The Customer really wants us to win
(Or variations on the theme such as “The customer loves us” or “The customer is on our side”)
If the customer really is on your side, that’s great. Not only does it mean they’re likely to be positive towards your submission; have more influence on what goes into the rebid; find out more about what the customer wants and potentially get feedback on how the rebid is progressing.
But if you start to hear (or think) that the customer wants you to win you should check:
- Who is saying the customer wants you to win – and how do they know?
- When they say ‘the customer’ who do they mean specifically?
- Why exactly do they want you to win?
Too often ‘the customer’ in question is the day-to-day operational customer. This is usually the person your team have most contact with throughout the contract period. But are they going to be the person who’s making the decisions about the rebid?
Having the operational customer on your side is a good thing. But it can easily lead you into complacency.
When the customer (as an organisation) is looking at the rebid, senior people not usually involved in the day to day management of the contract will become involved. And often these people will be the main decision makers, not your operational customer. They’ll have different perspectives on what they need and want the next contract to look like. What the terms of the procurement will be (the rebid for you) – for instance price might be more important to them. And of course later who the eventual winner of the procurement will be. And they might know you less well – and be less invested in you being that winner.
Too often we see incumbents who’ve heard that the customer is on their side, finding out the customer in question doesn’t really know what’s going on (or don’t know the full picture).
Don’t have the power to influence what’s going into the rebid.
And don’t have the final (or even any significant) say in who’s chosen as the winner of the rebid.
And of course the way the incumbent finds this out isn’t usually by being told. It’s by what happens in the rebid. For instance they find the ITT (or RFP) contains a range of changes to the contract they knew nothing about beforehand – and aren’t ready to respond to.
Or the way the rebid will be evaluated or awarded isn’t as expected. For instance, price has become the most important factor, when they’d been pushed by ‘the customer’ to focus on quality delivery.
Or their customer contact can’t tell them what’s happening in the rebid process – because they’re not part of the team making the decisions.
By then, it’s usually too late to do much about it. And the incumbent finds themselves scrambling to catch up. Rather than being ahead of the competition where they thought they were.
Only then do they realise they’ve been complacent.
How to avoid the problem
If you’re being told the customer is on your side, ask the questions we’ve listed above and test the answers you get back.
Early on in your rebid preparations, make sure you really understand who in the customer’s organisation will be involved at each stage of their procurement process. Starting with the decisions they’re making about whether to run a rebid or extend the contract, and deciding what the scope and breadth of the new contract should be.
Challenge your team to find out who will be involved.
Perhaps look back to see who was involved, and in what role, the last time the contract was let. Even if the people have changed, the positions may still have the same roles.
Ask your customer contacts what the process is likely to be, and who will be involved. And check what the process has actually been for other recent procurements of similar type or size.
Look around at other similar customers you might have and see what their processes are, and whether there might be lessons to learn from these.
Ideally you should triangulate the information you get from these different sources – comparing the answers you get to see where the truth is likely to be for your rebid.
And once you have a better view of who really holds the power in the rebid, find out as much as you can about them and what their ‘hot buttons’ are.
Try to build a relationship with them as well as your existing contacts. If you can build a strong relationship with them, you’ll be in a better position to understand what needs to be done to win.
If you can’t build a relationship with them, at least you’ve taken yourself out of the position of being complacent. And you know you’ll need to work to keep the business.
And even if they tell you they really want you to win, don’t assume you can lean on that – you still need to put in the best offer possible.
Don’t get lazy
One of the other, often hidden forms of complacency we see when incumbents feel they have the customer on their side: It can lead them to assume the customer will do the rebid work for them.
There seems to be an implicit assumption that the incumbent just doesn’t need to put as much effort into a rebid where the customer is on their side as they would with a new bid, or one where the customer is perhaps neutral.
Perhaps they think the customer will volunteer information about the rebid. Or perhaps they’ll ensure the incumbent’s submission is evaluated with higher marks. Or that ‘the customer’ will proactively influence others to accept a higher price from the incumbent than the competitors are offering.
Just as with other forms of complacency, this isn’t written into a plan or talked about in those terms.
But it still infects the rebid effort.
Perhaps there’s less preparation done. Or the team put onto the rebid isn’t the team that would be put onto a new bid of similar value.
Perhaps the solution isn’t as innovative as it could be, or the price isn’t as keen as it might be elsewhere. Perhaps the written solution doesn’t include all the evidence it could (after all the customer knows what we’ve done, right?).
But this is a dangerous route to take.
As we’ve said above, your ‘customer’ might not be the one with the decision making power.
And those who don’t know and prefer you will read and evaluate your submission more objectively, marking down your lack of innovation, and your less competitive price.
Even if your ‘customer’ does have some influence, you could embarrass them if you put in a submission that’s less than your best.
Your customer’s colleagues will have your competitors’ bids to compare your effort with. So:
- What excuses for choosing a poorer bid will your customer have to give?
- What favours will they need to pull in? What compromises will they need to make?
- What impact will this have on their support for you and the reasons why they preferred you originally?
- What impact might this have in the future – especially if they have to start using their support for you to get you through the early stages of the rebid process with an inferior offering?
- What damage might it do to your future relationship even if you do win?
- Just how far out on a limb is your customer prepared or able to go for you?
The more objective and heavily governed the customer’s processes are, the less impact even the most supportive customer can have if you’ve taken their support, even subconsciously, as an excuse not to put in your best possible bid.
If in other words it has led you to be complacent.
Don’t fall into this trap. Even with the most supportive customer, you should put in the absolute best rebid effort and submission possible. That way you reinforce their support and allow them to use your rebid as another example with their colleagues (and themselves) as to why they prefer you in the first place.
Checklist:
If you hear the customer really wants you to win your rebid:
- Check who ‘the customer’ being referred to is
- Check whether they really do want you to win
- Check if they are actually a decision maker, or influencer in the rebid
- Find out who else in the customer organisation is involved in the rebid – and what their preferences are
- Build as wide a range of relationships as possible within the customer decision making group
- Put in the best possible bid – assume you have no customer advantages in the solution, submission and price you put in.
