Are you Ready to Hear the Truth About your Pitch?

What happened after your last bid submission?

If you failed, did you go back to the client to find out why? Or did you tell yourself that you wouldn’t find out anything useful, or simply not get round to it?

If you won the bid, did you think ‘job done’ and dive straight into project execution or mobilisation? 
​
This isn’t what the most consistently successful bid teams do. They always want the unvarnished truth about their bid and the way it was presented. ​

Whatever the outcome, these businesses want to know where their bid was perceived as particularly strong or weak. They want to know if there were elements of their pitch that the client struggled to understand or to see the relevance of.

​Above all they want to know if there are important business objectives that they failed to address.

All of this intelligence gets fed back into improving future pitches.

What do you do?

Why Feedback Matters to My Business
To show that I practice what I preach I always ask for feedback from clients within a week to 10 days of running a workshop for them. I want to ensure that I’m meeting their needs and that what I thought I was telling them matched their understanding.

No matter what the feedback I ask myself, why do they feel that way? I try to look at the scenario from their perspective – to see me as they saw me at the time. How well was I performing on that day? What was happening in my world that might have affected have effective I was and, equally, what was happening in their world that might have influenced how they responded to or interpreted what I said?

The bid we’re jointly working in is, as often as not, one of the biggest things going on in the business at the time – but not always. There can also be non-work events that are occupying their minds. Being aware of what is happening in their worlds helps me gauge how to pitch myself to them, and to put the feedback I receive into perspective.

The purpose of asking clients for feedback is primarily so we refine and reinvent our services to stay closely aligned with clients’ changing needs. It also ensures that I can tailor the way I pitch and deliver workshops to specific clients so they get the absolute maximum return on their investment. 

That’s why getting detailed feedback is critical to my business. What about yours?