Dealing with Uncertainty

Bidding teams try to factor uncertainty into the proposal, but these bidders will tell you how difficult it can be to price accordingly. 

Common Types of Uncertainty in Bids

What type of uncertainty are we talking about?

A new practitioner unfamiliar with bidding contracts may use high, low, and nominal estimates. But this is not the best method for pricing analysis. Some bidders get a little too fancy with statistical distributions. And other analysts don’t consider uncertainty at all.

But don’t let any of these things get in your way of pricing your bid because we have you covered.

Three Ways Uncertainty Creates Confusion

Our eBook reveals how uncertainty can create confusion in bids and explains the most common mistakes bidders make when dealing with uncertainty.

Click to read the free eBook “Three Ways Uncertainty Creates Confusion in Bids.”

More about Lone Star Analysis’ competitive solutions:

If you need more services for competitive solutions, check out our full offering of Competitive Analytics & Pricing Solutions to help you win new business.

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Assessing Competitors’ Behavior

Competitor behavior assessment is an essential technique that will help you gain the insights you need to bid appropriately to be awarded the contract. Winning the deal is what you are looking for, after all, right?

Challenges with Competitive Analysis

But understanding competitor behavior has its challenges. We’ve seen bidders making these detrimental mistakes many times. The reality is that you need to avoid these errors or risk losing the opportunity.

Understanding the Competition

Nonetheless, bidders need to understand their competition well enough to gain access to actionable insight. In this eBook, we share three common errors bidding experts frequently see in assessing competitive behavior.

Click here to read “Three Mistakes in Assessing Competitor Behavior.”

More about Lone Star Analysis competitive solutions:

If you need more services for competitive solutions, check out our full offering of Competitive Analytics & Pricing Solutions to help you win new business.

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Facing the hard truth in bid pricing

The hard truth is that you need to know these basic blunders first before you price your bid, especially if you are a non-practitioner charged with pricing a proposal. As capture managers, price-to-win analysts, and business developers, you must also figure out how to find the proper bid strategy for any given bid. If you don’t and make these common mistakes, you probably won’t win the contract.

Avoiding these pricing blunders

Before you get started, learn about these blunders that bidding experts see happen all the time. To help you reach the ideal outcome of your bid, we’ve created an eBook that contains some solid practical advice.

Click to read “Three Basic Blunders in Bid Pricing.”

More about Lone Star Analysis competitive solutions:

If you need more services for competitive solutions, check out our full offering of Competitive Analytics & Pricing Solutions to help you win new business.

The post eBook: “3 Blunders in Bid Pricing” appeared first on TruPredict® - by Lone Star Analysis.

Effectiveness is a relative term. There are so many levels of efficiency that anything qualifies as effective. Nonetheless, being able to differentiate between lower and higher levels of valuable data will motivate your bidding strategy. 

So, what are the qualifiers for the effectiveness of competitive intelligence? The mission of active Competitive Intelligence should be to: 

• Strengthen your company’s position. 
• Understand how the buyer perceives the company’s value proposition. 
• Peek into what the competition is doing. 
• Figure out which industry-wide best practices apply. 
• Discover new markets. 
• Uncover innovative technologies. 
• Help navigate the company in the right direction. 
• Develop new products/services/solutions. 
• Investigate and address the problems of your clients’ experience. 

Indecision is an obstacle. 

There are many obstacles to producing valuable competitive intelligence. The most important of these obstacles is indecision. This indecision devalues intelligence efforts. In some cases, it leads to the dissolution of the actual intelligence efforts. 

What is the real problem with indecision? 

The problem with indecision is that there is no agreement on focus and the results of the efforts. Often, executives will request specific bits of information while other departments create laundry lists of potential topics. 

In too many cases, a strategic plan for intelligence is lacking. Evidence of this environment usually rears its head with the philosophy of “let’s grab everything we can, and once we have the data, we’ll know what to do with it.” The most dangerous symptom is a company that is very reactive in its intelligence efforts. 

The truth of the matter is that this lack of system usually leads to information overload. It would be best if you prioritized your efforts for competitive intelligence to be practical. The prevailing feeling is too much data is not useful. From this point on, you will base corporate decisions on experience rather than intelligence efforts. 

Without a competitive intelligence strategy that makes effectiveness a vital characteristic of success, the intelligence group is likely to marginalize its value. 

3 Key Steps to Decisive Competitive Intelligence 

It would help if you made your company decisive about its competitive intelligence efforts. You can do this by: 

1. Developing a set of effectiveness criteria. 
2. Measuring your strategy against its ability to be effective.
3. Selling this idea to your management and on up the chain. 

Create a habit of decisiveness around your competitive intelligence efforts, strategies, and plans. Otherwise, indecision will trivialize your best efforts. 

Contact us for more information on competitive intelligence and how we can help you. 

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