Writing Business Bids and Proposals For Dummies. Cobb Neil

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СКАЧАТЬ alt="tip" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#i000037690000.jpg"/> Responsive proposals help customers achieve their business goals, not just their solution needs or procurement objectives. Examples of responsiveness include

      ❯❯ Understanding and addressing your customer’s stated and implied needs

      ❯❯ Describing the benefits your customer will gain from your solution

      ❯❯ Pricing your proposal within your customer’s budget

      ❯❯ Editing your response so it reads like your customer talks

      

Your goal as a proposal writer is to comply with all your customer’s requirements and express how your company goes beyond those requirements to help meet its business goals. Compliance alone won’t win in an increasingly competitive marketplace. You have to work with your customer before the RFP is released to understand its hot buttons. Hot buttons are singularly important issues or sets of issues that are likely to drive customer buying decisions. They’re emotionally charged, and your customer will repeatedly bring them up because they inhibit success. You can think of hot buttons as benchmark issues – issues that ultimately determine whether the customer selects your solution. You must clearly address them in your proposal – and doing so is what we mean by going beyond compliance and being truly responsive. So while compliance can prevent your proposal from being immediately eliminated, responsiveness edges out your competition in the long run. For more about hot buttons, see Chapter 3.

       Facing the third degree: The challenge of Q&A-style RFPs

      Most RFPs consist of a series of questions that you must answer thoroughly while wrapping a story line or set of messages around the answers. A question-and-answer (Q&A) style of RFP provides specific directions on how to structure your response: You follow the organization of the RFP to the letter and answer each question one by one as it appears in the text. Deviating from this approach can cost you business.

      Q&A-style RFPs often have short deadlines and are notoriously demanding. Procurement organizations and consultants use Q&A-style RFPs to develop line-by-line assessments for comparing each bidder’s capabilities and solutions. Q&A-style RFPs not only ask many direct, compliance-oriented questions but also ask challenging, open-ended questions that you really can’t answer satisfactorily without a consistent win strategy. A win strategy is the collection of tactics you use to help you win a specific opportunity – written and dispersed to everyone on the proposal team. Clearly defining your win strategy and its components ensures that your contributors consistently echo your main messages throughout your proposal.

      To devise a consistent win strategy, you must understand the entire scope of the opportunity (which is why you read the RFP cover to cover) and be able to answer every question with an eye to how it relates to all your other answers. A win strategy is something you’ll create early in your process for every opportunity (see Chapter 6 for a full discussion) and includes the following:

      ❯❯ A succinct statement of your overall solution and benefits so all contributors think about your strategy as they write their answers.

      ❯❯ Expressions of your solution’s most important, overarching benefits (these are sometimes called win themes and must contain a need, a pain statement, a feature, a benefit, and a corresponding proof point). You need to echo your win themes at every opportunity within a proposal (see Chapters 6 and 7 for more on writing win themes).

      ❯❯ Clear descriptions of your customer’s hot buttons (those compelling reasons to buy). Including your customer’s hot buttons in your win strategy ensures that you consistently address your customer’s most pressing and emotionally charged issues. Check out the preceding section for more about hot buttons.

      ❯❯ A SWOT analysis of your and your competitors’ products and services (SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). A SWOT analysis will help you align your solution with your customer’s needs while evaluating how well you stack up against your competition (see Chapter 5 for more on SWOT).

      ❯❯ Your company’s key discriminators. These are the things that matter to the customer that you can do that your competition can’t, or things you do better than your competition.

      Win strategies are easier to create and implement when you know as much as possible about your customers, their needs, and your competitors before an RFP is released. If you’ve had a meaningful dialogue with your customers before they release an RFP, you have time to gather the right people, exchange knowledge about the customer’s hot buttons and how you’ve solved similar problems, craft meaningful win themes by using that shared knowledge, and hit the ground running when the RFP is released.

      

If you haven’t talked with your customers, you have to do the same strategic preparation during the time you should be honing your response, and you’ll be in what we call reactive mode – you’ll be reacting to new information instead of acting to shape the outcome of the opportunity. Industry research bears this out: You win more when you start early.

      The nearby sidebar “Getting ahead of the curve” points you in the direction of some useful advice for avoiding reactive mode.

GETTING AHEAD OF THE CURVE

      So how do you stay ahead of the curve and avoid falling into reactive mode? A lot of this book is devoted to answering that question, but in brief, you should

      • Find out as much about your customer as you can. See Chapters 3 and 4 for ways to do this, but the idea is to establish a relationship long before the customer releases an RFP.

      • Create a comprehensive, repeatable process for responding to RFPs. Having a documented, proven approach for your responses gives you a better chance of assembling the resources and people you need to win. Chapter 15 offers ways of putting knowledge and resources on standby for a rapid response.

      • Tailor your standard proposal processes to meet the deadlines and unique requirements of each opportunity. Chapter 6 also addresses this topic.

      • Create a standard template for responding to RFPs. Your customer may require that you use its template, but often you have the liberty to plug in the customer’s RFP within your response template, so you can distinguish your response from your competitors’ responses through branding, textual, and visual elements. We have lots more about this in Chapter 11.

      • Gather as much information about your likely competitors as you can, using insights from salespeople who have competed against them before. Chapters 5 and 7 help you do this.

      To craft the ideal Q&A-style RFP response, you access all the information you need to answer your questions and then write a dazzling persuasive document around СКАЧАТЬ