Bid Selection
From Zanecorpwiki
Very much a work in progress. This is ripped right out of an email that was getting too long.
I've never had much luck writing proposals. Most (maybe even all now that I think of it) of the business I've gotten has been from personal relationships. The relationships got started in a business context, but have always involved something other than the work I eventually was hired for. E.g., we worked at a previous company together, I offered to help with technical matters and was hired to do a job later on, that kind of thing.
Actually, I did write one proposal that was accepted, but even there I had a champion within the company and that probably made more of a difference than the proposal itself. Based on my own experience and listening to as many anecdotes as I can find--which is a horrible method for deduction, but perhaps the best available here--my take is this:
1) In normal situations, the decision process is rarely made on the content of the proposal (numbers, features, time line, etc.). In my estimation, the majority of go/no-go decisions are made on two criteria:
A) Personal relationships. They know they want to work with and it's because they know and trust them personally. Proposals are merely a step in the final negotiation after the decision has been made. Even when competing proposals are acquired, these are not to decide alternatives, but to provide some checks and fodder for negotiation.
B) Hot button issues. There are times when deciding on personal relationships isn't possible. When this happen, it's all about hot button issues. In such a case, the key is understanding the dichotomy between how the producer writes the proposal and the consumer views it. Proposals are written to be taken as a whole. Yes, it costs more, but I'm offering XYZ exceptional value. Consumers almost always say this is what they want, but what they're really looking for is their hot button.
We often think the hot button is price, but at this stage, it usually isn't. It's some feature, or way of presenting things that the consumer likes. Something they find is just sexy, or some unknowable criteria, some graph or form of presentation they feel is the right way to do things.
The challenge is that there is little chance of determining what the hot button is a priori.
2) The pricing decision. Here, the customer is choosing simply based on price. This is perhaps the most common occurrence, but
3) Most decisions are not made under normal situations. Which is to say, what we assume as normal is actually the rarer case. (The level of business effects this greatly, and when I say most here, I mean those which you and I are most likely to encounter, not necessarily the globally greatest.)
When there is a lack of relationship and the consumer (customer) and the customer is not highly motivated to make a decision, they tend to back burner decisions. In this case, the hot button is often price. The customer will make their first decision based on price. The project will fail. They then get caught in this spiral where they try to move up the chain to more professional providers, but fail to realize that their previous expenditures are a sunk cost. They get stuck with faulty logic. They emotionally feel like they money they already put in should contribute towards the new solution. They have conditioned themselves to think that the price previously quoted was the right price, they just had the wrong guy.
This kind of situation can also occur the first time out, without a previous failure when the customer gets backed against a wall and hasn't and is in a situation where they just need it done but is unwilling to pay the cost of that.
In either case, the key component is that the customer is acting from a position of desperati
