Posted by Jon
I was party to an interesting debate recently amongst a group of proposal managers from different companies, who discussed techniques for winning with a higher price than their competitors.
Most of their debate centred on the philosophy that BJ uses to great effect when training salespeople about proposal strategy: “If you don’t create value, all the customer has left to go on is price.” So they talked about creating empathy with the customer, working out win themes, drawing out points of differentiation from competitors and suchlike.
I was party to an interesting debate recently amongst a group of proposal managers from different companies, who discussed techniques for winning with a higher price than their competitors.
Most of their debate centred on the philosophy that BJ uses to great effect when training salespeople about proposal strategy: “If you don’t create value, all the customer has left to go on is price.” So they talked about creating empathy with the customer, working out win themes, drawing out points of differentiation from competitors and suchlike.
Perhaps they were just being polite, but – observing from the sidelines – it struck me that they missed playing on the fear factor that lurks for so many evaluators. Two of the more powerful messages to weave subtly into your proposal if you’re worried about being the more expensive bidder are:
“You want the cheap solution?”
(which may be below the minimum acceptable quality, creating problems to your users and business, cause you considerable headaches on an on-going basis – and cast doubt on your competence: “bring me the heads of the fools who selected this incompetent supplier!”), and:
“They think they can deliver it for that?”
(because if they do, their cost model must be wrong – and their solution flawed – or they’re misleading you: you’ll be forever fighting against change requests and price increases as they exploit their ‘price to win, recover to profit’ strategy).
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