My presentation at APMP Dach Conference

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I got an opportunity to present to about 100 proposal and bid management professionals at the APMP DACH conference in Munich last week on the topic Innovation and Bid Success. You can see the presentation slides here (though on my screen they looked blurred). 


I was only reasonably satisfied with my presentation. The following were the issues with my presentation: 


  • The ideas were randomly strewn together. There was no story or flow from one slide to the next  except in some cases.
  • There were too many ideas on most slides. You cant expect to make more than 3 or 4 points per slide and still be understood.
  • I was often saying things which were unrelated or off-tangent to what was on the slide. This does not always work, especially when the audience is not native English speaking and is searching hard to find your words on the slide 
  • I could have simplified some of the slides by converting text into pictures. 
  • I could have added some more background slides explaining my definition of bid management  and so on.
Having said that, I enjoyed the experience and the interactions that followed.  


I think I have definite ideas on improving my presentation and if I get another opportunity to present on the same topic, I am sure to do better.

The two faces of Bid Management

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Working on many bids over the years, I have realized that in any given deal I am either playing a Thinking role or an Organizing role. In some situations and deals, I have tried to play both the Thinking and Organizing roles and these have been extremely challenging and painful. I have come to the conclusion that on any successful deal, these two roles are different and both must be filled independently with sufficient leadership bandwidth for the bid to succeed.


Organizing Roles are Bid Manager, Proposal Manager and the like. Thinking roles are Transition Expert, Solution Architect, Solution Integrator and such. The thinking role can also be called Solution Lead. The Solution Lead is constantly bothered with making the solution / offer to the client stand out. When I say solution, my definition is broad and covers every aspect of the solution (business requirements coverage, technology, delivery model, positioning, commercial model and so on). So, the design of everything that the client will base his decision on, is the Solution Lead's baby. 

The Organizing role is Project Management to the core. Managing the bid as a project and making sure the plans and deliverables are moving forward is this person's job. The organizing role calls for managing all the deliverables that will eventually go to the client. Put differently, the Organizing role makes sure the proposal and the bid and questions on the RFP and so on are all getting delivered on time.

There appears to be a grey area in between...the solution lead is dependent on the organizing lead for getting his ideas on the deliverables. Similarly, the organizing lead is dependent on the solution lead for the structure / storyline of what needs to go to the client. 


This interdependence is a fact of life and where this is managed well, bids succeed and where it is not, the results are painfully obvious. So, for effective working, the solution lead and organizing lead should be completely aligned and working closely with each other.

Should there be a hierarchical relationship between the two? YES. One of them - Solution Lead or Organizing Lead - should be named the Bid Manager.

Who should that be? On small deals where the Solution Lead is purely in an advisory role, the Bid Manager can be the Organizing Lead. On larger critical bids, the solution lead must be the Bid Manager. Of course, one or the other should have a dotted reporting to the bid manager, in all cases. This ensures that the decision maker is clear and the roles are transparent. This also ensures that while the Solution Lead is mainly thinking about the solution, since the Organizing Lead has a dotted reporting to the Bid Manager (Solution Lead), sufficient oversight responsibility and control is given to the Solution Lead and there exists clear accountability. 

In all cases, the Bid Manager gets to pick his team and everyone reports to him for the duration of the bid.

Can Logic Win Deals?

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It has been famously said (and by others like this and this) that we are more a rationalizing people than a rational people.                                                           
What it means is that we believe in something first before we build the reasons for believing in that something (here is how the dictionary defines them). If we were rational people, it would be the opposite. We would first see something, then we would form beliefs based on what we have seen. Now, if we are rationalizing people, we will first believe and then, go to the extreme of even keeping out information that contradicts our belief and seeking out evidence that supports our belief.

What does it mean to those of us trying to win deals - the possibility that the client decision could be a rationalizing one rather than a rational one! 
Maybe one has to get their mindshare first and the facts can follow. One has to capture their imagination first, then the plans can follow. One has to woo them away by stories first, and the numbers can come slowly. If this were true, it has profound implications in my view. Logic, preparation, data and reasoning, thoroughness of the proposal, etc. can help rationalize a deal already won with passion or prior relationship or some other softer aspect, but these hard factors alone have NO CHANCE of winning the deal.

This is not as surprising as it appears. Imagine you are the client and you are contracting with someone who will build a house for you. More than any hard numbers or quotations or whatever it is, you will most likely go with the guy who wont cheat you, who appears sane and reasonable. You dont have to go through a threadbare analysis of his proposal to know you like him. You dont have to have a logical scoring mechanism before you know who you want. Most probably, if you are scoring the proposals after you have unknowingly made up your mind on these soft factors (appearance of trust for example), then you are going to score his proposal higher - thus rationalizing your decision.

So, since it appears quite intuitive and maybe people are really rationalizing beings rather than rational beings, how are we taking this aspect into account in our deals and pursuits? I can personally testify to these soft aspects like passion winning deals - having been part of some such experiences.

Maybe that is why I always have such a hard time giving an honest response to the question ' Why did you win such and such deal - what was different about your approach and our solution'. 
Can I let the cat out - isnt everyone expecting us to have had solid differentiators?

If only I could start with things like 'we showed better team spirit...' or 'we really moved the customer from the first meeting' and so on and then, maybe, I will be getting closer to the truth.

Wanted: Detacious Bid Manager

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These people really seem to know what kind of Bid Manager they want to hire...
I especially love the Key Attributes they describe, especially TENACITY and DETAIL HANDLING. I think they are spot on. 
A Bid Manager has to be tenacious and cannot give up on any ideas or threads or messages or what have you so easily and he has to persist until the deal is brought home and the doors are locked. Yes, a bid manager has to be TENACIOUS. 
Details, details! I would not call it DETAIL HANDLING as these people have. I would call it DETAIL ORIENTED or DETAIL DRIVEN or something like that...let me explain. 
  • The bid manager needs to be able to read the input documents in threadbare DETAIL. 
  • He needs to understand the customer needs, wants and expectations in great DETAIL. 
  • He needs to be able to give DETAILED directions and expectations to the bid team since there is little time or room for rework in a bid
  • He needs to be able to review everything that comes from the team in DETAIL
  • He needs to be able to patiently review, understand, redline and negotiate long contracts and bid documents in threadbare DETAIL 
  • He needs to be able to identify the good winning ideas from the average by getting into the DETAILS of the solutions and ideas from the team...
TENACIOUS and DETAILED.  How does DETACIOUS sound?

How to Ask and Neil Postman - First Post

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 I discovered Neil Postman  only recently, thanks to Vagabond Scholar and I was amazed by what he had to say in that brief excerpt about how to ask the right questions the right way. 

Here is one gem:  
The type of words used in a question will determine the type of the words used in the answer
Asking the right questions in a bid is critical. Especially those questions we ask of the Client or Customer. If we ask vaguely, they would answer vaguely. 

If you simply ask 'Are there any interfaces' or 'Is there documentation available' or 'Is round the clock support required' or something like that, you will get a YES/NO answer. 

(Almost) never ask a question which can be answered with a YES / NO.   That is Bid Management 101. 
Now, if you were to ask, 'Provide more details of the interfaces' you will get a standard document or write up that the client readily has, which might or might not have the information you need to make a good proposal with few guesses.


If you do better and ask 'Provide the following information on each interface' and then you specify what you need, a few things happen: 

a) The client sees you think before you ask, that you are specific, and that you are detail oriented.

b) You make the client think about those 4 or 5 elements of information you need e.g. you have perhaps asked for the number of programs using that particular interface and the client realizes he does not know the answer to that important question. Your question may trigger thoughts which could lead to refinement of project scope and clarity of requirements and so on. Of course, you also earn the client's respect for making them think. 

c) The client provides the precise information you really need to put together the proposal. 
d) You often get both the generic write up (which the client would have sent in response to a vague question) and the specific information you asked for so there is more to base your proposal on.
    
Now, you could do one better by asking the question this way: 

'Please provide the following information on each of the interfaces. The information is needed for us to submit a complete proposal for the reasons identified against each item'
Then you lay out what you need and why you need it. 
Let us say the RFP is huge and there is a lot of information out there in different documents including some information on those interfaces which you are so keen to pin down. Then, I would go one further and ask, 

'In the RFP (provide document and section and page references for each instance), the following interfaces are listed. For each interface, the following information is already provided in the RFP (refer again in detail). Please provide: 
a) A list of any other interfaces which may exist 

b) For each interface, the following additional information.'

Against each piece of information you need above, you mention why you need it - as before.

Now, the client also sees you have read the RFP thoroughly, taken stock of what is already included, found what is really missing and relevant for making the proposal and then are asking the questions.

You just moved a bit ahead of your competitors.


I shall post more of Postman's insights and how they are applicable to Bid Management in the coming weeks. 



Where are those RFPs?

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Time for a rant post. 


                                                                                                                                                                            
When I moved from Bid Management to Sales, one of the first things I realized is that those good, winnable, set-piece RFPs are not so easy to come by. Wait a minute, if I can do well in a certain type of RFP and give the customer a good proposal - that's got to be a win-win right? The market should be able to help make such things happen, i.e. bring the sellers and buyers together on those RFPs. 

Well, reality is a bit different. 


Often, the right vendors dont get the right RFPs. Especially in the private sector. The government RFPs are open to at least all who qualify. There are some qualification criteria and these are often meetable and so you will more than likely get an RFP that you want from a government agency than achieve the same from a private company.  Of course, winning the bid is something else.

Why is this so? Because, in private enterprises, other factors come into play. There is no machine choosing all those blessed RFP recipients based on a set of rigid criteria. Here a human being or several of them are making judgements on whom to invite to a bid. Of course, the idea is that the human discretion applied reduces time wastage and helps lead to the correct vendor soon. The flip side is that the right vendor may not even be in the radar of the buyers because, often, they are unknown to them.

Why do corporations allow this apparently subjective process to live on? Because, it would appear, the comfort of a manager making the vendor selection is much more important than the vendor selection itself.  In that sense, in the private sector, the decision maker is empowered. The underlying rationale is that vendor selection is only one tenth of the way in getting the project done. The remaining nine tenths depends on that chemistry between the buyer and the provider. So, while the government may end up selecting the right vendor, their project itself may not succeed, whereas the corporation typically gets its project done well with or without the best vendor. 

So, now tell me, where do I go for those RFPs which I so need...

Would you outsource Bid Management

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I noticed a company in Netherlands offering Bid Management services to interested clients. Then I found one in Ireland, one in Australia and this one in the USA calls themselves Competition Managers
No company I worked for has outsourced bid management but I have only worked for three till now. 

So would I outsource Bid Management? 

I had blogged earlier about the three different dimensions of bid managment, i.e. the strategic, the operational, and the creative. Maybe we can try to answer this question along these dimensions. 

The Strategic Aspects of Bid Management: I would probably never want to outsource anyy of this. This will involve sharing company IP, your positioning within the bid, pricing information and decisions, organizational politics and most importantly, lots of sensitive information about your client and your relationship with the client. I can't imagine outsourcing and having to share any of this with my vendor - except perhaps to evaluate specific strategic ideas in a bid, for example to help forge a partnership with another vendor or to employ an expert consultant to do some specialized research or something like that. 

The Operational Aspects of Bid Management: Here there is surely a lot more potential for outsourcing. For some operational activities, it might even be desirable to outsource, especially when the Bid Manager has to handle both the strategic and operational aspects which can be difficult. Here, the challenge to outsourcing, however, comes mainly because operational managment of a bid often requires an insider's networking ability and connects within the organization. 

The creative Aspects of Bid Management: Here is where you have high potential for outsourcing, especially for everything that you submit as part of the bid such as proposals and presentations and collaterals and so on. An expert can surely fine tune the message and present it in the best way. Of course, the limitation here is clearly that the creative side of Bid Management also involves some critical oral presentations and so on, which you cant outsource. You have to defend your proposal with your client, no one else can do it for you. 

So, outsourcing is possible in  Bid Management, but...