No Pain, No Gain…Starting With Pain Points In Your Proposals
| Pursuit | Strategy | Proposal Writing
Pain is one of life’s greatest motivators.
If you have tooth pain, you see a dentist.
If you’re feeling frustrated because your car is breaking down and unreliable, you buy a new (or used) one.
The same is true for RFPs/proposals.
If a customer is experiencing pain in their business, they’ll look for solutions.
When you identify your customer’s pain points and customize your solution to alleviate this pain, you gain their trust and win more bids.
Yet many organizations fail to do this. They use the proposal to focus on themselves and the solution, which often leads to losing business.
Pain Points
When responding to an RFP, part of knowing and acknowledging your customer’s needs (and how you’re going to help solve them) is to highlight what isn’t working for them, or their “pain points.”
This is one of the first things you need to determine when crafting your response.
Some also refer to them as “hot buttons.”
To clarify, hot buttons are a combination of pain points (issues) and motivators (what they hope to achieve). If you address the motivators and not the pain points, you are likely going to miss key buying information.
So, what is a pain point?
Simply put, a pain point is an uncomfortable issue that your customer is currently facing. Often there are more than one, and they are the reasons they are out to bid.
Here are a few questions to help determine a customer’s pain points:
Why is the customer looking for proposals/solutions at this time?
What are their top goals for this new product/service?
What is not currently working with their current system?
What else have they tried?
What do they hope to achieve?
Typically the salesperson will discover these during their qualification process, however, it’s important for this information to be transferred to the proposal writer/team, and used as a win theme throughout the proposal.
What are the common pain points in your industry?
In some cases, like with government proposals, you may not have the opportunity to have a conversation with the customer before bidding, so you’re unable to discover many of their pain points.
In such cases, you can do some research and make general assumptions based on common pain points in the industry.
For example, in the construction industry, common pain points are typically:
Delays/not meeting timelines
Going over budget
Supply chain issues
Safety issues
What are the most common issues in your industry today? What are some of the most common pain points from your past and current customers?
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Demonstrating your knowledge of your customer’s pain points in the proposal is important because not only does it show you understand their problems and have a solution, but is the foundation for developing trust and partnership.
Remember…no pain, no gain.
Tammy Holzer, MA is an APMP Executive Summary Micro-Certified writer, strategic proposal developer, and business development specialist. To find more articles and tools visit www.tammyholzer.com.
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