Situation:
Mary Sue had the accounting department review how many bids, quotes, and RFPs the company had responded to within the last 12 months? She wanted to know what was the cost in time, money, and labor to work them up and what was their conversion ratio? Mary Sue was flabbergasted when she found that the company had just barely broken even on 15% of the bids they received - despite all that emotional energy, time, and effort.

Problem:
Most companies simply don't do a cost/benefit analysis on their bid-to-conversion-to-profit processes. "That's just the way we do business" has become a sad reality for far too many lazy sales teams. In other words, prospect companies do not always know what is best for them and most sales teams are just too lazy to challenge the status quo.

Solution:
Work on your belief system that says "a NO is OK". Become a stronger negotiator on the front-end by embracing the philosophy that you WANT everybody's business, but on the other hand, you NEED nobody's business. In this case, WANT means something we plan for, to work towards and make every effort to achieve. NEED on the other hand, is a paralyzing emotion to bring to new business development. You may WANT the new Lexus but you do not NEED it. Simply stated, most of us will still eat tomorrow if we do not get the new car, motor home, boat or home, etc.

OK, you need a tactic to make it happen
Well here it is: after establishing trust take the buyer aside and say the following, "We have looked at the bid specs and see some issues. Those issues revolve around the area of planning. For instance if we bid today provided the information and the way it reads, you are going to be disappointed. Have you ever awarded a contract only to discover that there are a lot of cost overruns, lots of change orders and the work wasn't completed on time? That usually results because the specifications were flawed from the beginning."

Continue by saying "If you want us to bid, here is what we suggest. Let us come in and review the bid specs. We will have to charge for this service, but you will get it back if we are awarded the bid. Normally we are priced higher for this type of work but because of our due diligence in the beginning there will be far less costly surprises making your overall cost less than those inefficient low price bidders.

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