Almost every company I've worked for has done regular "loss reviews" when they've failed to win big bids. It was almost a knee-jerk reaction by management - "how can this possibly have happened?" - despite the fact that the sales team often knew well in advance that they weren't going to win.
What happens much less frequently however are "win reviews". I don't mean just celebrating a win, but analysing it to identify why you won and how you could repeat that success elsewhere.
Despite being done relatively rarely, these win reviews are much more likely to produce future wins than loss reviews.
The reason is simple. Loss reviews focus on trying to identify the reasons why you didn't win - "mistakes" - and change them for the next time. But in reality, the reasons why you don't win are usually much less likely to be fixable mistakes than they are to be inherent features of your products and your company. Things which are very difficult to change. Perhaps your culture didn't fit, or your high quality product line wasn't suitable for a low cost customer.
With a win analysis, however, you aim to identify the factors that helped you win. These factors are almost always repeatable for other bids. The important thing is to find more customers who value these factors.
The secret is not to try to change the unchangeable (of course, if you do find fixable mistakes then fix them) - but instead to identify which types of customers value the things you are strong at and which don't. You can then use this to identifying and screen potential new customers and bids.
For example, one of my previous clients, an IT services company had a very strong consultative culture. They believed that by working with their client to help them take ownership of their problems and jointly working together to develop solutions (rather than just "telling them the answer") they would have a much more sustainable result in the long term.
Like all business, they won some bids, and they lost some. Often, when they lost bids they would get feedback from clients that they didn't want to work collaboratively - they just wanted to be told the answer. They would then interpret the feedback as meaning they had to try to change thei way they worked - to abandon their collaborative approach to win more business. But whenever they tried this, apart from being culturally uncomfortable for them, they found they actually ended up losing more bids than before.
What they needed was to counterbalance the feedback from their losses with feedback from their wins. They then began to hear of all the occasions where their consultative culture had helped them win projects. With this more balanced feedback they began to understand that instead of trying to win everything, they should focus their efforts on "winnable bids" - bids where their culture, skills and capabilities better matched what the clients were looking for. They began to ask early qualification questions based on these criteria to allow them to see which bids they were likely to be a good fit for, and which ones the clients were looking for a different approach in. This focused approach allowed them to make major improvements in the number of bids they won - and decrease the effort spent on bids where they really stood no chance.
Ian Brodie works with the leaders and staff of professional service firms to help them attract more clients and win more new business.
His clients are lawyers, consultants, accountants, architects, surveyors, coaches, and other professionals. He helps them improve their marketing and business development capabilities.
Using Win Reviews to Get More Clients
Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ian_Brodie
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