CATEGORIES:
Every meeting opportunity you get in the lead-up to the release of the client’s formal Expression of Interest or Request for Proposal, is gold.
Ensure you drill out the most valuable insights possible from each such opportunity, with some critical self-analysis of your preparatory thinking, including:
- To start with, are we meeting with the right people? Are these the real decision-makers, or as close as we can get to them?
- What will the customer / client organisation’s representatives expect that we know about their business and this project or procurement?
- In answering the above question as comprehensively as possible, have we broken down the project or the need into a strategically granular number of parts?
- Are we gathering as many insights into each of those parts as we possibly can? (Think both primary and secondary research.)
- In reviewing the above, is there any critical piece of information we’ve missed – either about our own product, service or company, or about theirs?
- What degree of competitive intelligence should we have done? What would a switched-on competitor have done? What might they know about us?
- Is this a procurement involving an incumbent? What do we know about the incumbent, the history of the account, and customer satisfaction levels with the status quo?
TO BID OR NOT TO BID
The real value of a thorough and well thought-out bid/no bid decision analysis – whether highly structured or less so – results from asking the right questions (in a logically-progressing order) and seeking out well-researched answers.
It's a customised, deep-thinking process during which a valuable perspective of the client and the opportunity is built. When that is followed by a realistic self-analysis, the framework is in place for making a genuinely strategic, properly informed decision.
THE ART OF THE DEBRIEF
The key to getting the best value from any de-briefing session offered to you is to plan carefully, in order to extract every possible clue from the process.
This two-Module course provides step-by-step, real-time guidance to assist you in maximising the intel and insights available from the de-briefing opportunity. It also guides you along as you seek to ensure the permanence of the insights obtained, and the incorporation of their value into future bidding processes.
