Ever have a sales situation where you’ve come to realize, usually quite late in the game, that you’re going to lose? And to make matters worse, it appears the customer is about to buy from someone he or she will later regret buying from? Frustrating, isn’t it?
What do you do? You can do nothing and just let the cards fall where they may. Then, some time later, try to circle back to the customer to see how things worked out in a backhanded “see I told you so” way.
Of course, the reality here is that most customers are pretty slow to admit they made a bad buying decision, so don’t be too eager.
You could also try approaching the customer and telling him flat out what a bone-headed decision he’s about to make by buying from your lying and cheating competitor. Try this and let us know how it works!
I guess you could also throw in a last ditch unsolicited price concession in an effort to discount yourself to prosperity.
Let’s face it…you have no good choices.
However, you may have one thing you can still work with in a final attempt to put yourself in a position to win. FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
FUD can work to at least delay a decision and possibly give you a chance to reposition yourself relative to your competition. By planting credible seeds of doubt about a decision you believe the customer is about to make you might be able to get back in the game.
But a word of warning, implementing FUD strategies is not for the faint of heart. Done wrong and you can damage your company’s reputation.
Below is an example for a FUD email sent to a prospective customer (Al at XYZ Company) by Dave, a sales guy from “Alpha Corporation,” who realized he was in fifth place…out of five bidders. I’ve inserted annotations in various parts to explain the specific choice of words.
Hi Al,
During our phone call earlier last week, you told us that Alpha was 5th out of 5 when evaluated purely on total bid price. Frankly, we were shocked to hear that! In fact, after talking to you, we spent some time revisiting the scope of work to see if we’d mistakenly added anything. We hadn’t. (We can’t use tame words like “somewhat surprised” or we won’t get Al’s full attention.)
However, we did see two things on the second go around that caught our attention. (This paragraph needs to stand out.)
First, there were a few items that Alpha might have interpreted in an overly conservative way, even to the point of including things that we knew would ultimately be required for the project to succeed but weren’t explicitly specified. (Aren’t we wonderful here at Alpha?) If others bidding the project interpreted these same items overly aggressively, XYZ will be left with costly change orders to manage. (Oh those nasty, lying, cheating competitors of ours. Working with them is going to cost you!)
Secondly, and again, after looking at the scope of work from a different angle, we believe there may be ways to engineer some cost out of the project. Doing so would require a few scope modifications that we believe would be relatively minor. We would, of course, need to discuss the specifics of these value-engineering ideas with you to see if you agree with our assessment. (Just your basic tease. But you better have something to talk about, even if it’s a stretch)
Obviously, we could be missing the mark in our take on what’s going on. (We wouldn’t dream of besmirching the integrity of our worthy competitors.) What we typically see for a project of this type is several bids clustered more or less around a similar number and one “outlier” bid from a company that is, regrettably, desperately trying to keep its doors open by taking work at a substantial loss. It’s altogether possible that several companies bidding this project have decided to quote the work at a substantial loss in an effort to stay afloat. It’s similarly possible that some companies quoting the project are reaching far afield of their core business for the same reason. (It’s worse out there than we thought. Any company …other than Alpha…that you might buy from is probably going to go out of business during the project, leaving XYZ holding the bag and you, Al, with a black eye.)
Al, we hope you can appreciate where we’re coming from with this correspondence. Our goal, quite simply, is to advance the best interests of the both XYX and the Alpha Company. (We’re not going to even pretend this is “all about the customer.” It’s about both of us.)
If you’d like to get together I’m in pretty good shape to meet on relatively short notice over the next week or so. (I really have no intention of trying to sort this out over the phone. We have to meet in person.)
Sincerely,
Dave at The Alpha Corporation
