Does the Competition Matter?

When you are putting together proposals, how much attention should you give your competitors? Does knowing who your competitors are, change your strategy or what you write in your proposals? Should you change anything about your proposals because of what other firms are also submitting? Just how much does the competition matter?

An easy answer is yes. Competition does matter. But maybe not in the way you think it does.

And, how much should it matter to you while you write your proposals? That answer isn’t so easy. Let me explain what I mean.

Knowing the Competition Before the Proposal

Ideally, as part of your pre-proposal positioning, you are learning about the project, client needs, and issues related to the project and identifying what other types of firms may be pursuing the client. Because all these activities are done before the RFP is advertised, you can take actions and make decisions with feedback from the client.

You will want to identify the potential competitors during this phase and start listing out who might be on their teams. Knowing this information, you can then begin to analyze your competition to formulate your pre-proposal strategies.

Once you know this, you can start analyzing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and then align your team to capitalize on the competitors’ weaknesses and downplaying their strengths.

Analyzing Your Competition

Once you have identified your competitors, you can start analyzing the competition. You should do this by first, identifying your team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats using a SWOT Analysis. Then do a similar analysis for each competitor.

I provide a free template below to help you do this.

Once you have this analysis complete, you can look at how you compare to each competitor. You can look at each competitor’s weaknesses and see if you have any strengths that counter those. If you don’t and you are still in the pre-proposal phase, what can you add to your team to turn it into a strength. Sometimes you can do this by adding a specialty subconsultant or identifying a key staff member.

Conversely, what competitor strengths align with your weaknesses? How can you overcome or downplay those weaknesses to make them not as strong for your competitor?

You will want to do this for each competitor and item on the SWOT Analysis.

Shaping Your Proposal Around the Competition

Then, when it’s time to write the proposal, use the information in the SWOT Analysis to shape your proposal content.

You will want to develop content that:

• Highlights your strengths
• Mitigates your weaknesses
• Neutralizes a competitor’s strength
• Ghosts a competitor’s weakness

Ghosting the Competition

I wanted to point out this specific strategy around competition because it might be new to you.  Ghosting is taking the opportunity to emphasize your strengths and contrast them against those that your competition lacks. It is a more polite or subtle way of pointing out your competitor’s shortcomings without actually pointing a finger directly at them.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s say that you know that one of your competitor’s specific expertise is located on the other side of the country, specifically their team responsible for permitting. This team is hundreds of miles away from the design team, project, client, and local jurisdictions. Your ghost story might look like this:

This project involves approvals from multiple local, state, and federal jurisdictions. Having a permitting team who lives and works locally and has the experience working with each jurisdiction will expedite the approval process and keep the project on track.

Balancing Competitive Intelligence

I shared how to use competitive intelligence in your pre-proposal strategies and writing proposals. However, I want to caution you on not focusing too much on the competition so that it stifles the actions that need to be completed to produce your winning proposals. I still want you to focus on what the client truly needs and is looking for and then how to align your team to deliver that.

Yes, part of that is knowing your competitors and figuring out how you can differentiate, but the other, most important part is staying focused on the client.

You will constantly need to balance addressing the client and project needs and shaping the competitive landscape.

Competitive SWOT Analysis Template

To help you with this effort, I have put together a free template. This includes a way for you to capture strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your firm and your competitors.

Then there is a place to formulate your strategy for each.

Click the image below to get your Competitive SWOT Analysis Template.