B2B Sales: Move the goal post to win RFPs
As a sales lead for a start-up or a niche business, do you feel at a disadvantage in competing for RFP driven deals ? An RFP process tends to be complex, resource intensive and fairly daunting for smaller companies but at the same time you need to win such deals to have any hope of scaling your business.
I have successfully won a disproportionate number of large deals by moulding RFP discussions rather than providing a ritualistic response. Leveraging this methodology, in one instance, we were able to displace gold partners of a large OEM to win long term business while in another instance, we replaced 17 existing vendors, some of them Tier 1 providers, of one of the largest telecom service providers (TSP) in Europe.
How did we win so many deals where we were the underdogs (or in some cases, we may not even be a dog in the running!)
As always, let us start from the customer point of view. Customers put together RFPs to find the best fit to solve a specific business problem. They come up with a definition of ‘Best fit’ based on their pain point, their understanding of a functional solution for the same as well as their perception of critical success factors behind executing it on the ground. The moment you break the problem down into these multiple parts, you would realize that you can engage with the customer in defining or redefining the problem statement, discussing potential options for a functional solution and above all what would it really take to effectively solve the business problem.
Let us take our telecom service provider contract as an example. There was a reason why the customer had 17 vendors in their system. They needed on-demand availability of the right technical talent for their product testing and rollout. When existing vendors could not meet a specific need, they went out to enroll yet another vendor. Over a period of time, the number of vendors in their panel swelled to a level where managing the vendors became the job rather than launching the product in the market. The customer wanted to resolve the challenge of managing multiple vendors. However, given their past experience, they felt that no one vendor can provide them the flexibility and the responsiveness they needed to meet their ongoing requirements. With this backdrop, the formal RFP and informal conversation with the customer veered round to discussions on the capability of a single vendor to manage an ecosystem of suppliers and forging partnerships to meet the broad skill requirements of their product lifecycle.
On a normal day, some of the large System Integrators such as IBM, Accenture would have won the deal hands down. I remember one of our internal management meetings wherein all of us contributed profusely to the virtues of being a systems integrator and how those guys will win it and not us. But just when total despondency was setting in, we stepped back and took an inventory of our own strengths that could solve the customer problem — and not as stated in the RFP but by stepping into the shoes of the customer and surface the real problem.
We quickly realized that the real customer requirement was to get resources on-demand, for the specific skill sets needed for their projects on an on-going basis. If someone could solve this problem, would they really care about our SI capabilities and partnerships?
The moment we had this insight collectively, there was no turning back. Our entire RFP response, our presentations and discussions with the customer focused on this business problem and how we, as a single organization with the entire skill set available in-house, were actually better prepared to solve their problem compared to an SI with external partnerships.
Bottomline is that we moved the goal post. We were able to convince the customer that they needed to look at their challenges differently and how we were the right vendor in a truly genuine way, to solve their business issue at hand.
To summarize, while responding to an RFP, what often gets missed out is the true problem statement and the underlying evaluation matrix on which you will be measured. Being able to reconstruct this matrix with additional factors that will allow your strengths to be visible to the customer in solving their problem, before you put together any response at all, can give you an enormous leverage in your bid to win the business.
I found this approach of consciously moving the goalpost, to be highly effective and helped me win big RFPs time and again.
I would love to hear your stories of what works for you in such complex situations and your strategies for winning competitive deals.
