When I worked coaching sales teams I generally took a tough, if not black and white, position on responding to blind RFPs.  My clients heard me say again and again, “Follow conventional wisdom:  If you didn’t write it, your competitor probably did.  Let’s come up with more productive ways to spend your time.”

(Now I’m on the other side of the equation.  ESR helps companies write RFPs as part of their evaluation process for selecting a sales training provider. Since no vendors influence our RFPs, there is always a budget and executive sponsorship and every vendor receiving the RFP has, at least at the outset, an equal opportunity to win, we expect every vendor to respond.  Most do.  Search this blog for “RFP” and you can read more about both perspectives.)

Through an email, the author’s marketing firm (good work Gretel!) pointed me toward Tom Searcy’s terrific ebook Landing Big Sales With An RFP (registration required).  Tom provides as complete a process as I have ever seen for evaluating each RFP on its own merit.  What a perfect time to release this book.  Just when we are looking for new approaches and strategies for finding and winning business.

(I’ve written more than once about the extremely fragmented sales training industry.  I had never heard of Tom’s company Hunt Big Sales, did you?  Let me know if you have.)

In any case, the book is a serious keeper.  No fluff.  No B.S.  It’s stuffed (as in every pixel on every page) with pointers, recommendations, checklists and whatever else you may need to logically and objectively decide whether to respond to an RFP and, more importantly, how to respond to it.

Here are a few of the many lists:

• The ‘6 Ps’ to Replacing a Provider
• The Dirty Dozen of RFPs
• Top 10 Dumbest RFP Questions We’ve Seen (Searcy couldn’t have made this list up.)
• Words to avoid in an RFP response
• Checklist of Final Proposal

Bottom line.  This is the kind of value-forward approach companies need to do more of.  This is a free e-book.  Not only that, Hunt Big Sales says, “Please feel free to post this ebook on your blog or email it to whomever you believe would benefit from reading it.”  (I chose to have you go download it from the website so the author can capture your name, company and email address.  No yahoo, hotmail or gmail addresses, please.  Let Tom know who you really are.  That’s the least you can do for such a high-value gift, isn’t it?)

If you’ll receive only a single, unsolicited RFP in 2009 you need this book to guide you in deciding how to respond to it.

Photo credit: © shooty – Fotolia.com

If you are not selling in a tightly-controlled, RFP-driven sales environment, you might want to consider this collaborative approach for getting your proposals approved.  Proposal collaboration really makes sense now, during these unsure economic times.  It provides the customer with the ability to directly control the content of your proposal as well as the price.

First, some background. 

I’ve listened to dozens of good-natured arguments about which is more difficult—selling tangible products or intangible services.  Those on the services side claim, “Selling products is easy.  You’ve got something the customer can see and touch.  You can demonstrate its use.  Little to no imagination is required on the part of the customer.  They’ve got a spec, you’ve got a product. Ka-ching…  Sale made.”

On the product side, salespeople say, “No, you’ve got it easy.  No products to constrain you.  You can create whatever the customer wants or needs.  Just paint a vision of a solution in their mind and ka-ching…  Close the deal.”

Having spent many years selling on both the product and the services sides, I can tell you that, depending on the circumstances, things come out pretty much even.

But there is an advantage on the services side.  It’s the opportunity to collaborate on a proposal.  A few years ago I wrote an article entitled Instead of Discounting, Back Value Some Value Out of Your Proposal (most recently republished on Paul McCord’s blog).  In the article I suggested that you offer your customer three options.  Many customers like this flexibility.  (It pays to ask them whether they would like three options in advance of going through all this work.)  The approach has worked well for us and for many of our clients as well.  A variation of the three-option approach is the collaborative proposal.

For the past few years at ESR, we have been collaborating directly with influencers and decision makers during the proposal phase of the customer’s buying cycle.  At that point, we’ve already completed the discovery phase, and we therefore have a full understanding of the impact of our products and services on the customer’s business.  We’ve also built a degree of credibility with the customer.

We create a proposal containing a detailed assessment of the customer’s situation, their overall business goals and objectives, as well as the goals and objectives for the initiative, project or engagement.  We then list the strategies required to achieve those goals and objectives, and the tactics to support execution of the strategies.  We also list inputs and outputs, especially deliverables.  We include fees and the term and conditions of the proposed engagement.

We send the proposal to our business sponsor, with the understanding that it’s a working document—one that we expect will go back and forth several times until, as you tell your customer, ”we get it right.”  We solicit comments, changes, and suggestions from the customer.  In fact, we expect them. 

If the fees are too high (we typically have tested those in advance of this step), no problem.  We can lower them by removing some deliverables or moving them out into a later phase.  Not comprehensive enough?  We fix that by adding depth and breadth, at a increased level of investment.

The collaboration activity not only provides a platform for building the exact proposal that will meet your customer’s requirements best, but more importantly, it works well toward deepening the relationship.

Have any of you employed this approach?  Has it worked as well for you as it has for us?

Photo credit: © endostock – Fotolia.com

Is Boeing out for the count?

I heard on the news this evening that Boeing may decide to no-bid on the $35 billion U.S. Airforce tanker opportunity.

AviationWeek reported that “Word that Boeing is strongly considering a ‘no bid’ position for the next round of the U.S. Air Force refueling tanker competition is spreading only two days after the Pentagon released the revised KC-X draft request for proposals (RFP).”

The article went on, “After Northrop Grumman threatened a no-bid position in the last round [Were there supposed to be multiple rounds?  I don't think so...], the Pentagon added items to the RFP that would take into account the attributes of its A330-200-based design, which was submitted jointly with EADS.” 

A month ago today I accused the Boeing team of being outsold.  Apparently the Northrup-Grumman-Airbus team managed to get the Air Force to include specifications in the revised RFP that only they could provide.  Although Boeing representatives are certainly upset, they didn’t comment.  That was a textbook flanking strategy as I pointed out in the last post.

The Washington Post reported tonight that, “Last week, Boeing backers bristled at the terms and timetable of the Pentagon’s new tanker competition.” 

My guess would be that Boeing may not have time to redesign their version of the tanker to include the new specifications set down by the Air Force.  Again, indications of the timing aspect of a textbook flanking strategy.

Although it is being said that the Air Force will be embarrassed if they wind up with only one bidder, they’ll apparently get what they want—the Airbus tanker.

Is Boeing trying what Northrup-Grumman succeeding in doing, threatening to no-bid?  Will it work?

Let’s watch what happens.

• Spacewar
• WSFA
• Boeing: More Heat Over Tankers

I want to share with you some more of my recent experience and related opinions regarding sales training vendors and RFPs.*  (See my May 23rd post about RFPs.  If you haven’t read it and are interested in how sales training vendors—arguably world-class experts in managing RFP response strategies—reacted to one RFP, you should.) 

Before I go into where they generally fall down when responding to our clients’ RFPs, you should know that most of the vendors that ESR targets for our clients’ long lists respond quickly and competently.  They’re a pleasure to work with.

What transpired and my opinion:

• One vendor said to me, “If we can’t set the decision criteria, we don’t want to play.”  I understand the thought process here.  They don’t want to be column fodder in some vendor evaluation spreadsheet, where the winner has already been decided and it isn’t them.  Here’s the way I see it: They can’t meet the decision criteria and are doing their best to employ a (way too early and mishandled) flanking strategy.  There is another point: It’s an insult to a prospect who has invested considerable time and money in a requirements definition and RFP to have a vendor refuse to believe it was done above board, objectively and fairly. 
  

  ---

• Another vendor—one with a leading brand—arbitrarily copied and pasted content from their website into the RFP response.  I wish I could share with you the document our client received.  You wouldn’t believe how unprofessional this came across.  Our client was appalled. There was absolutely no correlation between what an RFP question was and the vendor’s pasted response.  In this case, a salesrep was probably responsible for the RFP response and corporate made the mistake of entrusting this person with representing that company. 
  

  ---

• One vendor’s proposal that resulted from another RFP had fees and costs that were so high, we thought they had made a mistake. I got a phone call from our client who shared with me the fees he was quote for rebuilding their sales process and customizing training material.  I literally almost fell off my chair.  My client felt that the vendor was attempting to take advantage of them since they’re quite large, with a significant global operation.  That’s not something you want a significant sales prospect to feel about you.  I called the CEO of vendor’s company and related what had transpired.  The vendor recovered, but I can only wonder what would have happened if I didn’t intervene.

Don’t conclude from this post that you shouldn’t go through the RFP process when evaluating sales training programs.  That would be a mistake.  My advice is this:  Take vendor evaluation and selection very, very seriously.  It’s so incredibly easy to get wrong, and your job literally depends on getting it right.   

*Disclosure: You probably know by now that my firm, ES Research Group, among other capabilities, assists companies in evaluating and selecting sales training companies as well as managing sales performance improvement initiatives.

White papers serve a function: to position a vendor’s assessment of opportunities or challenges faced by their target market and serve up that vendor’s products or services as solutions.  In most cases, white papers are marketing documents rather than the unbiased analyses they appear to be.  (There are exceptions, including the white paper recently published by ASTD.)

What about the research quoted in white papers?  What I question is what isn’t included in the white paper, not what is.  For example, one white paper I read states that companies that have adopted the vendor’s cold-calling technique have averaged 28% more qualified leads than they had previously.  What they don’t talk about is alternative methods of generating leads, some of which might deliver significantly more value to the customer.  I want to be clear.  I don’t expect a vendor to talk about other options or their competitors.  Their job is to convince you to see they world the way they do, so they can sell you something.

What about a white paper’s recommendations?  We all know that when your unique capabilities are adopted by the customer as their buying criteria, you become competitively advantaged.  That’s why we work hard to get the customer to use our pro-forma RFP as the basis for theirs.  Well, white papers serve the same purpose-to get the customer to see the world through the vendor’s eyes.

Are a white paper’s assessments accurate even if the recommendations within it are not?  The answer is most often no.  J. M. Barrie said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” That especially goes for the vendor that produced that white paper. That company was built on the unique way they see a market.  They’ve developed products and services to serve customers based upon that vendor’s perceptions of the market and what they have to sell.  To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, when you’re a vendor that provides training on cold-calling, most sales-related problems you see in a company ultimately the result of ineffective cold-calling.

So, when you read a white paper, ask yourself a few questions:

• What view of my challenges and issues is the vendor focused on?
• What alternative views of market-related challenges and opportunities might exist?
• What other vendors’ views might offer alternative perspectives?
• What isn’t the vendor discussing in the white paper that I should know about?

Among other things, we work with companies in facilitating an understanding of their own sales performance improvement requirements as well as guiding them through the sales training vendor selection process where appropriate.  

One client of ours issued RFPs to a long list of six sales training vendors.  The RFP included significant sales process work, sales training and some sales enablement technology.  In the introduction to the RFP, our client stated that (1) no vendor had been involved in the creation of the RFP (in fact, ESR wrote it), nor (2) had the company spoken with any vendor.  In addition, the company stated that (3) from their perspective every vendor had an equal opportunity to win their business.  The company also assured the vendors to whom the RFP was sent that (4) this was a real opportunity, (5) there was a budget and (6) the CEO had committed to go forward according to the dates put forth in the RFP.  I personally sent emails to the CEOs of those six companies in advance of them receiving the RFP explaining those points and assuring them that (7) everything the client represented was fact.  Several of the training companies balked, saying they didn’t respond to blind RFPs, although I can’t see why, taking into account that degree of explanation. My team at ESR discussed this situation.  We feel strongly that the vendors that aren’t willing to respond in a situation like this are behind the curve adapting their own selling process to a legitimate customer buying process—in this case, the buying process of ESR’s client. Isn’t aligning your selling methodology with your customers’ buying methodologies a critical success factor in most sales performance improvement initiatives?

Of the vendors that did respond, three were selected for the short list.  It became clear right away that one vendor was ahead of the other two with respect to meeting the client’s requirements.  That vendor was selected and the engagement is now underway.

It has been pointed out to me that in the past I’ve been very vocal about salespeople not responding to blind RFPs without being granted access to the business owner of a project or initiative. That’s absolutely correct.  I still am, but this situation is very different.