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Opportunity Qualification
1. Establishing Requirements Developing Strategy Communicating your Plan Planning the Proposal Phase Learning from Experience Choosing the right opportunities Opportunity Qualification Proposal Process Management Review Management Managing Time, Cost and Quality Qualifying Opportunities
3. Opportunity Qualification is considered best practice because: promotes early engagement provides the information you need move forward or withdraw encourages competitive analysis and if this is not enough, just consider the consequences of pursuing too many poorly qualified bids
6. Some well known checklists SCOTSMAN Solution / Situation Competition Only Me Time Size Money Authority Need MEAN ACTS Money Emotion Authority Need Ability Competition Time Size
7. Sample Go / No Go Scorecard: Two parts: Project Attractiveness (Do we want to win?) Our Capability to Win (Can we win?) Completed before each review Guide to planning and tactics Qualify Early, Qualify Often, Qualify Honestly
10. Sorry! Try again. Starting capture planning before the pursuit decision means that if the decision is ‘No’, then time and effort may have been wasted. Capture planning is about understanding the prospect, the possible solutions to their needs and the competition and using that understanding to create a plan for winning the bid. After the RFP is issued is too late to start capture planning. We need a good understanding of the prospect by the time the RFP is issued, otherwise we are not going to be in the best position to respond. Qualifying or Opportunity Assessment leads to the pursuit decision. Pursuit Decision Prelim. Bid RFP Arrives Submit Approve Close Opportunity Assessment Capture Proposal Planning Proposal Preparation Win Case Handover
What I’d like you to take away from this session is that “when you choose opportunities - you ask probing questions”.Firstly, ‘can we win?’ – that is, do we have the ability to deliver what the customer wants and secondly ‘Do we want to win?’ – that may seem like a strange question, but what it means is, by winning will our organisation gain some measurable benefit, whether that be financial or improved market share or some other strategic gain.
To help us answer the questions: ‘can we win’ and ‘do we want to win?’ we are going to learn the why, when, what and how of opportunity qualification.Opportunity Qualification is part of Capture Planning which is about developing strategies for capturing a specific business opportunity. We should start qualifying early in the sales process and if necessary make a serious decision to pursue the opportunity or to withdraw and focus on more profitable business.In order to make recommendations we need to capture essential information to help the decision makers. We shall look in more depth at the kind of information you may be required to collect and how you could present it. We shall also discuss some tools which can help us ask the right questions, get the right information about the opportunity and present it in a factual way.By the way, you’ll notice the words “Syllabus Requirement” at the bottom left of some slides. We are just emphasising that you’ll need to know these topics well.
It is considered to be best practice because helps to identify relevant information about the opportunity, such as customer issues, the competitive environment, approaches for implementation.Think about the consequences of going after too many poorly qualified bids. These could result unprofitable business, may overstretch your resources and damage your reputation. We will certainly benefit by qualifying the business we wish to pursue.In fact, a definition of a bid is the structured method of maximising return on sales investment when pursuing a Single Sales Objective (SSO)”This prompts some further questions such as :What are the costs?What are the rewards?What are the risks?
A workbook is a set of templates which prompt you to gather information and evaluate it systematically. (HOLDEN Power Based Selling – Value Guide)A Decision Tree is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like sketch to model decisions and their possible consequences, including chance outcomes, costs and resource needs. They can help to identify a map out a strategy most likely to reach a specific goal.Checklists provide a quick way of finding out whether the opportunity and your slaes team have met certain basic criteria such as: have we worked with this customer before, can we validate that the customer has funding, is this our core business.Scoring systems ask deeper questions about our bidding criteria and may require scores provided to be justified.
The checklists are often known by their acronymsEach point makes a question for the prospect.A simple checklist could be Will winning the bid be value for money?Do we have the capability to build a solution?Is there competition?How are the competition position?
Here is an example of a Scorecard tool as used by some of Bid to Win’s customersIt has two sections: Project Attractiveness (“Do We Want to Win?”) Our Capability to Win (“Can we win?”)Answering these questions in a team setting will enable us to qualify honestly and establish vital sales action that will improve our capability to win.The bid manager must ensure that the case owner works through this.The overall score is only an indicator. It doesn’t say absolutely go or no go and a rational decision can be made to pursue the opportunity.Use the concept of SPAD – signal passed at danger! Railway’s acronym, but the case owner and team needs to support the decision and be behind you for this to work.
Here are some of the questions that the decision makers will probably want you to answer – so have your facts ready.Have we influenced the requirements?How well does the customer know us?Do competitors have suitable offerings?How will competitors approach this?Do we need teaming partners to share information, development costs and risks; get entry into a new marketWill winning a contract be good value for our organisation.How much risk are we exposed to.Broadly there are two types of risk – proposal risk and project/performance risk We will cover risk in more detail in a later module.When you present this information, you need to make your recommendation to bid or not to bid.Your research, your collected facts and your use of tools will all contribute.
Maybe these questions could go in the Workbook7. Which of the following is correct?a) A capture plan does not need to be written if the customer is well known to usb) Capture plans and account plans are the samec) A capture plan should be written once and signed offd) A capture plan is opportunity specific p229. Which would you NOT expect to find in a capture plan?a) Allocation of authors to sectionsb) The buying processc) The evaluation processd) Risk analysis p2434. Which is correct?a) the capture plan is written before the account planb) much of the proposal plan can be extracted from the capture planc) the capture plan should contain the bid scheduled) The gold team reviews the capture plan p26
Clarify what the end result it and refer to workbook.