Is this the year you’ll say ‘I DO’ to your bid content library? I hope so!
There is so much good that can come from a healthy relationship with your content library – faster turnaround times, more confidence in the quality of your responses, less stress (more tea!) and just a general sense of feeling you have things ‘sorted’ or ‘squared away’.
I’ve clearly been in the bid game for too long as I’ve been waking up from dreams about benefit statements lately. It has made me think though and I wanted to share the difference between BENEFITS and FEATURES in this month’s post for the ‘RFX Knowledge Management Basics’.
First – did you know that benefits and features are not the same? If you did and are rolling your eyes, hang on…
How often does your paragraph start with “ABC Co will benefit from our highly-experienced team of developers working with your team in synchronicity.” or something similar? I say SO WHAT! What are the benefits?
Benefits are tangible, real things you get as a result of the feature (those highly-skilled developers)… It’d be better to say “ABC Co’s development team will gain knowledge and skills (BENEFIT) through our knowledge transfer program while our skilled developers work with them as part of a single, cohesive team (FEATURE).”. That’s a basic example but you can see where we are going…
Features are things that your offering has as part of itself – highly-skilled developers, 100% uptime, being able to reach 0-60 in 17 seconds… All of these are great, but without telling me why that feature is of benefit to me makes it less than useless.
To score even more, link the benefits and the hot buttons/pain points/issues and you will have a truly winning formula.
First ask and truly understand: What is the buyer looking for? What do they need? What would be REALLY useful for them to have? Why?
Once you have the answers to those questions ask yourself what features of your offering deliver those benefits? Next go through your content library and tweak the answers to reflect a clean version of that text (clean meaning you can use it without fearing you’ve left a previous prospect’s name in your new document – a story about that another time).
So, let’s take a quick look at a couple of scenarios – going to use cars because they’re kind of universal.
Scenario 1 – family with kids and a dog, needs a large boot because groceries, camping trips, sports equipment, would like reliability (last car had issues with electrics and they got stranded on holidays and had to hire a car) and kerb appeal would be a nice to have. Speed – not that important ferrying the family is usually a sedate affair!
Scenario 2 – young executive type – finally has enough money to buy a nice car (without forking out thousands in insurance – aged up!) and wants to travel around the country at the weekends exploring new places.
Let’s tabulate things:
This is really basic I know, but I want to give you a feel for looking at the obvious things buyers will have asked for in the way they have stated the requirement, and then how to delve deeper. You are the seller, you KNOW everything about your offer, what it does, how it does it, what the options are or aren’t and you should know what the competition are offering and what their reliability rate is like.
Scenario 1 might settle for an older model of something that has a feature that they really like over a newer more expensive model with more speed and kerb-appeal. Scenario 2 may decide they’d rather have a NEW car with a bit less speed off the lights but that does have the tech they want over an older sportier car without satnav integration…
You have to really understand your buyer to understand what BENEFITS they want from the FEATURES your offering has.
To come back to the content in your library, find that paragraph that says “ABC Co will benefit from our years of experience in the industry” and rewrite it to say “ABC Co will realise x% faster processing and y% improvement in productivity as a result of our 30+ years’ experience in design systems with users in mind.” (and then have a case study or quote to back this up!)
If all you do next is go through a couple of those copy-and-paste answers you use all the time and tweak the benefits and features you’ll be onto a winner.
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