James Keys

We all know that customer intimacy is the “gold standard” in preparing to write a winning proposal.  Yet getting significant insight into the mind of the customer is one of the most difficult challenges we face.  We all have worked programs where we were able to gain valuable insight into the customer’s priorities, and some that we were not able to gain much information at all. There were many reasons: 1) The customer was too busy to see us; 2) We lacked sufficient budget to do the legwork necessary; 3) People who knew the customer were not available to our team, and many more.  These and a thousand other issues often keep us from establishing an ideal rapport with the customer.

Following below are the top 10 things we can do to gain customer insight:

  1. Start calling on the customer long before the RFP is released – if you have a low risk solution that will lower his or her cost, they will see you
  2. Prepare white papers that educate the customer as to what we believe is the ideal solution, and why
  3. Hire a person who used to be an employee in the customer organization
  4. Hire a consultant familiar with the customer group
  5. Read and reread the RFP until the “hot button” issues become apparent
  6. Look up key personnel in the customer organization on LinkedIn
  7. Read the customer organization’s publicly available documentation such as the 5-year strategic plan, any Inspector General (IG) reports, and results from GAO audits or similar findings
  8. Find trade articles by or about key personnel in the customer group on Google
  9. Join trade associations attended by customers of interest to you such as ACT-IAC, NCMA, and others
  • Attend Conferences where customer personnel are presenting to gain first hand knowledge of what is important to them.

Here are some “war stories.”

Example #1: Where we got it right: For one IT customer on a technology refresh, we had met with different people in the customer organization several times and learned that it was far more complicated than “swapping out boxes”. We had to remap usernames/IDs, and while the record showed (for example) a user “Mary Smith,” she really went by “Sally,” and her married name was “Jones,” and there was no mapping of “Mary Smith” to be equivalent to “Sally Jones.”  By our simple verification step directly with the user before final technology exchange, we were able to explain why that was necessary, and help the customer achieve their objectives.  This also helped them with a major problem in their outdated records (without exposing this problem and getting them in trouble for it). The customer recognized this acute observation and we won the contract.

Example #2: Where we did not: On an IT bid for Air Combat Command (ACC), we had to address “Safety of Flight”, which to us, as software developers, meant to track aircraft and make certain they didn’t fly into each other. In the debrief, we were gently and politely told – that “Safety of Flight” to a pilot deals with hydraulics and mechanics, that when they pull a specific lever, a mechanical action would occur. By our detailed description of how we would keep aircraft from flying into each other by setting up safe buffers, we conclusively demonstrated to the customer that we didn’t understand. We did learn from that experience and had future successful dealings at ACC.