Have you noticed that by the time a request for proposal (RFP) is sent out by a prospect account, the sale is pretty much over? Before the RFP goes out, the customer has developed criteria that will likely determine who will win the business. Even so, the ritual ensues, where competing vendors invest countless hours and dollars preparing proposal responses that they hope will win the sale. In nine out of ten opportunities, however, the vendor who actually gets selected is the one who helped write the customer's RFP.

Request for proposals are compilations of the criteria that will be used to make a buying decision. It stands to reason, therefore, that sellers have a much better chance of winning when the criteria being used for the decision closely matches their solution. But who is responsible for establishing the criteria for the evaluation and decision? If you leave it up to your prospects to establish their own criteria, the RFP may not reflect your areas of strength, or it could be so generic as to invite more competition. Worse yet, if you don’t help prospects define the criteria for their decisions, your competitors will.

The key to working with prospective customers to craft the criteria for their decisions is getting involved early. Sellers today tend to spend lots of time explaining their products and services, but with today s high pressure "run and gun" mentality, they spend relatively little time on the front end working with prospects to develop criteria that will bias the decision in their favor.

If one of your competitive advantages is a link to the Internet, for example, then it’s essential that you help prospects understand that having a link to the Internet is important—so they will make a link to the Internet a requirement in their selection process. If another advantage you offer is a long-term warranty, then you will once again want customers to consider long-term warranty as a requirement for the decision. You can use this same technique to downplay any competitive weaknesses you may have. For example, if a competitor’s product offers more safety features, you might want to position your product as extremely safe, and convince the customer (in advance) that any additional safety features would be overkill and an unnecessary expense.

Let me put it to you like this: if somebody is going to help the customer develop criteria for their decision, that person might as well be you. This will increase your probability of success in making a sale. But you must be proactive. It’s much easier to build your solution’s capabilities into a prospect’s RFP than to try and “bolt them on” as additional features later in the sale.

Even when there isn’t a formal written RFP, customers still must have criteria for decisions, and if you are able to participate in the development of that criterion, your opportunities to succeed in professional sales will increase significantly.

—Thomas A. Freese

Copyright QBS Research, Inc. 2004

Thomas A. Freese, president of QBS Research, Inc., is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on strategic sales methods and buyer motivation.