Assessing your competition: Asking the right questions

Early on, as you’re planning to write your proposal — in big companies, it’s part of opportunity planning; in smaller companies, it’s simply following up on leads — you must determine the level of competition you face to win the business. The type of competition you encounter changes everything about your proposal — the strategy, tone, structure, and content.

You have to find out whether a company currently owns the relationship with the account (making it the incumbent). If so, you have a lot more questions to answer:

• Does the incumbent have a competitive advantage or disadvantage for this opportunity?
• Does this opportunity play to the incumbent’s strengths?
• Has the customer benefited from the incumbent’s work?
• How long have the incumbent and customer worked together?
• Has anything happened recently to either the customer or the incumbent that indicates the two are not a good match right now?

If your answer is no, you need to ask another key question: Are you aware of any other competitors for this opportunity?

Here we’re talking about the usual suspects — the companies you compete with every day. You probably know a lot about their strengths and weaknesses from prior competitions.

Ask the first three questions you asked about an incumbent company here, replacing “incumbent” with “competitor”:

• Does the competitor have a competitive advantage or disadvantage for this opportunity?
• Does this opportunity play to the competitor’s strengths?
• Has the customer benefited from the competitor’s work?

You also need to think about any internal sources of competition — that is, other projects or special needs within the customer’s organization that may conflict with your project. For instance, your potential customer can always

• Decide to do nothing
• Spend money on other priorities
• Do the work in-house

Whether the competition is internal (from within the business) or external (from an incumbent or competitor business), you have to build strategies in your proposal to counter opposing points of view.

After you consider the internal and external threats to you winning the opportunity, you need to anticipate the unknown by asking: Might any unknown competitors come out of the woodwork at the last moment?

To answer this important question, you need to put on your critical thinking cap and ask questions such as these:

• Has the customer tired of traditional solutions from traditional sources?
• Is the nature of the problem such that the customer may entertain a novel approach?
• Might a former incumbent have an advantageous position with a company decision maker longing to restore a relationship?

Going through these preliminary investigations can yield great benefits for your proposal. The answers to these questions can help you establish win themes, hone hot buttons, and may even alter your solution in positive ways (refer to Chapter 2 for more on win themes and hot buttons).

Gathering intelligence: The first line of defense

To beat any competitor, you not only have to physically perform better, but you also have to think better. You have to gather and analyze data to turn it into actionable strategies for your solution and clear themes and messages for your proposal. (The data you uncover about your competitors can help you express the difference between compliance and responsiveness that we stress in Chapter 4.) In short, an insight into your competitors can give you an edge when it comes to explaining the why behind the what of the customer’s requirements.

It’s not enough to know merely which competitors are planning to bid. You must also gain insight into what they can offer, at what price, and most importantly, what the customer thinks of them. You have three main ways to do this: through publicly available information, through your own colleagues, and from the customer itself.

Gathering competitive intelligence is an ethical activity — most sources of information are publicly and readily available. Your competitors, if they’re any good, are doing it, too.

Hosting a competitor review

Many companies use the information they discover about their competitors to fuel a competitor review before every bid — a review that analyzes and assesses a competitor’s strategies and solutions for a particular opportunity. Sometimes the review is formal, sometimes not, usually depending on the size of your company and the value of the opportunity. The purpose of the competitor review is to anticipate the approach, solutions, and strategies that competitors are likely to use and determine ways to include this knowledge in your proposal.

Competitor reviews normally do this through role-playing. On the formal side, larger companies may contract with a competitor’s former employees, consultants, and suppliers to formulate probable solutions, win strategies, and counterstrategies and to test the credibility of their own strategy. A less formal competitor review may entail you serving as “devil’s advocate” for your salesperson’s solution — for example, by countering a proposed win theme about a perceived competitor’s service issues with information you found on the competitor’s website that flaunts a big investment in its support desk.

Outputs from the competitor review can help you articulate the weaknesses in your competitors’ solutions and craft messages to neutralize their strengths, but this can take time. Ideally, you conduct competitor reviews several times during your sales cycle, even while you’re writing your proposal. Hold your first review before you decide to pursue the opportunity. Then, based on the complexity and significance of the opportunity, hold a second review as you begin crafting your proposal.

Your competitor review needs to answer the following questions (and, yes, some questions we ask under the section, “Assessing your competition: Asking the right questions” bear repeating during each review):

• How should we try to influence the customer’s decision?
• What are our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses?
• What are our competitors’ likely strategies?
• How do we compare to competitors with respect to answering the customer’s key issues?
• How do our technical approach, price, risk level, and past experience compare to those of our competitors?
• What weaknesses do our competitors have that we can counter?
• Does the customer prefer one of our competitors?
• How do we unseat the incumbent?
• How do we win as the incumbent?
• What weaknesses do we have to overcome?
• What actions can we take to strengthen our position?
• How can we counteract competitors’ likely moves to improve their positions with the customer?

In larger companies, your opportunity or account manager may plan and schedule competitor reviews and select team members from both company and external sources. Your team should include individuals from all pertinent business areas, along with solution design, and even consultants, retirees, suppliers, and partners — whoever has recent experience with your likely competitors. In smaller companies, consider including customer service personnel along with sales and company leaders. But even if you’re the sole creator of proposals, you still need to answer these competitor review questions to help you craft effective key messages from your answers.

Understanding what you know: Two tools for getting a clearer picture

The competitive intelligence you uncover through research helps you know where your competitors excel and where they fall short, but getting that intelligence into your proposal in a meaningful way takes more than just knowledge. You need to analyze this information alongside your own capabilities and the needs of your customer.

In the following sections, we present two tools that can help you see how your capabilities stack up against those of your competitors — the SWOT analysis and the bidder comparison matrix.

Highlighting your strengths

Time to conjure up some ghosts. Start with the positives — your strengths in relation to your customer’s needs and your competitors’ relative weaknesses. There’s no end to ways to highlight your strengths at the expense of your rivals, but here are a few techniques to consider:

• Identify your competitors’ weaknesses in areas where your organization is strong, and write statements that substantiate those strengths. This way, you can set yourself up as the gold standard for a feature, benefit, or capability with only the faintest reference to your competitors.

  For example, “We house maintenance and repair teams within 15 miles of both of your production centers to ensure that we respond to your calls more quickly than anyone else could hope to.”

• Use your trade-off analysis not only as a preparation step but also as a form of persuasion in itself. Consider this technique for justifying your solution while subtly positioning your rationale as superior to that of your competitors.

  For example, “We thoroughly investigated two other approaches to your need for uninterrupted access. The first, duplicating your entire system to ensure that you stay connected, was far too costly. The second, creating a series of soft switches, brought too much complexity to the solution and created potential failure points. So we opted for …”

• Create a checkbox comparison chart (in the same way that consumer advocacy groups often do for product evaluations), to compare your solution’s features against those of your competitors (you want more checks in your boxes than those of your competitors). Use generic names for the competitor’s solutions if you can, such as “Typical Open Source Solutions” or other general industry names for technologies. If possible, cite a source for the content, such as a trade publication.

• Differentiate any shared strengths by pointing to associated discriminators. For the strengths that you share with your competitors (common technology, for instance), consider ghosting statements that begin with clauses that indicate that the strength is common in the industry, and then point to a related but separate advantage you hold over the competitor.

  For example: “Most high-end providers have adopted X technology, so the track record of support you’ll receive after implementation is crucial to your success.”

Drawing attention to your competitors’ weaknesses

Now for the negative side of ghosting — the subtle put-down of your rivals. Everyone has weaknesses, and if you’ve done your homework, you can put your competitors’ weaknesses on display, if ever-so subtly. Here are a couple of ways to cast doubt without disrupting the positive tone of your proposal:

• Use a comparison/contrast statement. You remember this from high school English (hey, school did give you something you can actually use later in life!). Set up your competitors’ weaknesses with a conditional clause and deliver a solid, positive statement about your strength.

  For example, “While some solutions require local power and backup systems, ours powers itself with centralized backup should you lose power.”

• Allow the analysts to help out. Regardless of your industry or market, someone is watching over what you and your competitors do and how you do it. Highlight your opponents’ weaknesses by quoting the most reputable of these watchdogs. If you have the best ratings for your services, say so and cite the source. If your main competitor has a lesser rating, bring it to your reader’s attention.

  For example, “You told us how much being responsive to customers means to your business; a poor reputation with the BBB is like losing someone’s trust — it takes a lot of positives to win it back.”

When ghosting, never preach. Avoid any language that implies you’re instructing your evaluator on how to assess your proposal — for example, phrases like, “You understand the importance of …” and “Businesses as successful as yours know that financial stability is the most important …” Patronizing your customer with overt ghosting statements does far more damage than good.

Compensating for your weaknesses

If you or your solution has a perceived weakness, you need to anticipate that your competitors can attack you just as you can attack them if the roles are reversed. Here are some scenarios and potential comebacks you can use:

• If you’re the new kid on the block, your competitor may trumpet its years of experience and play up the risks of going with an unproven provider (you). You can counter by focusing on your newer equipment, leading-edge techniques, and more innovative approaches than the status quo solution.
• If your reputation has suffered from some service issues, your competitor may reference analysts that drop you into a weaker quadrant and cast you as unreliable. You can counter this by acknowledging your problems and demonstrating how you’ve overcome them with new equipment, improved techniques, or increased training for your support staff. Most customers understand that problems do occur — it’s what you do about them that matters (and be sure to cite proof for your claims of improvement!).