The presales process: A road trip to winning bids
Date
February, 2025
Reading time
7 minutes
Category
Best practice
Louis Emmanuel NDJOM BADGA
Louis Emmanuel is a pre-sales consultant working mainly in the IT sector. With over 3 years’ experience in the sector, Louis helps companies of all sizes to adopt innovative technological solutions to optimise their operations and boost their competitiveness.
With a Master’s degree in Business Development and Business Engineering, and a passion for technology and sales, he is able to understand customer needs and propose tailor-made solutions to meet their specific challenges. Louis is also recognised for his communication skills and his ability to work in international and interdepartmental environments.
Key words
#pre-salesprocess
#qualification
This article explores the key phases and steps of the pre-sales process, highlighting the best practices and key considerations in each phase. Whether you’re a seasoned pre-sales professional or new to the field, understanding the complexities of the pre-sales process can significantly enhance your ability and that of your team to work more efficiently and close more deals.
The lead generation phase, an essential upstream stage in the AVV process
The prospecting or lead generation phase consists in identifying potential clients who correspond to your company’s target customers, and who have a need that your products or services can perfectly meet.
Although sometimes not considered part of the pre-sales process, we believe sales and pre-sales teams should collaborate at this stage to help prospects define their needs, analyse your positioning in relation to these needs and your company’s ability to meet them, if possible, in a differentiating way. Careful qualification of opportunities ensures that you have the maximum amount of information to decide whether or not to respond to the invitation to tender (ITT) or request for proposal (RFP) when it comes out, and to adopt the best response strategy, optimizing resource utilization.
Pre-sales process or Processes?
Is there really a unique pre-sales process? The reality is that the pre-sales process is diverse and cannot be confined to a single, uniform approach.
This diversity stems from the fact that the procedure imposed by the customer can vary from case to case. Private tenders, for example, generally offer flexibility with fewer rules, while public tenders follow strict rules to ensure transparency and fairness. Some tenders may include negotiation and oral presentation phases, others may not.
The duration and effort required for each step of the process can equally vary based on the project’s complexity, whether or not it is similar to other projects you have already responded to, whether or not you are responding as part of a consortium, the number of contributors involved, etc.
From our point of view, the pre-sales process can be represented in the form of a core process, which outlines typical stages and validation milestones, but remains flexible and adaptable to accommodate the diverse nature of tenders, their context and specific requirements. The figure below illustrates our vision of this core process.
The steps from publication of the request for proposal to bid submission
The qualification - Go/NoGo
Upon the issuance of a call for tender or Request for Proposal (RFP) by the client, or when a new opportunity is identified by the sales team, it becomes essential to review the tender documents and conduct a comprehensive analysis of the project’s needs, requirements, risks, timeline, and constraints.
The qualification stage also serves as an opportunity for bidders to assess the overall tender landscape, including the competitors involved and the company’s positioning relative to them. It is crucial to evaluate the ability to respond effectively to the bid, to deliver on time, and to make an attractive offer at a competitive price.
Tender documents are not perfect, they sometimes contain contradictions, lack of detail or ambiguities. For this reason, bidders can ask questions directly to the client through clearly defined channels, particularly for public tenders. When possible, sales and pre-sales teams should meet with clients to discuss their expectations.
Once the qualifying information has been gathered, the decision-makers meet to assess the chances of winning, the risks involved and their interests to respond. They then decide whether or not to go ahead, and if so, what strategy and organization to adopt.
It is important to avoid engaging in a bid without having carefully analysed the case in order to focus your efforts on the deals where the chances of winning are highest and to define your response strategy on the basis of the best possible assumptions.
In our article titled “To bid or not to bid,” you will find valuable advice to guide your qualification phase and makean informed Go/No-Go decision. It is recommended that the decisions taken are written down.
Defining your organisation and response strategy
If the qualification stage decision is a Go, the next step is to define the organization to be put in place to respond and, more broadly, the response strategy to be adopted.
The organization consists of planning the tasks to be carried out, identifying the people to be mobilized to carry them out, and making sure they are available when we need them. Organization also includes putting in place the tools that will enable us to work effectively as a team, to follow-up and share the progress of the response at regular intervals, and to ensure that the proposed response covers all the customer’s requirements (via a requirements matrix, for example). The organization generally ends with a kick-off meeting, during which the context and objectives of the project are outlined, and the organization set up is presented to all the main contributors.
Defining the organization is part of defining the response strategy, since it means choosing the resources and efforts to be mobilized. But the response strategy goes beyond this. It also involves identifying how we’re going to win. To do this, we need to answer questions like:
- What are the strengths and assets I want to highlight, and the weaknesses (or competitors’ strengths) I need to mitigate? What are the benefits for the customer?
- How do I highlight these strengths and benefits in my response?
- How do I want to position myself in terms of price? (what’s the winning prize?)
- What choices and assumptions do I make to achieve this price positioning, while ensuring that the project is profitable for the company and that the risks are kept under control?
- …
This work of defining the response strategy must be initiated as early as possible and continued throughout the preparation of the response, to be refined or adapted as soon as new elements or information likely to impact this response strategy become known.
Crafting the proposal
This step consists of writing the proposal in a clear and appealing way while considering the defined strategy, client requirements and needs. It also involves the preparation of proof documents to be included, such as CV and company references. While some RFPs have pre-defined structures or models that need to be filled and the bidder has limited or no room to change the structure of the documents, other RFPs are more flexible.
For more flexible RFPs, the initial step in crafting your proposal should be for the Bid Manager or the Proposal Writer to develop an overall structure with rules and models and share it with the entire pre-sales team. The defined structure will depend on the type of project or service required, the technical, functional or business needs, and the defined strategy.
The proposal is divided into several sections, which may be written by different people depending on their skills and expertise. When several people are involved in crafting a proposal, it is necessary to ensure that they all follow the defined rules and model, and to make provisions for reviewing and checking to avoid mistakes or correct them.
Particular attention to detail is paramount to ensure that the proposal is clear, responsive, compliant and error free. Consistency in formatting and style is also important to present professional and polished documents.
Defining the target price and having it approved
The goal here is to make a clear and exhaustive estimate of all project costs, and to define the proposed selling price in line with the defined strategy. It is often necessary to make assumptions in order to quantify certain costs. The challenge is to ensure that the price is competitive enough to win the tender, while guaranteeing profitability and controlling price risks. It is also essential to respect the format for presenting the financial offer when it is imposed by the customer (which can prove complicated when business models are broken down differently, or when the price grids requested are very detailed).
Once defined, the offer must be submitted to the decision-makers for approval. This validation process ensures that the bidding price aligns with the company’s financial goals and risk management policies. The approval process involves various stakeholders depending on the size of the bid to ensure and overall evaluation.
Finalising and submitting the proposal
After approval, the proposal can be finalized and submitted. This involves checking that all the elements of the proposal are present, complete and respect the maximum size and any format and naming rules imposed.
The proposal is then submitted in accordance with the client’s specified process within the stipulated timeline. This may be electronic submission through a designated portal, physical delivery, or other methods as outlined in the RFP. It is essential to strictly follow these guidelines and deadlines to avoid being rejected.
Finalizing an offer often takes much longer than you think, so be sure to plan for safety margins. I advise you to submit your bid at least half a day before the deadline, to avoid late submission in the event of unforeseen circumstances (e.g. network problems).
The steps after submission
The negotiation and oral presentation phase
The project presentation phase, when requested, has a predetermined date, time and location set by the client, which cannot be changed. To ensure fairness, the presentation time, usually between 1 and 2 hours, is strictly enforced.
The main objective is to present the proposal and address the client’s questions, highlighting the strengths of your offer and demonstrating an understanding of the client’s needs. This stage is crucial in building a relationship of trust with the client.
Effective preparation includes preparing a presentation with the winning messages to be conveyed, selecting the right participants and rehearsing the presentation so that it is clear, fluent and on schedule. Attractive visuals and a convincing posture can enhance the impact of the presentation. A good presentation should make the customer want to work with us, and can therefore significantly influence the client’s final decision.
Whether or not there has been an oral presentation, customers may sometimes negotiate price, ask questions in writing and/or ask for certain parts of the offer to be revised: in this case, they set a deadline for sending the new version. It is essential to be ready to respond to questions and requests at short notice.
The closing phase
The closing phase begins when the client makes a decision, and includes activities that occur whether the bid is won or lost.
If the project is won, it marks the transition from the proposal to the execution phase. All relevant information, such as the requirements matrix, commercial proposal and cost estimates, must be transferred to the production team responsible for executing the project. This involves preparing the knowledge transfer with the production team and organising an internal kick-off meeting. This meeting marks the official start of the project and is the time for the production team, to ensure that all team members are aligned and understand their roles and responsibilities.
Regardless of whether the project is awarded or not, it is essential to conduct a capitalisation phase to gain insights and improve future performances. This includes seeking feedback from the client to understand the decision-making process. Understanding the client’s perspective will help identify areas for improvement in future proposals. Lessons learned should be documented and shared with the team to improve future bidding strategies and increase the chances of success in subsequent opportunities.
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