Today’s Order Winners are Tomorrow's Order Qualifiers

It's a Business case Quantify for any Organisation to sustain in a competitive market, and How it becomes a true statement "Today's Order Winners are tomorrow's Order Qualifiers"

Order winners are those who have competitive advantage over other customers such as quality, delivery speed, reliability, product design and flexibility. To win an order, customer would look for these qualities along with price, brand, history, trust, reference and so forth. 

Order qualifier is a characteristic of a product or service which is required to be considered by a customer. We may use certain methodology, tool or an approach to compete. To qualify, company must demonstrate in order to be a viable competitor in the business arena. Customer may look for an experience on number of projects executed, quality of service, stability of the company, revenues, longevity in the market, privately or public owned company etc.

The people in operations would be responsible to differentiate criteria for Order-winning and order-qualifying based on inputs from Sales or marketing people. This process starts with the corporate strategy and ends with the criteria that either keeps the company in the running (i.e., order qualifiers) or wins the customer's business.

Now to quantify “Today’s orders winners are Tomorrow's order qualifiers”, the customers could be tomorrow's order qualifiers based on today’s order winners.

For example of any start up, they may recruit well qualified team, very good infrastructure to execute project but to win, they may estimate competitive price. It can be considered as an investment, unless they prove in a market of their capability or quality of service it would be hard to sustain in market. Any orders won can gain confidence from customers and be a reason to be Order qualifiers for new and existing customers.

One of the company had an invite to be a qualifier for largest industry project. Now this opportunity been considered not just for winning the order, it could lead qualify for more orders. The reason is the company never had such a large customer before and by winning this order, it’s a value add for a company and to refer winning future customers. This is a real example where they strategized for lower revenue to win the project, and many more projects won based on the global brand and presence in the market of a customer around the world.

For any new customer, the prior project execution or experience can be a catalyst to qualify for Orders. To qualify for an order or to being considered would be the first step. To win orders, vendor must have competitive or combinational characteristics to persuade customers to choose its products or services. This process is not static, it could very well vary with customers and over the time, can change for same customers and may be different for different markets. For example, speedy delivery may be vital for group of customers but not for another. Characteristics that are order winners today probably will not remain so, because competition will try to copy winning characteristics, and the needs of customers will change. It’s very important for any industry to understand and put strategy to win orders or to qualify based on every products or service. It is virtually impossible to be the best in every dimension of the competition. Firms should in general strive to provide at least a minimal level of acceptance for each of the order qualifiers but should try to be the best in the market for the order winner(s). Same customers can change perspective as competitors always try to innovate with ideas, incentives or benefits to win orders.