How Lawyers, Consultants And Other Professionals Can Use “Win Reviews” To Get More Clients
Almost all professional service firms perform “loss reviews” when they lose big bids. It’s a knee-jerk reaction by management who can’t believe they’ve lost – despite the fact that the professionals running the bid often knew well in advance that they stood no chance of winning.
What happens much less frequently however are “win reviews”. I don’t mean just celebrating a win, but analysing it to identify why you won and 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 focus on trying to identify the reasons why you didn’t win – “mistakes” – and change them for the next time. But in reality, the reasons why you don’t win are usually much less likely to be fixable mistakes than they are to be inherent features of your products and your company. Things which are very difficult to change. Perhaps your culture didn’t fit, or your high quality product line wasn’t suitable for a low cost customer.
A win analysis however, tries to identify the factors that secured your victory. These factors are almost always things you can repeat. The important thing is to find more customers where these factors are valued.
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 working with their client to help them take ownership of their problems and jointly working together to develop solutions (rather than just “telling them the answer”) they would have a much more sustainable result in the long term.
Like all service firms, they won some bids, and they lost some. On many of the occasions 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 this firm would then interpret the feedback as meaning they had to try to change their culture – to abandon their collaborative approach to win more work. 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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