The Pre-Sales Strategy Toolbox: 8 Essential Tools to Win More Bids
Date
May, 2025
Reading time
12 minutes
Category
Best practice
Peggy Herman
Co-founder and Managing Director of Bee4win, where she oversees the company’s consulting and pre-sales service activities. Since 2002, she has managed numerous public and private tenders, ranging from a few tens of thousands to several hundred million euros, in sectors as varied as IT, energy, industry and events.
An expert in pre-sales, Peggy continues to provide bid management and writing services, coaching and training. She has also been conducting studies on best practices in this field for over 10 years. Committed to the development of the pre-sales profession, she is president of the French-speaking chapter of APMP and a frequent speaker at events including the Bid and Proposal Conference Europe and Bee4win’s customers.
Key words
#Goodpractice
#PreSales
#Tenders
#RFP
#BidManagement
#Strategy
#SWOT
#BidderComparisonMatrix
#GoldenCircle
Often overlooked, yet crucial … I propose to share with you some tools and best practices of pre-sales strategy.
What is a pre-sales strategy, and why is it crucial?
Generally speaking, our aim when we respond to a call for tenders is to win that tender 🏆. To do this, we have to convince the customer to choose our offer and not that of a competitor ♥️. If the tender has weighted evaluation criteria, to win we need to score more points than the competitors.
I like to draw a parallel between the world of sporting competition and that of bidding. In sport, there are two ways to score more points than your opponent(s):
- 🤾♂️with a better attack => this involves knowing how to exploit your strengths and your opponents’ weaknesses.
- 🥅and/or with a better defense => the aim here is to know how to counter your opponents’ strengths and mask (or mitigate) your own weaknesses.
According to the APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) Body of Knowledge, we can define pre-sales strategy as:
- 1st step: the opportunity strategy 💪 => our plan to highlight our strengths, mitigate our weaknesses, highlight competitors’ weaknesses and reduce the importance of opponents’ strengths (what key points / messages do we want to get across?).
- Step 2: the response strategy 🤩 => our plan for what to include in our proposal to create a persuasive, winning proposition (how do we write and highlight these messages to make sure they’re read, retained and convincing?).
🥇The pre-sales strategy is crucial when responding to a call for tenders because it’s all about defining how we’re going to win!
8 tools for a good pre-sales strategy
Here I share 8 tools that can help you define your pre-sales strategy:
- The qualification grid to research and gather information on customer needs and the competition,
- The SWOT matrix to identify your strengths and weaknesses and those of your rivals,
- The SWEET SPOT diagram: a SWOT variant for competitive positioning analysis,
- The SONCAS(E) method for analyzing decision-maker profiles,
- The BIDDER COMPARISON MATRIX for choosing which topics will have the greatest impact with regard to the customer’s evaluation criteria,
- The CAB method to distinguish the features, advantages and benefits of our offer,
- Simon Sinek’s GOLDEN CIRCLE to create a connection with the customer based on shared values,
- Some winning message templates to formulate value propositions and key messages to be integrated into the proposal.
1. Qualification grid
The purpose of the qualification grid is to enable you to ask yourself the questions and gather the information that will help you decide, objectively, whether or not to respond to a given opportunity.
You can easily prepare this grid in Excel (or equivalent). All you need to do is list twenty or so questions to ask yourself to help you decide whether or not to respond to an invitation to tender. Here are a few tips to make this qualification grid easy to complete and help you make a quick decision:
- For each question, identify who in your organization needs to answer that question?
- Define 4 or 5 predefined answer choices for each question.
- Include a field to leave a comment, if you wish, detailing the answer; remember, the more information you can gather, the better your pre-sales strategy will be!
- Group questions by category, for example: customer intimacy, alignment with corporate strategy, ability to respond, ability to deliver, competitive positioning, risk and commitment.
- Associate a score with each answer choice, so you can calculate an overall score and/or visualize your answers as a radar according to your different question categories.
You can also further enhance your qualification grid by using it to automatically generate a SWOT matrix.
2. The SWOT matrix
The SWOT matrix is a useful tool for analyzing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your opponents. I suggest you complete the matrix by asking yourself the following questions:
- S (STRENGTHS): what does the customer need that I know how to do very well? Please note: your competitors may also be able to highlight these strengths.
- W (WEAKNESSES): what does the customer need that I don’t know how to do, or that I’m not very good at? Note: your competitors may also have these weaknesses.
- O (OPPORTUNITIES): what does the customer need that we do better than our competitors? What are our competitive advantages/differentiating assets?
- T (THREATS): what does the customer need our competitors to do better than us?
To go a step further, once you’ve completed the SWOT matrix, you can assess which way the scales are tipping to help you evaluate your positioning:
- If the scales tip to the left (S and O): you’re in the favorite position, go for it, but take care with your offer to highlight your strengths and avoid finding yourself in the situation of the hare in the fable of the hare and the tortoise.
- If the scales tip to the right (W and T): your chances of winning are very slim, and you should seriously consider not responding.
- If the balance is more evenly balanced between the left and right sides: expect serious competition. Think about your weaknesses and your competitors’ strengths. And think about what you can offer the customer that they may not have explicitly asked for, but which they might like and which wouldn’t cost you too much to carry out, so as not to lose out financially => create the opportunity to stand out!
3. The SWEET SPOT diagram
The SWEET SPOT diagram is a different way of representing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your opponents:
source : https://apmp.org
For the SWEET SPOT diagram, as for the SWOT matrix, it’s important to identify the elements to be shown in each case as completely and objectively as possible. If you are blind to your competitors’ weaknesses or strengths, you run the risk of making the wrong pre-sales strategy choices.
4. The SONCAS(E) method
This method was originally a technique used by sales reps for commercial prospecting. It consists in identifying the psychological levers that will influence decision-makers’ decision-making and guide the content to be highlighted in your proposal. Each letter corresponds to the initial of a profile:
- S = Security: Customers concerned about the reliability of a product or service => highlight your certifications, labels and customer references.
- O = Pride: Customers looking for a prestigious solution or one that confers social status => your offer should highlight the personalized solution aspects, the privileges you grant customers, the disruptive concepts you propose.
- N = Novelty: Customers looking for innovative or unique products or services => emphasize cutting-edge technologies, latest innovations, innovative offers.
- C = Comfort: Customers who value simplicity, practicality and ease of use => emphasize messages related to accessibility or ergonomics for end-users of your solution. Also show the customer a simple, task-limiting organization on his side to implement the solution.
- A = Money: Customers looking to save money or maximize profitability => highlight your solution’s quality/price ratio, and how your solution is a good, profitable investment.
- S = Sympathy: Customers who value a warm, empathetic and attentive relationship => Establish a dialogue with your customer, show yourself to be reassuring and attentive to their needs, adopt caring gestures, behave with humility and humanity, seek to create an “emotional” connection, by highlighting shared values and interests, for example.
- E = Ethical: Customers concerned about respect for the environment and sustainable development => take care to ensure that your solution and your company are environmentally responsible and respect human rights.
Bear in mind that decisions are often taken by several decision-makers, and make sure that each decision-maker finds the messages that resonate with his or her dominant profile.
If you know little or nothing about the prospect, you can make assumptions by drawing parallels with similar prospects you know well.
5. The BIDDER COMPARISON MATRIX
The BIDDER COMPARISON MATRIX (BCM) is the tool I use to support opportunity strategy workshops: it takes the results of the SWOT or SWEET SPOT analysis and compares them with each customer evaluation criterion and more emotional decision criteria that you can add (linked to the SONCAS(E) analysis, for example). For each decision criterion listed in your BCM, the strengths, weaknesses, competitive advantages and disadvantages enable you to situate your positioning (on a scale of 1 to 5, for example: strong disadvantage, slight disadvantage, neutral position, slight advantage, strong advantage) and the positioning of your competitors. By supplementing this positioning with the weightings per criterion (known or evaluated), you can deduce on which criteria the difference in points with your competitors is highest, and thus identify which themes / messages should have the greatest impact on your final score 🎯.
Once you’ve identified these themes, all you need to do is define how to highlight them in your response!
Like the qualification grid, the BIDDER COMPARISON MATRIX can also be done in Excel or equivalent: using conditional functions and formatting, the positioning evaluation can be automatically derived from the SWOT analysis by criterion, or it can help you target the right messages to emphasize in your response, quickly and effectively.
6. The CAB method
The first 5 tools presented above help you identify which messages to emphasize. Now we’ll look at 3 other tools that will help you present these messages in your proposal in a powerful and convincing way.
Let’s start with the CAB method: like the SONCAS(E) method, this is a method inspired by sales prospecting techniques. The 3 letters CAB stand for the following initials:
- C = Characteristics: The intrinsic and objective attributes of the proposed product or service. Example: this car is electric.
- A = Advantages: The attractive consequences brought about by the objective characteristics of the solution. For example: this electric car emits no CO2. It is therefore less polluting than a petrol or diesel car.
- B = Benefits: The real reason why the customer wants to buy the solution (more subtle than evidence). It allows you to personalize your pitch and be more convincing by understanding why or how the advantage presented meets a concrete need for them. For example: this car is part of an eco-friendly, decarbonizing approach by a customer who is currently looking to reduce his carbon footprint.
Features are essential, but often insufficient to close a sale. Where the advantage is often generic, the benefit must be tailored to the target’s personal situation (cross-reference with the SONCASE method).
Benefits can be:
- 🧠 rational (proven by scientific test results, for example)
- or 💗emotional when they appeal to the prospect’s senses.
When you write your sales pitch, make sure you identify the features, advantages and benefits of each key point of your offer, and that these elements are included in your answer, and that the benefits are highlighted in a special way so that the diagonal reader can see them.
7. Simon Sinek's GOLDEN CIRCLE
“People don’t buy what you do, they boy why you do it” – Simon Sinek.
If you haven’t seen it yet, or would like to see it again, I invite you to watch the inspiring bestseller by one of the most popular TED speakers whose talk has attracted over 28 million viewers – the third most popular TED video of all time! How to become more powerful, influential and successful?
https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action
In this video, Simon SINEK explains what the Golden Circle is: WHY? HOW? WHAT? Why start by presenting your WHY and how to define your WHY. This inspiring talk highlights what makes the real difference between leaders and their competitors.
So why not apply these principles to our proposals?
Source: https://www.akeaccounting.co.nz/ake-knowledge-base/the-golden-circle
8. Winning message templates
Finally, the last tool I’d like to suggest is a set of templates from APMP’s Body Of Knowledge: these templates are a sort of fill-in-the-blank sentences that guide you on how to write your key messages to make them convincing:
- Customer name] can improve [what] [by how much / in what way] by [doing what differently], over [how long] for an investment of [how much].
- Indicate the value the customer will obtain], [Identify the differentiating factor that will bring this value], [Provide proof that the claim is credible].
- For [target customers] who are dissatisfied with [current market alternative], our [product name] is a [new product category] that offers [key problem-solving capability]. Unlike [other product], our product has [unique features].
- The [customer] will be able to [improve what] [by when / by how much] thanks to [discriminating feature] [proof of claim].
There are many different ways of structuring your value propositions. It’s up to you to find the model that suits your organization and the response you’re preparing.
Defining models that work for you will save you time in formulating messages that have all the ingredients to be clear and convincing.
Finally, here’s a litmus test to see how well-written your message is:
- Could a competitor credibly make the same claim => the answer should be no.
- Could an evaluator copy and paste your message into an evaluation form to justify awarding the highest score? => the answer should be yes.
Conclusion
You don’t have to offer the lowest price to win a contract, but you do have to show more value than your competitors.
The tools presented here should help you identify how your offer is more valuable, and how you can convincingly highlight this value, your unique and differentiating assets.
Don’t hesitate to react by asking us questions or sharing the tools you’re familiar with.
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