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BLAST FROM THE PAST
Mock Competitions in Action:
Changing Your Solution by Studying
What the Competition Might Do
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An
article by Jim Mathews
Director
Competitive Intelligence & PTW
TASC
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HOW DOES A MOCK COMPETITION IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING?
To realistically have a chance to win a contract in a competition, you must:
(1) Understand what the customer wants to buy.
(2) Conduct an analysis of what the competition might propose to meet
those wants and needs.
(3) Identify a solution that will address what the customer wants.
(4) Define why your solution is better than what the competition might do
to meet those wants and needs.
In other words, you can develop a solution that addresses the marketplace values, not just your own interpretation. Your solution can then be presented and compared to the marketplace through the mock competition to see how it compares in a side-by-side situation to the competitor’s postulated solution.
To accomplish these four steps, you first need to identify the customer’s decision makers, their requirements, wants, and needs through a customer analysis workshop. For this first workshop, you need to assemble a group of individuals who know the customers, their personalities, and their buying habits, and postulate how they might react to this particular bid.
Second, address how the competition could meet the customer’s needs, and at what price, through a competitor analysis workshop. Using open source information, this workshop gives an ethical view of how you believe a competitor (or competitors) will try to meet the customer’s wants identified in the first workshop.
Third, strategize how your approach gives the customer’s decision makers what they want, while countering the competition’s potential approach, through a win strategy workshop. This workshop addresses how your capture team will present the winning solution for this bid by considering not only how your team is going to meet the customer’s wants and needs, but also by addressing how your solution is better than the competitors’ proposed solutions.
To bring all these activities together, the last step is to conduct the mock competition to test how your solution and approach compares to the competition’s solution and approach. The actual mock competition compares, head-to-head, the two solutions that will be presented to a group of individuals who represent the customer’s decision makers.
DOES A MOCK COMPETITION REALLY OFFER ME VALUE?
A mock competition offers an independent view of your solution compared to the competition’s solution. When conducted correctly, the mock competition evaluates your solution against the competition’s solution from the customer’s viewpoint. If you conduct the mock competition early in the capture strategy effort, it helps your team to adjust your solution to the customer’s needs when compared side-by-side with the competitions’ in the actual bid environment.
The exercise gives you an opportunity to view a side-by-side comparison of competing products in a learning environment. As hard as it is to lose in a mock competition, it is much better to see your weaknesses before your customer points them out in a loss debrief.
TEAM SELECTION
When planning a mock competition, the question is not just “Who should I have on my team?”, but also “What teams will I need to be successful?” A successful mock competition requires three teams:
1. The capture team responsible for this pursuit
2. The mock competitor team that will represent the competitor
3. The mock customers or evaluators who will decide who has won
this competition
Selecting the right people for all three of these teams is critical. You want the best available team to capture your new business, but you also want knowledgeable people who know how your competitor thinks and acts to be a part of the mock competitor team. If this is an important bid, the competition is going to have an extremely smart group of people on their team for their bid efforts.
WHAT CAN I DO WITH THE RESULTS?
Once your have the mock competition results in hand, you can either decide that the exercise really didn’t work, because you didn’t win, and ignore it, or you can learn from the experience, whether your capture team won or lost. Based on the evaluations of the presentations, you can take the following actions:
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If the capture team won, then you can continue to refine your position to
address any weaknesses that were pointed out by your mock customer
or mock competitor.
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If the capture team lost, then you can work with the mock competitor
team to learn how you can address the issues they used to win.
In either event, you can discuss with the team representing the customer what tangibles and intangibles caused them to select the winner.
SUMMARY
Realize up front that it will take effort and resources to do it right. Finding the right people for the mock competition is the most difficult part, but absolutely the most important! Using the data properly, regardless of the outcome, will help you develop a better proposal. Do not take it personally if you lose the mock competition — better to lose now than to really lose later! The goal is to win, and a mock competition will assist you with that goal.
What the competitive intelligence professional brings to this capture team is an independent view of the customer, and the potential competitors’ solution, which can be compared in a mock competition to ensure, as best you can, that in the end your capture team has every tool available to help them be victorious.
[Editor’s note: this article was excerpted from the September/October 2007 issue of Competitive Intelligence Magazine.]
Jim Mathews now works at TASC. Following a successful career at Lockheed Martin, he retired in early 2003 and then spent three years at Raytheon setting up their CI/PTW function prior to joining Northrop Grumman in mid-2006. Jim was the director of competitive intelligence and position-to-win (CI/PTW) at Northrop Grumman. He is also retired from the U.S. Air Force and was an airborne voice controller for the Apollo and Skylab programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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