In most larger deals, there will be competition, and therefore, during the initial qualification phase there will also be an assessment on where you are with regards to client requirements and competitor capabilities. A simple graphic view looks like this:
Client requirements and supplier capabilities are shown as overlapping circles. There are 4 intersections:
- Area of high competition: Client Needs, Competitor, and your capabilities match. As no supplier has a unique capability, the bid will be decided mostly on price or on the performance of the deal team. A lot of commodity services like Infrastructure Operations or standardised SAP services will be in this area.
- Capabilities that are not relevant for the client: This is a critical area in a lot of proposals driven by technical people who want to show off on all the cool features their products and solutions have. Unfortunately, the client is not interested in them, and worse, the competition can deliver them just as well as you can. The deal team should stay away and not waste time and energy on those topics in the solution.
- Your weak spot: Those are the requirements that you cannot fulfil as well as the competition. If those requirements are key for the client, it needs to be discussed in the qualification process and the deal will potentially be disqualified. There is no point in pursuing a deal where you know that your competition will do significantly better. If those requirements are not among the key requirements then the role of the deal team and the customer relationship management is to move the discussion away from those requirements, and get the client to focus on other areas. This approach will ideally lead to a discussion about Intersection 4:
- Your Sweet Spot: The area where you are leading, and where the competition is not present. Those topics should be the majority of your discussions with the client, and you need to focus most of your energy during solutioning and client presentations in them. Ideally you can also position those topics in an innovation environment, giving you a further advantage over the competition. One word of caution – if you ignore all other areas of the deal and only focus on your sweet spot, the client feedback might be that you ignored his standard requirements, which are 90% of the overall requirements.
You can win a deal, if your Sweet Spot is large enough, and relevant to the client, and if your weak spot is small and not in a relevant area for the client. Therefore, this guide can be a good starting point for a Deal Qualification and the development of a win strategy.
In large, complex deals, it can be a good idea to build up this simple but effective competitive analysis for each tower / part of the deal, and also for each major competitor. This will give a good overview on the areas your team needs to focus on in order to win the deal.