this is all you need to talk about to win again. Unfortunately, when reduced to writing, your great track record only explains who you were yesterday; not who you are today and who you’re planning to be tomorrow.

Talk about your track record, but don’t rest on it. Explain how the client will derive future value from what you’ve done before - in reduced risk, higher quality, know-how and IP.

The first sale is to yourself

What goes through your mind when you’re faced with a big, juicy opportunity that you would really love to win? Requests for Tender present exactly that kind of opportunity. The pot of gold that a huge contract might bring looks as shiny and enticing as a lotto win. On the flip side, there’s sky-high anxiety when teams are forced to re-compete for business already worth millions to them – and that competitors now also have the opportunity to bid for.

Because competing for business is so stressful, pretty much everyone’s first reaction is to start babbling about themselves and why they deserve to win. Left unchecked, the proposal will reflect that kind of shallow, self-centred thinking and the underlying current of anxiety it came from. This is very off-putting to buyers, who - like the rest of us - are wired to tune out at the first sign of a sales pitch.

Jakob Nielsen, an expert in website usability, did an experiment to measure the way that writing style affects selling on the web. He concluded that “promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users, who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts. When people read a paragraph that starts ‘Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions,’ their first reaction is ‘no, it's not!’, and this thought slows them down and distracts them from using the site.”

Therefore, when you’re writing a proposal to convince a buyer, the first and most important sale is to yourself. It’s essential to take the time to define your proposal strategy - what the customer most wants, what you can best deliver, and what positions you most favourably against competitors. This gives you access to the most powerful competitive weapon you could ever have; belief in your ability to make a difference for the customer.

Despite this, most organisations don’t have a good methodology to define proposal strategy. It’s common to see less than 5% of proposal development time devoted to strategy, and this usually amounts to kicking around “our points of difference” - the output from which then gets translated into the proposal as some kind of laundry list titled “Why You Should Choose Us.”  Unfortunately, our enthusiasm for ourselves will never be as compelling as enthusiasm for what the customer wants to achieve and how we can help them to achieve it. Or as Dale Carnegie puts it in How To Win Friends and Influence People, "the only way on earth to influence others is to talk to them about what they want and show them how to get it."

The Persuasive Tender and Proposal Writing Master Class provides many valuable tools and techniques to help you to develop your proposal from the customer’s point of view. For example, you will be trained in my Bid Strategy and Purchaser Value Topics Development Methodology, which is licensed and used by organisations in very competitive industries that consistently win almost everything they bid for. Watch the video to find out more.

Nine ways to slice and dice competitors

Competition is a reality of business life. As long as there are contracts to be won, deals to be done, and money to be made, you can bet that there will be others apart from you who will be interested. Pitching for business is always a stressful exercise. Much of the stress actually comes from the fact that we are being judged against others and might be found wanting, rather than from the more obvious pressures of meeting the deadlines and the customer's requirements.

It's not always possible to know exactly how many competitors you are up against, or the strength of that competition, but one thing you can be certain of is that you won't be the only supplier in contention for the job.  When you already have the business and want to retain it, this thought can be terrifying.

So while it’s tempting to pull the covers over your head and hope they'll go away, these particular bogeymen could stand in the way of a lucrative contract. Let's shine a flashlight in those dark corners to see what might be lurking there.

When I work on bids with my clients, I’ve noticed that almost all of them think of their competitors as the firms or organisations that are the closest match to themselves – what I call “peer competitors”. Often there is a tendency to underestimate the field of competition as a result. So here are nine other ways to slice and dice potential competitors that might pose a threat to your ability to win:

1. National firms, if you are local
2. Local firms, if you are national
3. Much larger or much smaller firms
4. Firms that already work with your customers in another capacity
5. Firms with expertise in an area of current or future interest to the buyer
6. Firms with expansion plans that include your market space
7. Potential partnerships among competitors, including joint ventures and consortia
8. Offshore and multinational competitors, and
9. The buyer themselves – they might do nothing, spend their money on other priorities, or decide to do it themselves.

Proposal writing tip: etc = “oops, ran out of things to say”

Think your proposal is ready to go? Do a quick spell-check and see if you can find any instances of the abbreviation “etc”. This is one sign that the proposal isn't yet ready for the customer to read.

At best, finishing a sentence with “etc” looks like you have run out of things to say; at worst, like you have run out of interest in what you were writing about. It doesn't matter whether you were stumped, distracted or just ran out of time.  You don't want one little three-letter word to tarnish an otherwise great proposal.

Luckily, this is easy to fix even if you don't have a lot of time left before the deadline.

Look again at any phrase ending in “etc” and see if you have supported the main claim with at least three pieces of evidence ("...for example, X, Y and Z").  If you really had run out of things to say, consider deleting it.  The customer won't notice it's missing - but they will notice your use of “etc”!

Is your bid pricing methodology leaving money on the table?

Join pricing consultant Greg Eyres and I for a free 30-minute webinar on Thursday 13 June 1.00pm (AEST) and find out how to use Evidence-Based Bid Pricing as a powerful strategic weapon to build more successful bids. Customers will spend if they get value in return. However, according to bid pricing specialist Greg Eyres of Inforvalue, most organisations have a bid pricing model that doesn’t consider value at all. “Your bid price speaks volumes about your company but the task of pricing is usually approached with a great deal of nervousness,” Eyres says.

Are you nervous about bid pricing? If you aren’t, maybe you should be. There’s a very good chance that your pricing methodology is losing you bids and is also leaving money on the table that could have been yours, had you advocated for it. Some of the telltale signs that your bid pricing model needs an overhaul:

• You’re making a "guesstimate" of all your costs, adding on a margin and hoping for the best.  
• You tend to leave pricing to the day before the deadline.
• You’re always revising and whittling away at your price as a result of late information.
• Your sales and finance teams constantly lock horns, with one advocating for what the customer will pay and the other insisting on cost recovery.

“Customers will pay when they perceive they get more benefit than they pay for - in other words, where the value justifies the price,” says Eyres. "A tendering environment, by its very nature, gives you the opportunity to get to these value drivers. During the tendering period, you have the ability to communicate regularly with the customer and to get a detailed understanding of their business model.  Through this, you can determine how you can affect the customer's ability to create value for its own customers and/or reduce its own costs. This not only gives you evidence to develop your pricing strategy, it also enhances the relationship you have with the customer.”

Greg and I are delivering a free webinar on Thursday June 13 where we will discuss how to use Evidence-Based Bid Pricing as a powerful strategic weapon to build more successful bids.

If you missed the webinar, contact Greg Eyres to find out more about Evidence-Based Bid Pricing.

Proposal positioning tips for challengers and incumbents

A proposal is just a means to an end. You aren't writing a proposal - you are convincing someone to buy from you. The role your proposal will need to play to achieve this goal will be very different, depending on whether you are pitching to a prospect or a customer.

If you're pitching to a prospect — someone you've never done business with before — you're a “challenger”. In this role, you may need to win the business away from someone else or to convince the prospect to buy something that they're not currently in the habit of buying.

If you're pitching to a customer – someone you're currently doing business with, or for whom you have done similar projects before — you're an “incumbent”. In this role, you already have the business and want to retain it, or you want the customer to continue giving you repeat business in preference to competitors.

So which role are you playing today – challenger or incumbent?

As a challenger (you want to win the business), your proposal needs to convince the prospect of your relevance. First, you must get them to notice you, then get them interested enough to listen to you. This is particularly true when you are responding to a formal tender request. Once you’ve done those things, you also have the task of getting the prospect motivated enough to go through the perceived pain and hassle of signing up - or changing suppliers - in order to work with you. Change is a risk and the prospect will be looking for reasons not to give you the business. Don’t make this easy for them.

If you're an incumbent (you already have the business and want to retain it), your proposal needs to convince the customer that you remain relevant to them. Be aware that while change is a risk, they are also taking a risk by staying with you. First, you must show them that you are not just resting on your (hopefully excellent) service record. Next, you need to present your vision of their future. Finally, you need to show them that you are continuing to innovate and build best practice in your business from which they stand to benefit.

This is the first of 10 tips in my new e-book - 10 Easy Ways to Write a Better Proposal Today. See sidebar to download your free copy.

Two reliable ways to improve your proposal success rates

How do you go about continually improving your proposals? You may be missing out on valuable insights that could really make a difference to your win rates. Most people I talk to only pay attention to losses. That's understandable, but it is rarely helpful.

Yes, it hurts to lose. Your boss is probably breathing down your neck for answers. Maybe you want to argue with the prospect in the hope they'll change their mind.

Unfortunately, in most cases there is little value in seeking feedback on a lost opportunity.

If you're not the winner, the prospect has no interest in giving you rational feedback that you can actually use. You aren't the supplier they chose. They just want you out of their office and out of their hair. In a government tender debriefing, you will get the least possible information designed to protect the department’s probity position.

If you think that sounds a bit disheartening, it is. There's no way to sugar-coat it.

The truth is that there are only two reliable ways to build your proposal success rates.

1. Get feedback when you win. Every win contains a lesson and your mission is to figure out what that lesson is. We often tend to skip this step due to a little habit called "confirmation bias" which - according to Bri Williams, a specialist in buying behaviour -  is our tendency to seek information that confirms our existing beliefs. In other words, to assume that the reasons why we won the business are the reasons why we thought we should win it. Never assume; always ask. You may well be surprised at the things that the client liked most about your offer.

2. Get feedback from a friendly, long-standing client, even if they passed this time. They probably still like you and feel they owe you an explanation. For example, one of my most successful clients recently lost a bid that they were fully expecting to win. Yes, it hurt, but they were able to pull themselves out of the post-loss quagmire and really listen when the customer told them where our bid had missed the mark. These insights were the benchmark against which the bid team assessed everything we put into the next bid. The customer was impressed, and three months later my client was rewarded with a huge contract that was widely considered a long shot before we got the wake-up call.