Too often sales teams hop on the RFP bus and dutifully follow the customer buying process without first developing a clear, effective and compelling Win Strategy. Bidding for new work is expensive and continually chasing customer ender documents without an effective Win Strategy, results in low win rates, demoralises sales teams, wastes finite resources and ultimately ends in failure to achieve your business goals.
A Winning Strategy is a detailed plan for achieving success, how you are going to beat the competition and win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the customer. The win strategy influences and affects the customer’s selection process by focusing on their needs, differentiation from competitors and highlighting your strengths, mitigating your weaknesses and neutralising your competitor’s strengths while emphasising their weaknesses. Ultimately it articulates why we are confident that this will work.
At Digital Distance we believe your value proposition is the most powerful element of your overall customer proposition. It must be compelling, it needs to be differentiated and it needs to be tailored so that the business value is clearly identified to each of the key customer stakeholders, particularly the identified “economic buyer”. The value proposition underpins your Win Strategy and as such its development is a key output of this workshop.
Digital Distance has specific techniques with which to build a value proposition for both private and public sector customers, be they large or small, national or international. We believe that if your sales team can’t clearly articulate how your products and services underpin the business outcomes and corporate value your customer desires, it is unreasonable to expect your customer to make that connection.
Once a value proposition is agreed, Digital Distance will help you develop your associated key win themes and then map these to the relevant stakeholders. Where possible, individual stakeholders will be profiled with a view to making future interactions with them effective and fruitful.
Additionally, your competition will also have developed value propositions and win strategies; Digital Distance will help develop appropriate messaging and counter strategies to mitigate the competitive threats.
The Win Strategy Workshop includes a lot of hard thinking focused on the customer and the competition. It can be an intense session, but when executed correctly with a Digital Distance specialist, the insight generated can be a game changer in your favour.