EP109: The Go/No-Go Decision, Part 2 - Creating a Process
Bidding on RFPs that aren’t a good fit is a waste of time and resources, and it takes a real toll on your win rate—and the morale of your team.
But to make better go/no-go decisions, you need a system.
So, what does it look like to develop a successful go/no-go decision-making process?
On this episode of The RFP Success Show, I share five steps to developing an effective go/no-go process, explaining how to determine your go/no-go criteria and create a corresponding checklist or scoring tool.
I discuss what it looks like to establish checks and balances in the go/no-go process and describe how to develop a consistent process for using your scoring tool to make a final decision.
Listen in for insight on training your team in the go/no-go process and learn to leverage go/no-go data to track trends, refine your criteria and win more business with RFPs!
Key Takeaways
My 5 steps to developing an effective go/no-go process
Brainstorm criteria
Create checklist or scoring tool
Develop consistent process
Train team on process
Use data to track trends
Why it’s crucial to develop a go/no-go process for bidding on RFPs
How to develop go/no-go criteria by asking what makes a good project (and what doesn’t)
The process of building a scoring tool in Word or Excel
What it looks like to establish checks and balances in the go/no-go process
The value in developing a consistent process for using your scoring tool
Who might serve as the central point of contact for managing the go/no-go process
The benefit of a live training to communicate the go/no-go process to your team
The power in using go/no-go data to track trends
RFP Success Show EP109 Transcription
You're listening to The RFP Success Show with eight-time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company, Lisa Rehurek. Tune in each episode to learn what today's capture and RFP teams are doing to increase their win percentages by up to 20, 30, and even 50%, and meet the industry trail blazers that are getting it right. Let's get started.
Lisa Rehurek (00:25):
Hello everybody, and welcome to The RFP Success Show. I am Lisa Rehurek, your host and founder of The RFP Success Company. Today we're going to be talking about the go/no criteria process. This is actually part two of go/no-go criteria. Part one was episode 103. If you haven't listened to that episode, you'll want to go back and check it out. We talked about different criteria, that's really important to focus on in your go/no-go criteria. Now, what I want to do is I want to take a step back and talk about very simply the actual process for making a good decision. For those of you who have never had a go/no-go process, this is for you. It's going to feel really simple, but it's so important, and the reason that it's important is that if you don't have a solid process, and you're just out there kind of shooting darts at whatever comes across your desk, that looks like you could possibly bid on it, you're going to waste valuable time and resources, and you're not going to have as many wins.
Lisa Rehurek (01:29):
As simple as this process is going to feel, it will make a massive difference in your ability to win contracts and your ability to better manage your time and your resources. We're going to dive right into the different steps you need to take to develop this process. The first step is really brainstorming your criteria. What makes good criteria for you and a project that you want to bid on? Again, episode 103 deep dives into the different areas that you should be considering in your criteria. If you don't know where to start with that, just get a few people in the room, start talking about what makes a good project, what makes a bad project, let's think about some of the things that we've bid on before that we shouldn't have bid on. What was that? What are some of the reasons we don't bid now? Things like terms and conditions are misaligned, or the timeline to respond is too short. Again, episode 103 is going to give you a huge leg up there, it's going to give you a really great starting point, but you want to get your criteria.
Lisa Rehurek (02:37):
I wouldn't have more than maybe, I'd say, somewhere between 10 and 20 criteria, for really making sure that it's a good fit for you. You're going to brainstorm your criteria, that's number one step. Number two step is then create a checklist or a scoring tool, whatever works best for your organization. This is something that's going to get filled out and submitted to somebody, we're going to talk about that in a minute, for final approval of the go process. Now, this can be something as simple as, again, a checklist in Word, or maybe you want to do a fancier Excel spreadsheet. We have, a lot of times, created Excel spreadsheets for our clients, where there's formulas in there, and it makes it really easy for them, and it gives them a score, that's a lot of fun. But, find what works best for your organization. If that feels too big of a hill to climb, then just use something as simple as a Word document.
Lisa Rehurek (03:34):
Step three is that you've got to have a central decision point. What you don't want is somebody just being able to make their own decision without having what I consider a checks and balances around, is this really a good decision? Did they check the boxes because they're emotionally invested, or are they being realistic in what they checked on that scoring tool? You want to have a checks and balances of some sort, a decision process. So, the RFP comes in, whoever gets that RFP or whoever is responsible for assessing the RFP does the checklist, and then that checklist gets submitted to somebody, probably in a higher up leadership position, their boss, the CFO, business development director, whatever that looks like. There should be somebody there that gives a final sign off on that go/no-go decision. The other thing you'll want is to develop a consistent process for using that scoring tool. Where do you store it? How quickly does it need to be completed? Who fills it out?
Lisa Rehurek (04:41):
Again, back to the piece that we just talked about really, who's the ultimate decision maker and where are those checks and balances? What works really well is if you can have a central point of contact who helps manage that process, who can have a commitment to urgency, and then keep track of all of the opportunities. If you've got, say a sales coordinator, or somebody, even an intern, I've seen organizations use interns, I've seen them use an executive assistant, I've seen them use somebody on the proposal team, if you've got a proposal team. Again, a sales coordinator who, part of the process is that the person, the sales person, or whoever fills out the criteria, it goes to the central point of contact, they're responsible for feeding it out to the right leadership people that need to give the sign off. Then they track this information that we're going to talk about here in a couple minutes. You want this little internal process. Again, it sounds super, super simple, but it is hugely important to have that process in place so that it's this well-oiled machine and you get everybody on board using that, and there's a lot of reasons for that.
Lisa Rehurek (05:53):
Number one, because you don't want people making rash and emotional decisions on what to bid on. Two, we also want to track some of this. Again, I'll talk about that in a minute. Step three, really developing that consistent process for how you use a scoring tool and how the decisions get made. Number four, you want to communicate this new process, and you want to train your employees, the people that are going to be using it, on the process. Now, this is something that is going to feel weird, because again, simple, simple process, and it's going to feel like, well, it's so simple that people are going to understand it, how could people not understand how simple this is? It's amazing how many questions people have, and also you want to make sure everybody's hearing the same message and understanding the same message. We all have different brains, we take things in differently, we read things differently, so the best case scenario in communicating this is live, verbally, thus the training versus just a written communication.
Lisa Rehurek (06:56):
You want to have this written in an SOP somewhere, standard operating procedure, and then you want to do a live training to say, okay, this is our new process. Then step number five is using the data from this process to track trends. What does that mean? It means that you can start tracking, let's say you use this scoring system on your go/no-go form, scoring tool, let's say you actually use a score. You can start tracking that score, and then you can track that against your wins and losses and see, okay, everything above an 80%, we have an 80% win rate. But when we get down into the 60 to 70% score, our win rate drops to below 40. Now you can see what criteria is working for you or against you.
Lisa Rehurek (07:46):
It also really just helps to understand, hey, we've got a losing trend here, do we have the right criteria? Is there something within that criteria that we're missing, that we need to adjust? That data should be used to track trends on a pretty regular basis, and it's very powerful. We all know how powerful data can be when used correctly. This is another way to use that scoring tool and that data and it can be a very simple tracking Excel spreadsheets, here was the date, here was the final approval. The other thing you can track is who brought the RFP to the table, because internally you might have a particular salesperson who is bringing all of the wrong opportunities to the table, or you've got a salesperson who's bringing all the right opportunities, and then you can go back and assess and say like, okay, what are you doing differently? That can help train and inform other salespeople.
Lisa Rehurek (08:48):
This data can be extremely, extremely powerful if you just track some basic things. Here's what I would track. I would track the date, I would track the score, I would track who brought the RFP in, I would track who approved it, and then I would track if you gave in on anything, if there was anything that you felt a little bit inky about, that you were still like, let's do it anyway, we want to take the risk here. I would track that because if you're taking those risks, you want to track to see, are these risks paying off or have we tried the same thing two or three times and it's not working. One of the beautiful things about this go/no-go process is that it really helps to inform, are you bidding on the right things or are you wasting time and resources?
Lisa Rehurek (09:36):
This is the hub of whether you're going to be an organization that have a high win rate or a low win rate. If you listen to episode 103, you'll know I get on my soapbox about that because, I really am heartbroken when we lose bids because we didn't do the diligence upfront or when our clients are just bidding and wasting time and resources and bidding on things that they have no idea whether they should be bidding on. This is a little bit of the hub of how you can start creating a better culture around RFPs and a better win rate, but you've got to have this process down as simple as it seems. Really easy to get lost if you don't make it more official, so create this process does help to take the emotions out of the decision, train your team, and really get commitment from them and explain to them again, here are the benefits to doing this.
Lisa Rehurek (10:35):
We're going to attract the data, we're going to be able to see some trends, we're going to be able to make sure that we're bidding on things we should be bidding on, which ultimately gives us more time and resources to bid on things we're going to win, we're going to increase our revenue. It is that crazy how a process this simple can lead to that, but I promise you that it will. Take some time in your organization to develop that criteria and create this process and as always, if you have questions or need some support, you can reach out to us, we're always here for you. You have been listening to The RFP Success Show. Thank you for tuning in. We appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
This has been another episode at The RFP Success Show with Lisa Rehurek, eight time author, speaker, and CEO of The RFP Success Company. Thank you for joining us. If you have feedback on today's episode, email us at podcast@RFPsuccess.com. No matter your business size, industry, if you have an in-house RFP team or need outside support, The RFP Success Company helps increase RFP win ratios by 10, 20, and even 50%. Learn more at theRFPsuccesscompany.com..