Loved and hated = losing

Proposal teams always talk about the need to appeal to the interests of all members of the evaluation team. And, of course, said team is likely to be multi-disciplinary in nature – comprising representatives of each of the business functions with an interest in the decision and the solution.

There was an interesting illustration of this principle in a discussion recently with a senior purchasing manager. He talked about a recent evaluation, where three bidders were in contention for a particular contract. Bidder A came out clearly on top of the scoring with half of the evaluators; the other half of the team were passionately in favour of Bidder B. Needless to say, Bidder A’s fans hated Bidder B, and vice versa.

The result? Bidder C won – fully capable of delivering the solution, liked by all of the evaluators (but loved by none) – and second in everyone’s scoring… Of course, you’d really want to come top of the table with everyone – but it’s the illustration of the importance of appealing to all of the evaluators that struck me as a particularly pertinent lesson.

This article was written by Jon on 13 April, 2009 and filed under Musings. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via RSS or Email.

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