Attention Executives: How to get your company to find leads before the RFPs are released

You’ve got to start somewhere. So companies often start by responding to as many RFPs as possible, hoping to win a few to get the company established. Once they are established, they can reassess and start doing things strategically.

When should they reassess and begin to change? That day is now. How do I know? Because your win rate is so low that you can double your revenue by increasing your win rate without chasing any more leads. Your win rate is low because you’re bidding without a competitive advantage. Even though you’re getting by and it’s become your comfort zone, that approach will cause your business to plateau early and go into decline. The truth is you’re leaving money on the table and it’s time to reconsider.

It only requires one small change to start maturing as a company: bid every opportunity where you have an information advantage. That’s it. You still get to bid everything you can find. It just has to be everything where you have an information advantage. If you don't have an information advantage then you are relying on luck or low-balling the price. Neither approach is sustainable. 

You don’t have to worry about having to drop most of the bids in your pipeline and starting over. The change will be gradual. A small change in win rate can return more than 30% growth in a single year. It’s actually quite profitable. 

You don’t become a mature company by flipping a switch and changing everything all at once.  Instead of dropping opportunities, you’ll gradually replace them with opportunities that have higher win probabilities. Our Pursuit and Capture Program eases you into it a little bit at a time over a few months. We start by developing an understanding of the mix of opportunities in your pipeline and designating one or two future customers to start practicing relationship marketing with. We'll show you how to build an information advantage and use it to win what you pursue.

How do you pick the customers to develop relationships with ahead of the RFP? Strategically based on publicly accessible data about who buys what you sell. Our Pursuit and Capture Program covers that.

How do you get to know them? By being helpful and practicing relationship marketing. Our Pursuit and Capture Program also covers that.

What techniques do you learn? We’ll show you how to initiate opportunities instead of just finding them. We’ll show you what you have to do to influence the RFP. We’ll tell you what questions to ask so that you can develop an information advantage. And an information advantage is the best customer advantage.

Success requires more than simple techniques

There is no secret technique that will enable you to go from a being a company that is driven by ad hoc approaches and people trying to make up for it by working really hard into a company that makes informed decisions, follows deliberate approaches that are proven to increase win probability, and consistently develops an information advantage for all of its bids. Instead of some non-existent secret technique, we’ll show you how doing a few small things differently can end up transforming your company over time into a highly effective engine for growth. 

How you approach the implementation of these things is more important than the techniques that get you in the door early. You can’t beat mature processes by trying harder to do ad hoc things. No matter how skilled your staff are, they will perform better when supported by mature processes. 

You probably realize this and just haven’t seen a practical way to implement this shift. This may be the only thing that’s been holding you back. That and the temptation to stay in your comfort zone. What makes our Pursuit and Capture Program special is that our approach to implementation is more practical than anything you’ve ever seen and will get you to a better comfort zone.

Visualize your leads as a series of pie charts. For some you are the prime and some you are the sub. Some are with existing customers and some are new. But if nearly all were discovered from public announcements and databases, you're not being as competitive as you could be.

Improving your ability to pursue and capture

Our Pursuit and Capture Program shows you how to start initiating opportunities instead of finding them, how to influence the solicitation before it’s even a solicitation, and how to discover things no one else knows about the customer and the opportunity. Then we’ll work together to set targets so we can make sure it happens. Gradually that approach will take over until you’re bidding all of your opportunities with a competitive advantage and your win rate is much higher than it is now.

Our Pursuit and Capture Program starts by assessing your pipeline and setting targets. Then we teach you how to pursue and capture those targets. By starting with a pipeline assessment, we can set metrics and measure progress to ensure that every single step contributes to making you more profitable. We’ve designed the program so that it’s easy to leave if the targets aren’t being met.

If what we do together is profitable, you’ll want to double down and continue in order to maximize your returns. If it’s not, you’ll simply drop the program. Take a look at the program details and then we can have a conversation about the challenges you face and what we can do about them. 

Or use the widget below to get on my calendar for a telephone conversation so we can discuss whether we're a match.