3 Reasons for Obtaining Customer Feedback Before Bidding
To ensure informed bid decisions, it is important to understand all of the details of any given opportunity. In contrast to other platforms, the AlphaBrook VoicedIQ Platform provides you with real-time, customer-sourced intel on any upcoming opportunities to ensure your bid and proposal (B&P) dollars are being spent wisely and as efficiently as possible. We have briefly summarized three key reasons why you should avoid bidding on an opportunity before fully understanding the government end-customers wants and needs.
1. Should you even bid or are you wasting your time?
There are a variety of reasons why you should have an in-depth look into exactly what the government is asking for before drafting a proposal. For instance, let’s say the customer is extremely happy with their current incumbent. Perhaps the company is well-loved and they are sticking with them. Knowing this information in advance is key in determining whether it will be profitable for you to bid on an opportunity or if you’d be investing in a lost cause and should avoid the competition completely. Don’t waste B&P dollars when the government has already made up their mind.
Further, what if the customer wants a certain skill set not listed in the RFP that you don’t have? Or, what if they are looking for specific personnel in a proposal or specific personnel accomplishments that are not clearly defined in the requirements documentation? Much of the time, this information can’t be found online and it’s important to know what the government truly wants in order to determine if bidding on an opportunity is worth the investment of your time and money.
2. What if you miss a valuable opportunity because you thought you shouldn’t bid?
Conversely, what if the opportunity doesn't look great on paper but in actuality, the current incumbent is performing poorly and is not well regarded by the government customer? Securing this customer feedback can help you quickly determine if you should proactively bid and pursue a contract to unseat the incumbent. Valuable information such as the government's specific preferences, detailed solution needs, and personnel desires are almost never listed online or in the documentation, and the only way to truly assess capability alignment is by engaging with the end customer. If your skill set directly aligns with what the government wants, you may decide to bid more aggressively on an opportunity that you normally would not consider based on the documented misalignment. We actually think it’s dangerous, and often very costly when only using basic online or RFP information for bid decisions. Winning contracts goes beyond points chasing because when numerical points are equal, the government ultimately selects who they feel most comfortable working with and that’s often determined by who they view as the “lowest risk” from a partnership perspective.
3. Create Customized Proposals and Gain a Competitive Advantage
To differentiate from your competitors, fully understanding the scope of the work that is being sought out is extremely valuable. Let’s say the scope of the opportunity is XYZ but the program office would also love some expertise and support in ABC areas. Knowing what ABC entails allows you to draft customized proposals, catering to the customer's exact wants and needs, while still ensuring maximum proposal compliance.
Within each opportunity in the VoicedIQ™ Platform, you will find that the customer’s incumbent performance feedback and most recent pain points are outlined with thorough research and customer quotes obtained from direct conversations with the government program offices behind a given RFP, contract, or program.
In Conclusion
In short, data aggregators can’t paint the whole picture. Unlike all other solutions in the market, the AlphaBrook VoicedIQ Platform does not simply pull or scrape data from government feeds. Instead, it provides you with detailed, verbal feedback directly from government decision-makers on a multitude of different opportunities. This information includes direct, quoted statements on the incumbents, current customer pain points, and contract details allowing your staff to save precious time and act swiftly on our data. If you are not currently an AlphaBrook VoicedIQ™ customer, you are likely missing out on an extensive amount of valuable customer bid intel that would help you make informed decisions. Learn more about how you can stop missing out on valuable, biddable opportunities due to a lack of customer engagement.