Winning work is getting trickier right now as the economy slows. Here’s a thought to help your win rate: speed up your quoting process.
Sorry, it’s a low-entertainment story. But relevant if you want money.
I just went through a purchase process for a $25,000 personal project at home. I approached three suppliers. One never turned up. One seemed good, we had a long conversation about the details of the project and he promised a quote. The third option also seemed good, and sent a quote within a week.
After some revisions over two weeks, I confirmed the third guy, given it was the only number I had.
A week after that, the detailed quote for Option 2 turned up. Ta daaaa!
It would have taken him about two hours to calculate and write, all completely wasted when it’s delivered in a geological time scale.
If someone wants to know a price, particularly for services, they’re not doing it for pure entertainment. Buyer interest is a precious thing, don’t make them wait.
Many of us have a tendency to treat each quote as a customised masterpiece. By the time your hand-whittled artisan work of art quote arrives, someone else has sent the customer a systemised one days before and won.
Everything here varies wildly between industries. In ours, quotes can be super complex and individual. Yet when you look back over a few years of work, elements of projects tend to cost similar amounts. Are you better off just streamlining the process by assuming most of it will be similar? Maybe not everything, but some of the component parts.
If getting that last 5% of cost accuracy means you lose 30% of the work you quote because you’re too slow, you’re not helping yourself or anybody.
There’s also the nervous feeling of wondering what number will win the job against all those competitors. The voices in your head agonise back and forth. Is it too much? It’s payday next week and cash is a bit short, better make sure you win. How will all the others price this? Is this one of those clients who just takes the cheapest quote every time? Maybe do a draft quote, then sit on it overnight before I hit that terrifyingly final send button. Tomorrow will bring the clarity I need. Or the day after.
I know, I’ve done this a lot over the years.
Looking back at how it all worked out, I don’t think any of my worrying and insecurity achieved anything. Other than taking up lots of time and stressing me out.
If you go to the hard sales data, at least in B2B, price isn’t even a top ten factor (if you’ve not read it, So you lost the big sale. Want to know why?)
And if you’re not losing some, you’re not pricing high enough to have a sustainable business.
Getting in first means yours is the proposal they’ll read more of. And if the client doesn’t know you, it sends a clear signal that you’re organised and able to get things done by a deadline.
If a supplier can’t get a quote done on time, how will they be when it’s time for the actual work?
Getting in first opens up the conversation, which is really what wins. That’s where they get a sense of what you’re like to work with. If they don’t have specific knowledge of your field, you become their adviser while the others are still finessing their number.
If you can’t get them a rapid quote for whatever reason, send them a message explaining where you’re at and why, and when they can expect it.
Quoting speed, and all other forms of customer response, gets harder as your company grows and more people get involved.
Processes and multiple layers of approval get brought in as a response to one incident that happened years ago. Now your customers must wait two weeks for the number they need because one of the approval gatekeepers is on holiday.
If you can empower your people to quote without this crushing weight of bureaucracy, it really helps. Give them parameters to work within and treat them like adults. If they underperform, that’s something for periodic reviews rather than every-quote supervision.
I’m generalising here, but so many quotes come with endless pages of template filler about “experience the difference” and “our people are our greatest asset” with the price on the final page.
All that does is make them flick straight to the end to look at the price.
Get straight to the point on page one with information that’s about the customer, not you.
What are the top set of problems you’re going to solve for them? For that individual, not for the entire population of customers on average. If you got to have a meeting with them, just repeat their own words back to them.
And put the price somewhere in the middle of the document so it’s harder to find at the first flick-through.
If they read more than a quarter of the other stuff you wrote, that’s a win. Time is money, stop reading now and get some new clients in.
This article was first published on the Undisruptable website. Ian Whitworth’s book Undisruptable: Timeless Business Truths for Thriving in a World of Non-Stop Change is out now from Penguin Random House.
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Ian Whitworth is a reformed branding and advertising creative director turned entrepreneur, who co-founded corporate audiovisual company Scene Change.
