It’s the goal of all sales organizations to win more sales. For many of these organizations, it’s their success at big bids that makes the difference between success and failure.

Most organizations perform “loss reviews” when they’ve failed to win big bids. It’s often an instinctive reaction by management – even though the team on the ground who ran the bid usually knew well in advance that they were going to lose.

However, not many firms do the alternative: “win reviews”. More than just celebrating success – but digging into it to figure out what caused the win – and how that could be repeated on future bids.

Although they’re not often done, these win reviews actually have a much better track record in driving future success than loss reviews.

The reason for this is pretty simple. The focus of loss reviews is on figuring out the “mistakes” you made and trying to fix them for next time. However, more often than not, the reason you lose isn’t easily fixable mistakes – it’s because of inbuilt features of the products and services and culture of your business. Things which really can’t be changed easily. Maybe your high end service wasn’t suitable for a low end customer, or maybe there was a mismatch in cultures.

With a win analysis, however, you aim to identify the factors that helped you win. These factors are almost always repeatable for other bids. The important thing is to find more customers who value these factors.

The secret is not to attempt to somehow change the essence of your business (of course, if there are some easily fixable mistakes you should fix them) but to figure out which customers actually appreciate the things you’re good at. You can then use this to identifying and screen potential new customers and bids.

For example, one of my previous clients, an IT services company had a very strong consultative culture. They fundamentally believed in a model of working closely with their to get them to take real ownership for their problems (rather than just ‘telling them the answer”) so that the results of the collaboration were much more sustainable.

Like all firms, they had some successes and some failures with bids. Often, when they lost bids they would get feedback from clients that they didn’t want to work collaboratively – they just wanted to be told the answer. They would then interpret the feedback as meaning they had to try to change the way they worked – to abandon their collaborative approach to win more business. But in fact, as well as being culturally challenging for them, they actually lost more bids than before.

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What worked successfully for them was to mix feedback from the bids they lost with feedback from bids they’d won. Doing this opened them up to hearing all the times when their culture actually was a great fit and helped them to win the business. When they took a more balanced view like this they began to see that far better than trying to win everything would be to really focus on “winnable bids” where their culture and skills matched what the customer was looking for. By qualifying potential bids using these criteria they began to see which projects they were a good match for and which they weren’t. By taking a focused a approach they got a huge increase in the number of successul bids. And they stopped wasting time on bids they were never going to win in the first place. Ultimately, this helped them to get more clients and win more new business.







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