So, your salesperson receives an email from a very large prospect with a request to quote attached. Or, a junior partner gets a phone call from a large prospective client wanting an engagement letter to review. What happens next? Are the champagne corks popping? Does everyone adjourn to the bar to celebrate? Have the commission checks already been spent?
As the manager, what do you do next?
In my world, we have a go/no-go checklist as to whether or not we even respond to the request. If you answer “no” to any of the following questions, you DO NOT send a quote, proposal or engagement letter. Here we go:
- Is this client, project or business a strategic fit for us? Yes/No
- Did we know about this project prior to the request? Yes/No
- Have we met with the key decision-makers PRIOR to receiving the request? Yes/No
- Do we know why each decision-maker wants to do something different from what they are doing now? What do they need from us to make a decision? And, was all this addressed prior to the request for proposal being released? Yes/No
- Do we know the prospect’s expected budget and do the profits meet our goals? Yes/No
What I find too often is the salesperson does not take the time to adequately search out and qualify opportunities. When the proposal request comes out, they just have happy ears. They think that just because they send in a quote, they are selling. How wrong is that? The real work is in the trenches turning over stones to find opportunities before the competition gets there.
I once did a program on how to respond to RFP/RFQs. An electrical contractor and his two estimators would scour the Internet for new construction projects, do a takeoff, prepare a quote and blindly send it in. The closing ratio on these quotes was 8 percent and they thought this was good. In other words, for $1 million in quotes, you win $80,000. There is no way a sales manager can fix that paradigm until the owner/president/CEO says to stop.
Bottom line, how disciplined are you to enforce a go/no-go bid response criteria?
Dave Harman is an associate with Sandler Training. He has over 30 years’ experience in sales and sales management with Fortune 500 companies as well as small, family-owned organizations. He has held positions from sales to senior management with companies such as Conoco/Vista, Amresco and Ohio Awning, and owns his own business. He earned his MBA with a concentration in Marketing from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. You can reach him at [email protected] or (888) 448-2030.
