Winning Bid

  ProjectsAtWork  

The three keys to winning an RFP: Get there first, pick the right battles and play to win.

Is a low RFP (Request for Proposal) win-rate draining hours and revenues from your firm? Responding to an RFP can consume from 40 to 100 man-hours, but, on larger projects, it can balloon to hundreds of hours. Multiply those hours by salary and overhead, and suddenly you have a very expensive investment. As more and more firms hold service providers accountable for their cost of business development when calculating utilization and revenue production, the need to improve RFP win-rates increases particularly if you are public company.

The keys to winning in competition are to:

1. Get there first,

2. Pick the right battles

3. Align your tactics to survive each phase of the competitive process.

Get There First

Pursuing new business exclusively in the "visible" market -- the portion of the market where companies are actively and openly looking for a service provider -- is a dead end strategy in this economy. The best way to win in these turbulent times is to become the sole or preferred provider, and that can only happen by engaging clients before they look for service providers when the project is still invisible to your competition. This is what I mean by the "invisible market."

By the time companies enter your field of vision -- asking for proposals, statements of …

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