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How Lawyers, Consultants And Other Professionals Can Use “Win Reviews” To Get More Clients

Dec 19, 2009 Sales

Almost all professional firms perform “loss reviews” when they’ve failed to win big bids. It’s almost a knee-jerk reaction by management, despite the fact that the professionals running the bid often knew well in advance that they weren’t going to win.

Few firms, however, carry out “win reviews”. Not just celebrating a win, but actually analysing it to identify what caused the winand how you could repeat that success elsewhere.

The truth is that these win reviews are much more likely to produce future success than the loss reviews.

The reason is simple. Loss reviews try to identify “mistakes” you made which caused the loss. But in the world of big sales, the reasons why you don’t win are actually much less likely to be fixable mistakes than they are to be inherent characteristics of your firm and what you do. And so they’re very difficult to change. Perhaps your culture didn’t fit, or your high quality service wasn’t suitable for a low cost customer.

With a win analysis, however, you aim to identify the factors that helped you win. These factors are almost always repeatable for other bids. The important thing is to find more customers who value these factors.

The secret is not to try to change the unchangeable (of course, if you do find fixable mistakes then fix them) – but instead to identify which types of customers value the things you are strong at and which don’t. You can then use this to identifying and screen potential new customers and bids.

For example, one of my previous clients, an IT services company had a very strong consultative culture. They believed that by collaborating with their customers to get them take ownership of their problems and jointly working on solutions (rather than just “telling them the answer”) they would have a much more sustainable result in the long term.

Like all firms, they won a number of bids, and they lost a number. On many of the bids they lost, the feedback they got from clients was that they didn’t want to work collaboratively – they wanted to be told the answer. Often my client would interpret this as meaning they had to try to change their culture – to be more prescriptive in their approach. But whenever they tried this, apart from being culturally uncomfortable for the team, they would end up losing more bids than before.

What they needed was to counterbalance the feedback from their losses with feedback from their wins. They then began to hear of all the occasions where their consultative culture had helped them win projects. With this more balanced feedback they began to understand that instead of trying to win everything, they should focus their efforts on “winnable bids” – bids where their culture, skills and capabilities better matched what the clients were looking for. They began to ask early qualification questions based on these criteria to allow them to see which bids they were likely to be a good fit for, and which ones the clients were looking for a different approach in. This focused approach allowed them to make major improvements in the number of bids they won – and decrease the effort spent on bids where they really stood no chance.

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Tags: find clients, get clients, get more clients, Sales