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January 16, 2023
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January 19, 2023
Win strategy development is an approach for developing an overall plan for winning a competitive bid. Strategy and tactics are often confused. In the purest sense, strategy is your pre-engagement position; tactics are the actions you take to implement your strategy, to convey it persuasively. Both are required to win.
The guidelines for developing a win strategy include preconditioning, targeting, analyzing, and then determining and packaging your solution. A win strategy always takes into consideration your competitive position and requires an understanding of your discriminators.
Organizations that are most effective at winning business have aligned their strategies and processes throughout, including their approach to business development. Their business, market, capture, sales, and proposal strategies and tactics are aligned, coordinated, and consistent.
Misaligned strategies result in inconsistent, confusing, and unclear customer messages. This disconnect prompts customers to doubt your message.
If the following example describes your organization, you can improve your business capture effectiveness:
- Account executives position their solution based on successful previous solutions.
- Individuals write proposals with little direction from capture or sales, using extensive boilerplate due to limited response time and numerous requests to bid.
- When asked to make a finals presentation, senior executives deliver standard presentations.
In these examples, messages to the customer are often seller focused. As a result, customers doubt both your understanding of their needs and your commitment to satisfying their needs. You must demonstrate why you are the best solution throughout the capture process.
