contact sid@sidjaffe.com or 703-855-3160

Archive for month: September, 2015

You are here: Home / 2015 / September
✎

Market Research Lately?

September 10, 2015/in /by

by Sid Jaffe, SJ&A

One of the most neglected but vital ingredients to business development is market research. It helps to: identify customer needs and  opportunities, guide customer communication, provide data on your competitors, identify technical trends, and reveal intelligence on pricing and acquisition strategies. As important as these things are, market research is often pushed to the side when marketing, preparing a proposal, or doing your corporate strategic planning.

Who should be gathering information? Everyone! All staff can contribute to strategic market research, as well as tactical market research for a specific opportunity. This includes:

  • Corporate decision makers for trends and company focus
  • Project staff for new solutions, opportunities, and customer satisfaction– they are your front line for vital data!
  • Business Development for opportunities, intelligence, and competition profiling
  • Contracts and Pricing Staff for pricing intelligence
  • Capture Teams and Proposal Staff for solutions development, trends, and state-of-the-industry
  • Human Resources for continuous recruiting of targeted, timely talent
  • Other staff to deliver the best and most cost-effective services.

Where can this information be gleaned? Everywhere! This includes formal on-line business databases, social media, and going to conferences and trade shows. There are contacts in your address book right now that can yield important information. All staff should be alert to it!

Effective market research requires planning, discipline, and a platform or venue to share data. In most occupations, they say “the job isn’t done ‘til the paperwork’s complete!”  Well, in market research, that axiom is especially true. Research needs to be documented—and most important, the information needs to be at-the-ready for decision makers.

Keep your staff continuously engaged in market research—use it as a way of operating. Develop a Market Research Plan, make it a component at staff meetings, provide a secure bulletin board to exchange information, develop a repository on a portal, and provide for it in project reporting.

Market research is a team sport. Whatever the role, know: what your customer’s interests and preferences are, what solutions work best in the industry, what the trends are, and what strategies your competitors have implemented. Plan for it.

If you would like to discuss ways in which we can support your market research needs, contact Steve Bruce at steve@sidjaffe.com or call him at 703-989-2799.

✎

The Five C’s of Proposal Preparation (Second in a Series of Articles)

September 10, 2015/in /by

by JP Richard, SJ&A

In the last issue, we talked about Compliance, the first of the Five C’s of Proposal Preparation. To refresh your memory, the other four were Capabilities, ConOps, Competition and Compelling. Let’s now move on to Capabilities.

It is critical to show the evaluators how compliant your response is by meeting all of their requirements, but they also want to know something about who is telling them that all of their problems will be solved if they turn the problem over to your organization. That means you have to tell them about your organization’s capabilities and convince them that you are the best qualified to handle the job.

Showing your capabilities means demonstrating a variety of skills:

  • how you will perform the required tasks
  • how you can manage a team of people
  • how you will communicate with the users
  • how you have set up a response structure to resolve problems that may arise.

Past performance is still their single best measure of future success: show them that you have done similar work at their agency or in a related organization. Make sure that the past performance examples that you provide are equivalent to the work being required in the current RFP, both in size and scope. Detail the work and don’t forget to tell them why that is relevant to the current RFP, whether they ask for the relevancy or not. Draw direct comparisons. Often, companies have their project descriptions “boiler-plated.” Be sure to tailor your contract performance data for each submission!

Most important, prove it! Quantify and qualify your success stories and project descriptions. Provide statistics, measures of improvement, speed of response, and the amount of dollars saved by your clients. Show how you have been innovative. Don’t just tell them that you provided first-rate support—spell out the benefits that other customers have gained. Even better, provide a graphic depicting this, ensuring that your message comes through.

This is an opportunity to emphasize your organization’s strengths and distinguish yourself from other bidders. The reviewers must be convinced that you bring unique capabilities to the table. In our next issue, we will see how to do that when we talk about ConOps.

If you would like to discuss ways in which we can support your proposal development needs, contact JP by e-mail at jp@sidjaffe.com or call him at 703-568-6417.

Recent Comments

    © Copyright - Sid Jaffe & Associates, 2019 - Enfold Theme by Kriesi