5 Disasters Your Go/No Go Process Should be Helping You Avoid
We’ve all been there. Working on the proposal you know you should not be spending time on. Organizations waste hours of staff time and other business development resources on opportunities that just shouldn’t have gotten the green light in the first place.
How do we avoid these headaches? It starts with a strong Go/No Go decision-making process, which should serve to nail down what you view as a strategic use of business development time and resources for your organization and identify which opportunities match this vision. And then: hold to that vision. Even when it’s hard. Even when we think we could squeeze in just one more bid to round out the pipeline a bit. Even when we’ve already invested time and resources.
Over the upcoming five posts, we’re going to take you through situations where a Go/No Go process has failed us.
Retweet if you’ve been on one of these bids! Join an exclusive club if you collect all five!
And then, let’s talk solutions. How could a better system avoid these five disasters?
First: Do you have a Go/No Go process in place at your organization? Really and truly – like, do some special opportunities get to bypass it? Is it just an informal gut check where there was once a set of questions but now it just comes down to the mood of one decision maker? Do you even have all the right decision makers in on the process? Is it simply a form treated as a formality, or is there actual discussion and hard decisions surrounding the decision?
A robust Go/No Go process may feel like overkill at first, especially if you currently don’t have anything in place. But as you get the right tools in place you should find that the time invested up front yields dividends of less time wasted on these proposal disasters, and less time lost to burned-out/pissed off proposal teams. You might just see your win rate start to climb.
Check back for the following five business development disasters – and how to prevent them