Get to Great™ can be traced back to 2001, when Chris Whyatt, its creator, was leading a project for Lotus / IBM to improve their bid win ratio. Chris realised Lotus needed to understand their current capabilities and define their aspirations before he could start to close the agreed gaps. Taking inspiration from the Capability Maturity Model, Chris built a five-level capability model covering the 12 critical success factors in improving bid capability. The subsequent project delivered a step change in bid win ratio from around 10% to circa 90%!
Chris subsequently used the same approach on similar projects for organisations as diverse as SAP, BNFL, Castle Care, HP, Getronics, Adobe, and Davis Langdon, all of which delivered significant step change in bid win ratios.
Upon successful completion of a project for Microsoft in late 2006, Jon Hughes (now with Integralis) suggested that a Sales Readiness model would be the next logical step; this was duly created with input from Jon and his team. All that was needed was an ‘umbrella’ name to cover the methodology, and Chris chose and trademarked Get to Great™ to reflect the nature of the desired outcome of a customer engagement.
