Posted by Jon
- Don’t be scared to walk away. Put another way, don’t feel that you have to bid. Even (especially) when you’re incumbent, work out whether this is good business for you to win – and whether the deal is winnable. If you’ve been losing money on the contract for years, their requirements are unrealistic, they’re a nightmare to work with and their chief decision-maker’s best friends with a competitor, then qualifying out may be the best option.
- Try and avoid them seeking competitive quotes in the first place. At the very least (e.g. if they’re a public body which has to retender), think what you can do to wire the RFP in your favour – you should have the information, and the access to their people, needed to influence their requirements and criteria.
- “Play nice” in the period up to renewal – make sure there’s real focus on quality and cost-effectiveness of everything you do in the run-up to the tendering process, and try to throw in some new ideas and improvements as you go.
- Draft your proposal well in advance. You should be able to predict the questions that they’ll ask. So develop your content, review it, highlight gaps in your knowledge – and make sure that your time between RFP receipt and the submission date can be spent on fine-tuning and tailoring.
- Play back praise. If you’ve got “nice quotes” from the customer’s staff (at various levels – operational as well as senior management), or data points showing how well you’re doing, use them. Actually, more than this – make sure that your pre-proposal planning discussions recognise the need for such quotes, and that the sales team (actively but subtly) goes about gathering them in before the RFP arrives.
- Be honest. If things have gone wrong in the past, acknowledge them – but show what you’ve learned, and what you’ve done differently as a result that has avoided a recurrence of the problem.
- Use their data. If you’re the incumbent, you should have detailed insights into what they do now, and into volumes, costs, service levels, timescales etc. There’s no excuse for your proposal not being the most detailed and specific, in terms of its recommendations and the way it presents the benefits of the proposed new solution.
- Present your improvement suggestions. One would hope that your “insider’s view” should help you to generate good ideas as to how things could be done better.
- Show how you’ve improved things over the lifetime of the contract that’s coming to an end. (Sub-text: we don’t only offer you cool stuff when you force our backs to the wall).
- Subtly – reflect the cost and risk of change, should they go to an incumbent.
- Be clear, if asked, that were you not selected, you’d handle any “transition out” with the utmost professionalism – that the customer’s ongoing success matters to you, even if you’re not chosen as their supplier.
- Remember that the competition will be hungry to dislodge you. “What would we do were we in their position” is an important test.