You will likely participate in some bidding process before you can win the sale if you sell to the public sector or large systems, infrastructure, engineering, or complex equipment of significant size. Usually, the bidding procedure for necessary contracts takes roughly 6-9 months to prepare. But, if you begin putting up your bid proposal after receiving the tender, it’s typically too late, and you might not stand a good chance of succeeding. Everything you put into this bid—effort, time, and resources—will be useless if you lose.
Shipley, a business that assists clients in winning $200 billion worth of bids annually, claims that the winning process begins long before the tender is released. The winning strategy is represented as a six-phase business cycle. Businesses with a long-term posture that win early on while adhering to a strict procedure for developing and presenting winning proposals have a better chance of success. Consistently, a win rate of up to 83% can be attained.
To increase your chances of winning, you will have to:
• Place early on to prepare and capture the bidding opportunity
• Pick and decide which bids you wish to participate in and which ones may merely end up with wasted time and resources;
• Recognize and address specific underlying and covert business concerns the client may be experiencing that may not be included in the tender;
• Coordinate your sales, proposal development, technical, and “subject matter experts” to produce proposals that cover your consumers’ evident and unspoken needs while also demonstrating why you are a superior option to your rivals, etc.
Choosing the Right Business to Bid
In a recent survey of Chinese companies bidding in open tenders, we found that:
Up to 8 or 9 out of 10 bids are unsuccessful; 30 to 40% of successful bids do not generate a profit; While the importance of relationships or guanxi may be a factor in winning bids, many businesses have wasted time and money by cultivating the wrong kinds of connections.
Companies can increase their win rates by being more selective about the projects they want to bid on rather than competing for every opportunity. You can devote more time and resources to these fewer but more likely bids that will produce more wins by concentrating on the fewer bids that offer the best chances of success.
Based on our R4 model, the following recommendations will help you decide which offers to consider as your top priorities:
What performance standards does the customer have for this project regarding reliability?
o, Do these performance criteria align with what you have to offer?
o How do your performance standards stack up against your top rivals?
• Relationship: How well-connected are you to the key stakeholders in this project, such as the decision-maker, end users, and evaluators? Are our opponents or supporters the majority?
o How well-connected are your rivals to these critical decision-makers? Do they have a more extensive fan base than we do?
o How are the connections between various stakeholders in this project handled?
• Responsiveness: o Did you or your team take the time to fully comprehend the needs of the client BEFORE they requested this open tender?
o In comparison to you, are your key rivals more or less customer-responsive?
• Resourcefulness: \so, Can you deliver new solutions that exceed clients’ expectations?
o How do you stack up against your primary rivals in delivering creative solutions that exceed what clients expect?
Place yourself in the proper capture position.
As Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, “Know thyself and the enemy, and thou shalt know thyself to be invincible.” If you don’t know enough about your customer and your main competitors, you probably won’t command victory.
To achieve this, you must take the following actions well in advance of the client asking for the tender:
• It pays to spend time networking and getting to know the elected leaders of the relevant city, township, or district if you are submitting a bid for a government project. As part of your CSR initiatives, give back to the neighborhood. • Do you always have to conduct business through winning bids? Can you also make a few short sales of goods or services to allow you to build a rapport and gradually exert your influence?
• Can you receive further information from some 3rd party, such as their customers, suppliers, or even your distributors? Can these third parties refer you to the essential decision-makers?
Contrary to the widespread belief that contracts are always obtained based on price or a mysterious relationship alone, large-scale contracts attract attention from various power groupings. Several bids may have different sources of leverage and relationships. Relationships and cost are undoubtedly meaningful, but they are only the visible tip of a more enormous, complex iceberg that lies beneath the surface, determining who wins. In reality, most bids are chosen to win during the preposition and preparation stages, which occur long before the tender is issued.
Uncovering Clients’ Underlying and Hidden Needs
For various reasons, some of your client’s business requirements aren’t clearly stated in their open tenders. Such often ommited material may include:
• Why is the customer required to purchase to carry out this project? Specifically, what will happen IF the customer does NOT produce the purchase or implement the project as planned?
• Who influenced the customer to write their proposal request in that manner? Do the specs already favor one competitor over another?
• If the customer’s “Decision Making Unit” consists of a small number of individuals, are all their purchasing goals aligned, or do they have varying demands that must be met?
Before submitting your proposal, you should think about doing the following:
• Get precise information from internal colleagues and the customer on what can be given by the customer’s requirements and objectives; • Offer “proof of concept” to demonstrate that what you suggested can genuinely function as intended;
• Visiting various client locations to conduct in-depth research and discussions, etc.
Organizing Your Group
Once you have decided to submit a bid and have understood your client’s obvious and unspoken needs, you must align your team and ensure that they are working toward your goals. Your team will typically include the following members:
Business developers or sales representatives, proposal writers, and subject-matter specialists
It’s interesting to note that even though many businesses have a team of proposal developers who are experts in handling the technical and financial aspects of the deal, the business developers and proposal developers don’t communicate well enough for the proposal to address the customers’ underlying needs adequately.
These proposals are typically too complex and time-consuming for business developers or sales representatives to draft in detail. Instead, they offer the proposal developers a brief description of the client’s requirements. On the other side, the proposal developers employed their presumptions based on the briefs they were given to create the proposals.
Without visiting consumers frequently enough, the Proposal Developers are unlikely to write proposals that satisfy customers’ needs. The Business Developers could not give the Proposal Developers advice on adapting to customers’ needs without attempting to comprehend the proposals’ critical components.
There’s another group of people called the Subject Matter Experts. As long as they have the necessary experience to assist you in winning your bid, they can be internal coworkers, external experts, friends, or consultants. Such knowledge can assist you with the following:
Government relations; best practices for creating winning strategies and reducing loss potential
• Business insights about the customer’s business or how the customer’s organization is run; or • Technical skills about the customer’s perspective on how the equipment, systems, and technology are used
Such Subject Matter Experts can be called in for fresh perspectives and add a lot to the final proposal, which will ideally be a victory.
C.J. is a reputable sales expert who has assisted foreign businesses in China and other countries in significantly increasing sales earnings. Additionally, he is the first sales trainer and consultant ever to take the stage at the ASTD International Convention. As of now, c.j. has assisted:
A world-class architectural hardware company increased the sales revenue of a critical account in Shanghai by ten times in just three weeks. The world’s largest PC sales company transformed its sales force into more collaborative and solution-focused, helping them regain a global pole position from its nearest competitor. A leading international hotel produced the equivalent of an additional 5,000 room nights in China during the slow summer months of 2007.
Before this, c.j. Held the positions of Asia Marketing Manager for a Fortune 500 logistics company and Corporate Training Manager for Ringier AG, Switzerland’s largest media group, in China. In these roles, he was in charge of developing the sales team and contributed to increases in overall sales targets of more than 50% and the percentage of new hires who closed their first sales within two months by 30%.
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