Quotes serve a purpose: to convince a customer to purchase your product or service. That means you would prefer every one of your offers to become a contract. But everyone knows it doesn’t work like that. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.
win ratio = all quotations approved by customer / all quotations issued in x time
How do you know if your win ratio is correct? It depends on the sector and the service or product of a good win ratio on offers.
There are some important parameters:
- How many competitors do you have?
- How well-known is your product/service?
- Are the competitors very similar to you, or do they offer something different?
- How big a contract is you trying to make?
- Are you a key player in this market?
Want to know more about how these parameters affect your odds of winning? Learn more.
We assess the win ratio of bids as follows:
| Ratio | Good | Wrong |
|---|---|---|
| 100% | You don’t take enough risks. You are missing opportunities | |
| >60% | Some competitors with very similar offerings. | Competition with different offerings: You’re missing opportunities |
| >50% | Large contracts, stiff competition | Key player in the market. |
| >33% | Large contracts e/o services not well known | Small contracts, products are similar to competitors. |
| <33% | Never good | You are putting in too much work for too little opportunity. |
Your odds of winning are good, between 60% and 90%. Above that, you take too little risk and thus miss sales opportunities. If you have a probability of winning lower than 33%, you are putting in a lot of work for little result.
What could be better about the offer?
Here are the ten most common mistakes in proposals:
| 1. | Nothing about the customer; No problem, no reason why … Just nothing. |
| 2. | Sloppy; Spelling mistakes, typos, sentences that don’t flow |
| 3. | Too long; Nobody reads everything anymore. A proposal with too much text gets lost |
| 4. | Too short; If there is hardly any explanation, especially on the most critical points. |
| 5. | Poor readability; Too much text on 1 page, no headings, long sentences, and ditto paragraphs |
| 6. | Recognizability lacks; Missing the language of the customer’s industry |
| 7. | Content too legal; If the legal department has interfered too much in the proposal |
| 8. | Wrapping up about price; Your customer wants to know what it costs, don’t hide it away |
| 9. | Late submission; Lost momentum because the offer was too long in coming |
| 10. | Mismatch of problem and solution; Match between the customer’s problem and the solution is missing, then lots of text about how sublime your answer is. |
Much more can be said about these ten causes. You can read about that here The ten most common mistakes in proposals.
How will your proposal get better?
But then, what is a good offer? The best proposals conform to the following rules:
| 1. | Recognition; The client recognizes himself in the texts and feels that it is custom written for him |
| 2. | Clear; It is a straightforward story; proper cause – effect and problem – solution connections made |
| 3. | Pleasant; The document reads pleasantly; sentences are correct, and the formatting invites reading |
| 4. | Not too long, not too short; The core document is between 6 and 10 pages in total |
| 5. | Price is easy to find; The price is in the back, but not on the last page |
| 6. | Customer centric; The document is about the customer and not about your company |
| 7. | Content too legal; The proposal will be on your customer’s digital doormat one day before submission. If the customer has not specified a date, then assume one week, unless it is highly particular custom work, then it may take a little longer |
Conclusion
A good proposal is about recognition. As a customer, do I recognize myself in the proposed problem, the solution, and why this solution will fix my problem? If this is the case, then you have a good proposal. And the quotation will be even better if you can do this in a relatively short document containing mainly the most important things. If it is essential to give more detail about the solution or why then it is better to send this in an attachment. The customer can then choose to read these details.
Want to read more about good quotations? Here are a few articles:
