What should we do to position ourselves most favorably during the rest of middle game? After you learn enough about the opportunity and the customer’s needs to make an informed pursuit decision, you pass through another of the go/no-go gates we spoke of earlier. For some companies, the most formal pursuit decision occurs once they have completed a thorough analysis of the opportunity. In truth, opportunity analysis is a hit-or-miss affair in most companies. Some lack the structure and discipline to impose formal procedures and decision rules for making the bid/no-bid decision, but others have learned from experience to put a formal structure and process in place. Clearly, we favor the more formal approach, largely because bid and pursuit dollars are too precious to waste on bad opportunities, and we’ve seen companies waste millions of dollars pursuing pipe dreams and phantoms—opportunities they had no hope at all of winning and would not have been able to execute profitably had they won them. In bad economic times, salespeople get desperate and start chasing jobs that in better days, using better judgment, they wouldn’t give a second thought—and that’s just throwing good money after bad.
The smarter move is to be disciplined and systematic about assessing every opportunity once you know enough about it to make sensible decisions. Many companies have formal bid/no-bid decision criteria. Some require salespeople to submit opportunities on a form that requires them to take a disciplined look at the pros and cons of each potential bid, and this is smart business. It helps prevent the wild goose chases that waste valuable time and money, and it helps ensure that you devote the right amount of time to the opportunities you do choose to pursue. Even if you decide not to pursue an opportunity, you can use your decision as a chance to differentiate yourself behaviorally. You can explain to customers why this opportunity is not right for you and them, why other suppliers—who don’t offer what you do—might be a better match for them this time. So you can use your no-bid decision to position yourself for the next opportunity, and in some cases to convince customers to rethink their needs or redefine their requirements so you are right for this opportunity. In either case, you show that you are being thoughtful about what you pursue and choose to pursue only when you are a best fit for the customer’s needs and have the best solution to offer. There’s no downside to this posture, and when you don’t chase bad opportunities, you preserve your resources for investing in the better ones.
If you decide to pursue an opportunity, another part of being disciplined in mid–middle game is to develop a pursuit strategy that addresses these kinds of questions:
What should we do to position ourselves most favorably during the rest of middle game?
How can we ethically build bias in our favor? How can we influence the customer’s decision-makers and influencers and add value to them during middle game?
How should we engage our zippered network and ensure that the right same-level or cross-level contacts are being made?
How can we presell our solution and our people?
How can we behaviorally differentiate ourselves from our competitors?
Many companies try to accomplish these middle game goals, but relatively few are as disciplined and systematic about it as they could be, and those who fly by the seat of their pants are really trusting everything to luck. Being disciplined enough to develop and implement a pursuit strategy helps ensure that you are being thoughtful about what you should do to position yourself for the win and helps you avoid the woeful Monday morning quarterbacking one often hears following a loss: “We should have done this, or we should have done that.” The smart move is to force yourself to create a pursuit strategy and then to work the strategy systematically, using all the resources at your disposal. The smartest move is to include in your pursuit strategy ideas for behaviorally differentiating yourself during middle game. What can you do—or avoid doing—that will positively differentiate you from your competitors? How can you behave in ways that demonstrate greater responsiveness, interest, care, and commitment to the customer? Behavioral differentiation is generally not the result of serendipity; it results from being thoughtful and self-conscious about your customer behaviors during every touch point.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.—Margaret Mead