Upon Further Review

How can we get better at dealing with Procurement and RFPs, and improving our odds of success moving forward? One way is to conduct Win/Loss Reviews, where we look back at our past deals and see what we can learn from them. Here are some questions we could ask about each deal.

Loss Reviews:

• What was the reason (or reasons) they gave us for not selecting us?
  
• What decision did the customer make? Why?
  
• Were we involved in the opportunity prior to the RFP?
  
• Did we have any influence on the bid specs?
  
• How effectively did we understand their business direction and needs?
  
• What questions should we have asked that we didn’t ask?
  
• What were their rules of engagement (RFP, auction, consultant, access…)?
  
• What was our strategy?
  
• How strong was our coach network?
  
• Did we present to senior level decision makers (vs. submitting via email)?
  
• What are the top 3 reasons we lost (outsold, price, weak coaching, poor fit…)?
  
• How effectively did we involve the right people from our team (support resources, executives…)?
  
• Did we do everything we could to change the ground rules to our favor?
  
• What would we do differently if we could go back and try again?
  
• What key learnings came from this situation?

Win Reviews:

• Are we pleased with the outcome (solution fit, price…)?
  
• What did we do well?
  
• What was the turning point?
  
• What reasons did they give us as to why they selected us?
  
• How did we avoid the traps?
  
• What were our critical success factors (good coaching, executive access, support from our leadership team…)?
  
• How did we differentiate ourselves?
  
• What would you replicate in future deals?
  
• What key learnings came from this situation?

By asking these questions, we can gain tremendous insight and make sure that our future efforts are more effective than ever before.