Would you outsource Bid Management

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...