On nearly every competitive (or even non-competitive acquisition strategy), there are three key evaluation areas: technical, price, and past performance. The importance of each of them is different for each acquisition…but the value of them is not. To me, past performance is the most valuable, and often overlooked, part of the competition.
We recently recorded a Contracting Officer Podcast episode about how important it is to APPLY past performance vs just claiming an ability to do the work. (Note: the episode number is TBD, it has not been posted yet). In that episode, I talked about how price and product are not sustainable competitive advantages because they both fade, eventually.
Competitors can bid a lower price. Unless you’re Wal-Mart or Amazon, others can and will price lower than you to get the work.
Technical solutions can be copied, reengineered, or become outdated. Technical advantages don’t last (AOL, Kodak, and GoreTex).
Price and product advantages don’t last.
However, past performance is much more valuable because it is much harder (frankly, impossible) to manufacture overnight. There are ways to manufacture past performance (such as teaming with a contractor who has the right past performance or buying the items/services from the competitors who have it), but even then, the effectiveness and shelf life of that past performance is limited.
Organic past performance is exceedingly hard to manufacture. That’s why it’s an advantage. When used well, past performance can be THE difference in winning and losing.
Here’s the catch (of course there’s a catch): while the past performance is the most valuable of the three evaluation areas in the aggregate, it is only as effective as the government evaluation team makes it in the RFP. In other words, if the evaluation criteria waters down the past performance by, for example, making it a go no/go criteria, then the decision slides to technical, and more likely, to price.
Like we talked about in the podcast episode about competitive lockout, our lockout (in that case our past performance) only has value if the customers values it.
So, what to do? Here are three ideas:
- No surprise here: target. Focus on customers who value your past performance. Target opportunities that compound your past performance. When you diversify, let your customers lead you (that’s your past performance’s compound effect in action). Don’t go out of your way to justify not targeting.
- Build your past performance library to document, or even to reveal, your past performance strengths. Document your experience. Knowing what we do well makes it much easier to explain to others as well…unless we have to pull it out of our heads as we are writing the proposal. That’s hard. And exhausting. And likely not as valuable (or accurate).
- Start sooner. This is yet another reason to get upstream on opportunities. One of the best ways to win on past performance is to shape the way the government evaluates the RFP. A simple, and perhaps pedantic, example is explaining your past performance in your RFI response as a small business (or large) to show why a small (or large) business can do the work. This is a simple example, but without that knowledge, the government team may just assume a large business could do it (I had that happen personally, twice, as a KO) …thereby greatly reducing the value of your organic past performance doing the work.
Think of where, and how, your past performance creates an enormous advantage. Then target work like that. Under the rule of abundance, there are plenty of opportunities, regardless of how much we target (see Embrace Abundance blog).