Win-Loss Reviews
When you lose a bid, do you review it to see why you lost? Â It makes sense, doesnât it? Â If you know why you lost this time, you can avoid making the same mistakes next time. Â But do you also review bids to see why you won? Â Do you have the right people involved in the review? Â And are you involving the most important reviewer -the customer?
Review the wins as well as the losses
It sounds counter-intuitive to review a win. Â If the bid won, it must have been right, mustnât it? Â Well, kind of. Do you know, for example, which bits were exactly what the customer was looking for and which were merely OK? Â Did you leave the competition standing or were you just a nose ahead? Â Did your internal processes deliver the right answer because they knew it was right or was it just a good guess? The answers to these questions are very important if you want to retain the customerâs business in future and if you want to know which of your competitors are gaining on you and which are fading. Â Donât forget, your competitors are who the customer thinks they are, which may not be the same as who you think they are. Â Donât forget also, that when you review a loss with the customer, they wonât want to rub your nose in it; they will want to be constructive and to let you down lightly so that you will still want to bid for future business. Â By contrast, once you have won the business, you are on the payroll and can take your kicking like anyone else, so you may well find that you get a much clearer and less forgiving view of your shortcomings after a win than from even the most disastrous loss.
Whoâs in the review?
In all too many organisations, the reaction to losing a bid is for the members of the bid team gather and with the notification from the customer in front of them attempt to analyse the failure. Â Sometimes the discussion is rational and ego-free; changes to methods are proposed, discussed and implemented, and work goes on to the next bid. Â Sometimes the discussion degenerates into âblame-stormingâ; fingers are pointed, voices are raised; no problems are identified, no improvements proposed, but work still goes on to the next bid. Â
In both these scenarios, an important voice is missing: that of the customer, which is strange because the customer, and only the customer, makes the decision about where to award the business, so only their view of the bid has any real weight. Â Because of this, to make win-loss reviews worthwhile, they must be done in two stages: first we talk to the customer to find out what needs improving, then we work with the team to decide how to make those improvements.
Review with the customer
In the long run it is to the customerâs benefit to have their potential suppliers as well informed as possible about what they are looking for but, in the short term, reviewing a bid means one or more busy people taking some time out of their day to help you. Â Itâs a favour, so put some thought into choosing the bids to review. Â Donât expect to review everything, but do review the wins and do review the surprising results.
If possible, have a face to face meeting with the decision makers, or at least a conference call. Â The review will always be more productive if it takes the form of a conversation. Â If you canât get a meeting, then ask for written feedback in the form of open questions. Â Surveys with scores and ratings are good and everyone is used to the idea, but on their own they make it difficult to bring out the more subtle points of a review and you may miss an important piece of information because the survey didnât ask the right question.
Donât have members of the original bid team present at the customer review. Â Particularly, donât have the original sales lead involved. Â By all means have them set up the meeting, but it is always more productive to have the meeting itself conducted by people not involved in the original bid. Â A new set of faces can legitimately act as a quality assurance function, there to find out how it was for the customer, not to rake over old ground. If you can, have at least two people go to the meeting: one to lead the conversation and one to take the notes.
Have a structure for the meeting by pre-preparing the topics to discuss and questions to pose to kick off and maintain the conversation.  The best conversations, and therefore the best meetings, come from following a  thread, such as getting the customer to talk through the bid chronologically, describing what happened at each stage from their point of view and how they felt about it.  The conversation may jump about a bit, because items will crop up that trigger memories and if you have more than one customer representative  present, they will each remind the other of factors that might otherwise have gone unmentioned, but this is helpful rather than a hindrance because if means the final picture is more detailed and more complete.  Your role in all this is to keep the conversation going and to write down what the customer says.  Donât get sucked into responding to criticisms or complaints. Â
At the end of the customer facing review you will have a quantity of notes, which can be written up as a formal report to the rest of the bid team and used for the next stage in the process, the review with the bid team.
Review with the bid team
After you have seen the customer you will have a long list of reactions to your bid, and how it compared with what the customer really wanted. Â What are we to make of this heap of raw data? Â Customers are human like the rest of us, and they will tell you some things because they feel they ought to, or because they want you to bear it in mind for the future. Â For example, it is not in any customerâs interest give you the impression that your price could not be improved and you will likely hear that your price was too high and your service level too low. Â Of course, if your price was 50% higher than your nearest rival and nobody in their right mind would have paid it, then it may be as simple as that: you were simply too expensive.
Mostly, however, the customer will have told the truth as they see it, because doing that makes it more likely that you will submit a better proposal the next time they invite you to tender, something both you and they want. Â You want it because youâd like to win the business and they want it because they want to be able to choose the best of the best, not the best of a bad bunch. Assume that what you get from the customer at the review is the truth, and base your follow up actions on that assumption.
First, review the transcript of the meeting and identify all the separate messages it contains. Â Group the points made, wherever they occurred in the conversation, and construct a list of things the customer identified about the bid. Â Some of these will be positive, some of them negative. Â Next, hold the review meeting with the bid team. Â The agenda for the meeting is simply the list of items from the customer review. Â This focus on what the customer said removes the finger pointing and keeps the meeting on the straight and narrow. Â For each point the customer made, there is a discussion to be had and decisions to be made. Â If the point is a positive, how do we build on it? Â How do we make sure we retain that positive for all future bids? Â If itâs a negative, we have to look at how the problem arose, and how we can prevent it happening in future. Â Is it something that would be a problem for any bid? Â Is it something specific to this customer that should be noted as a preference for them?
The outcome from this second phase of the review will be a list of actions and information points to carry forward to future bids.  Because they will be based on things that a customer said, there should be no need for internal dissension: the customer is the final arbiter, so if  the customer said there was not enough detail in your bid then there must be more detail next time.  If the customer said the bid had too much extraneous material, then there was too much material and on the next bid you need to reduce or eliminate it.
Closing the loop
Reviewing your wins and losses with the customer ought to be a no-brainer. Direct feedback from a customer about the good and bad points of a bid is gold in the world of bidding. Â Yes, it takes a bit more work and needs some time and effort spent on it, but to carry on bidding in the absence of solid data like this means you are gambling, not bidding. Â You are relying on getting lucky, and tests prove that getting lucky is not a reproducible strategy.












