Jump to content
PropLibrary Content

Using Black Hat Reviews to gain a competitive advantage

Cloaked in mystery, no two are ever the same...

Like color team reviews, I have never seen two companies conduct Black Hat reviews the same way. At a high level, a Black Hat review is a competitive assessment to address who the competition is and their strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes a Black Hat review scores your company and your competition against the anticipated evaluation criteria to determine who has what advantages, and what to do about them. At a minimum, a Black Hat review should help you discover how to best position your company against its competitors, and what differentiators to focus on in your proposal.

See also:
Proposal quality validation

There are many techniques for acquiring and assessing competitive intelligence. These range from simple SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to more sophisticated methodologies. The technique you use is less important than your diligence at implementing it. Garbage in, garbage out. However, like risk assessment and quality assurance, if you don’t implement a formal methodology, you won't consistently get good results.

Any competitive assessment is only going to be as good as the data it's based on. Gathering good competitive intelligence takes time. If you simply bring all the stakeholders into a meeting and ask them what they know about the competition, you will not get the best data to work with. If you start trying to collect competitive intelligence at RFP release, you will not have the best quality data to work with. You must collect and validate competitive intelligence data throughout the lead qualification and capture phases of the pursuit if you are going to have solid data to assess at a Black Hat review.

Getting results

The key to a successful Black Hat review is to translate what you discover about your competition into action items. And those action items should not simply be to fill in the holes in what you should already know. A Black Hat review gives you a chance to demonstrate how much you know of your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. But if you don't have enough information to reliably assess their strengths and weaknesses, it gives you a change to do what you need to do to find the information so you can. If you can't even name your likely competitors, you're not ready for a Black Hat review.

The action items coming out of a Black Hat review need to affect your capture and proposal strategies in ways that will impact your probability of winning. Otherwise, a Black Hat review becomes an academic exercise that doesn’t affect your chances (this is a fancy way of saying “a waste of time”). How should you change what you intend to offer as a result of your competitors' strengths or weaknesses? What should you say in your proposal to position your company against their strengths or weaknesses? Should you employ ghosting to suggest conclusions the customer might reach about your competitor's supposed strengths or to point out the unmentioned weaknesses?

Action items related to teaming should also come out of a Black Hat review. A Black Hat review should tell you which companies are strong where you are weak and therefore make good teaming candidates, because you are more likely to win together than if you remain apart. It can also show you who you might want to take off the street by teaming with them. It may be better to give up a portion of the revenue by teaming with someone than it is to take the risk of losing all the revenue in competition. Or not. A good Black Hat review should help you assess this quantitatively, by showing the effect on evaluation scoring of different teaming scenarios. That’s another reason that formal competitive assessment methodologies can be valuable. They help you look at things objectively by providing the means to rank and score the competition.

Black Hat vs Price to Win reviews

A Black Hat review is not the same thing as a Price to Win review, but they do have some overlap. A Price to Win review focuses on predicting what the winning price will be. And part of doing this is assessing what prices your competitors will bid. This requires a specialized form of research in order to discover details like a competitors' pricing range, and their likely overhead range based on the data you can find. Competitively assessing price positioning and strategy is potentially relevant to a Black Hat review, and it can inform not only your solutioning but also your proposal writing. 

Using them to gain an advantage

Finally, a Black Hat review should help you finalize your win strategies. Win strategies should be developed in isolation from your competition, when the whole goal of having win strategies is to beat your competitors. It's not enough to simply articulate to the customer why they should select you. You must also be able to say why they should select you, rather than your competition. A Black Hat review can help you formally position yourself against the competition instead of just guessing, the way most people (including your competitors) do. If you do your homework before the review so that you have enough information to assess, a Black Hat review can help you drive winning into your proposal.

Let's discuss your challenges with preparing proposals and winning new business...

Access to premium content items is limited to PropLIBRARY Subscribers

A subscription to PropLIBRARY unlocks hundreds of premium content items including recipes, forms, checklists, and more to make it easy to turn our recommendations into winning proposals. Subscribers can also use MustWin Now, our online proposal content planning tool.


More information about "Carl Dickson"

Carl Dickson

Carl is the Founder and President of CapturePlanning.com and PropLIBRARY

Carl is an expert at winning in writing, with more than 30 year's experience. He's written multiple books and published over a thousand articles that have helped millions of people develop business and write better proposals. Carl is also a frequent speaker, trainer, and consultant and can be reached at carl.dickson@captureplanning.com. To find out more about him, you can also connect with Carl on LinkedIn.

Click here to learn how to engage Carl as a consultant.

Proposal Help Desk
Contact us for assistance
In addition to PropLIBRARY's online resources, we also provide full-service consulting for when you're ready to engage one of our experts.

It all starts with a conversation. You can contact us by clicking the button to send us a message, or by calling 1-800-848-1563.


Sign up for our free newsletter and get a free 46-page eBook titled "Turning Your Proposals Into a Competitive Advantage" with selected articles from PropLIBRARY.

You'll be joining nearly a hundred thousand professionals.

Sign up
Not now
×
×
  • Create New...