A study by the Association of German Engineers (VDI) showed that half of all German companies do not make use of customer relationship management systems (CRM-systems). In most companies there is not a systematic controlling of the bidding process. 75% of companies said that bid proposal management is a usual everyday process which is not systematically planned. According to the VDI, it is this fact which shows that there is still a lot of potential for improvement in this process.
Many companies consider customer relation management to be quite unimportant. About 20% of respondents said that they do not have any particular measures strengthening their relations with customers. Mr. Dieter Moll from the VDI therefore thinks: “There is a lot of potential for improvement in many companies in order to obtain attractive contracts.”
Many companies are not aware of how many opportunities they miss due to a lacking customer relation management because one quarter of businesses do not measure their business success regularly. Thus, it is difficult to benefit from learning and improvement. As was shown by the study, this situation could be changed, if the bid proposal management was systemized and employees given more room for manoeuvre at the same time.
Nowadays customers expect counselling to be much better than a few years ago. 80% of those companies interviewed are faced with the requirement of more individual and more rapid solutions which in general increase the cost of bid proposal management. According to the study, to customers quality and value for money are more important than a price. This requires buinesses to change their way of thinking.
First of all companies measure the success of their marketing initiatives by turnover. In most cases this is it. 23% of companies not not calculate the ratio of offers in proportion to orders received – the so-called hitrate- but carry out quite often a client satisfaction analysis. Benchmarking and competitor comparison are used either not at all (in 32% of cases) or only in part (42%). “These findings demonstrate that there is still a lot of potential for improving bid proposal management in companies”, says Mr Moll summing up the findings of the study.
All the findings of the VDI survey are available for free-of-charge download in PDF format. 