Intelligent Quotes

Most people who call themselves web developers would never consider building a web application without first finding out the problems it was trying to solve and suggesting an appropriate solution tailored to the problem, yet the same developers will roll out the same kind of quote to each client they meet. Obviously concept like social proof and credibility are relevant to all prospects, but how can you best customize quotes to different clients? The key is an elegant way to segment the classes of clients you deal with . . .

There are many ways you could segment your prospective clients when developing a quote. Industry, industry type, job title, personality type, client contact demographics, end user demographics, scale of project, type of project (e-commerce vs. extranet), etc. The question is, what classifications are most useful when customizing the information that will most likely make them choose your quote.

When it comes down to it, every decision maker has some kind of strategy for making decisions and a collection of beliefs that drive that strategy. Some decision makers believe that "quality is always worth paying for" where others believe that "a website is a website". Obviously they're likely to choose different vendors. Many of the possible segmentations listed above are just proxies for the decision making strategies and beliefs the decision makers are likely to have. All other things being equal, for a site selling Skateboards to 13-16 yr olds, excitement, coolness and being "with it" are probably going to be more important than coming across as a "safe pair of hands", but eliciting the actual beliefs of the specific decision maker will always be more accurate than such generalizations.

However, there is seldom a single decision maker which means that the final decision process is a function of the interaction between different individuals with their own strategies and various levels of affect (how seriously they are taken) and interest (how much they care about this particular decision). For larger project, it might make the sense to unravel all of the social dynamics of a project within the client company, but for smaller bids it probably doesn't make sense to spend the time to get to know all of the possible decision makers and how they're likely to interact.

The question then is what is the best way to quickly create intelligent quotes most likely to appeal to a given type of buyer. One approach is not to do this at all. Many firms position themselves with a clear brand (whether it is "hip", "competent", "leading edge" or "affordable") and simply take the projects where the clients are looking for their type of brand. This works, although I think if you take a branded approach, it is really important to pre-qualify leads by their interest in your brand values - if you're "hip" and they want "conservative", meeting with them and developing a quote is just a waste of everyones time.

Another approach would be to develop an intake questionnaire for capturing the values driving vendor selection. It won't be as accurate as speaking with all of the decision makers and watching them interact in a decision making context (hint: if you ever want to elicit the decision making strategies of a group, meet with them, ask them to make some decisions, and watch exactly what goes on between the group members), but it should help you to tailor the proposal to the values that are important to the decision making team, making the quote at least a little smarter.

How do you calibrate your quotes or decide which decision makers to work with? Any questions you've used in the past and found they helped you to zero in on great prospects or avoid those you wouldn't get along with?