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My top tip for BQ18 is all about joining the dots through the marketing funnel – from the initial stages of procurement right through to the purchasing stage.
I’ve banged on about the capture process for years, which is starting to gain momentum:
- Identifying and qualifying opportunities
- Developing a win strategy which documents your understanding of the customer’s objective (e.g., value adding solutions, price to win, capability requirements to pursue and win the contract)
- Transferring customer intelligence and information about the specific opportunity and your competition to the proposal team
- Identifying, analysing and mitigating the customer’s perception of contract performance risk
I’ve also talked about the big missing link with key account management (KAM) and how – if you are business to business (B2B) or business to government (B2G) – you should be getting 80% of your margin (not profit) from 20% of your clients.
My tips for your organisation include:
- Aiming to influence your senior leaders into focusing your efforts on key clients Deploying capture on your key recompetes (which is something that’s often missed)
- Consider account-based marketing as a subset of your business plan
- Make friends with your marketeers and get them on board with the key opportunities in your pipeline
- See how you can be aligned throughout the funnel of marketing, through KAM and capture
If you do all this right, bidding is just the end game. In my opinion, most deals are won before the RFP is ever written. Let’s get ahead of this. It’s time to join the dots through the funnel.
This article was written by Jeremy Brim.
Jeremy works with leadership teams and business owners as a consultant and advisor to plan and deliver sustainable growth through analysis and interventions across the sales cycle. Jeremy has also taken on leadership of the Bid Toolkit, bringing with him a wealth of bidding knowledge and desire to help businesses of all sizes improve their win rates.
