Bid Management Lingo

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RFP - the most commonly heard word around Bid Management circles. Stands for Request for Proposal. Some people mistakenly (minor sin compared to what else goes on!) also refer to their response as the 'RFP' as in :- 'We submitted the RFP yesterday'. As you know, you don’t submit an RFP, you submit an RFP Response or better still, you submit a Proposal in response to a customer's Request for Proposal.

Proposal - You have to unlearn what you thought a proposal is, when you first came to Bid Management - this proposal won't require a ring or flowers! A proposal is an offer from a vendor to a customer. Sometimes this has commercial details and pricing information and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it does not contain many details because the vendor does not know what the customer wants and rarely, because the customer has not yet said what he wants. So, when you see that a proposal is missing several major sections like a Price and even a precise Solution for a requirement, you could modestly and correctly call it an Approach Note.


Approach Note - Is a proposal without the filling! It is then up to the customer to visualize the missing elements! 


What a proposal DOES contain - Most proposals contain a cover page made in psychedelic colours, followed by several pages about the company peppered with internal terms and acronyms, made up of imprecise data, all in unchecked grammar, then the all important solution hidden on the fortyseventh page laced with lots of jargon, then the assumptions list which copies verbatim many of the requirements from the rfp, finally the climactic commercials section with pages-long fine print, not to forget the annexures which are embedded in the word document like leeches, and finally the absence of section numbers and page numbers giving the customer an infinite blue ocean kind of feeling...will the customer read on or curse their luck...
 

What a proposal MUST contain - A brief introduction about your company (one short para, no more), an Executive Summary, a recap of your understanding of what the customer wants or needs - not cut-and-pasted from the rfp but your articulation of what you think they want based on customer stated facts and your interpreted requirements, then the solution, the assumptions, the commercials and annexures listed in a table. The annexures go as separate documents. 

Executive Summary - It needs to be simple and without jargon. It should not make bombastic and evidently untrue statements like 'we have the most outstanding and respected enterprise consulting practice in the world', it should make the customer want to read on, and it should truly summarize the rest of the proposal. A simple structure of an executive summary could be,
•    Who You Are (a brief para about the company),
•    What you think the customer wants (a summary of what you have understood to be the customer need),
•    What is the solution you are proposing (a brief description of the solution including details like the timeline to implement the solution and the cost - only where RFP rules allow the cost to be mentioned in the main proposal),
•    What is different about your solution, and then finally,
•    Why your company for THIS project

 
Often, your solution highlights are mixed up with your credentials as a company and this is no good. First, explain why your solution is great (Solution Differentiators) and then explain why they should select your company to deliver the solution(Company Differentiators). So, sell the solution first and then the company. 
 

So, basically,  the executive summary should only have 5 sections,
 

1.    Who you are
2.    What the customer wants 
3.    What you are proposing

4.    Why your solution is great and 
5.    Why your company is the right one.
 

Most people tend to cut and paste items 1, 4, and 5 and sometimes even item 3 from old proposals, with little modification. The key is to make these sections relevant for the specific opportunity in question. 

For example,
 

•    If the customer requirement is a global roll-out of an application in obscure places like Timbuktu, then what you must highlight in the Company overview is your global presence.
•    If the solution will be built on a product like SAP, then item 5 above should contain something about Your company's relationship with SAP. The key is to not do this vaguely, but precisely. So, instead of saying 'We have a great relationship with SAP and we are strong partners who can leverage each other's strengths' it is better to say 'Our company's relationship with SAP will be utilized to validate the Blueprint for this project with SAP, the product vendor'. Of course, saying it is one thing; you need to be able to deliver what you said in the proposal once you get the order. So, say only what you will do, do your homework at the proposal stage so you will be able to make this commitment with conviction. So, if you want to use the above SAP commitment example, you should check with SAP first if they will validate the Blueprint you will make for your customer and you should ensure that you provide for it in your plan and estimates. 


So much about the holy executive summary.
 

One final note, don’t make the executive summary more than 3-4 pages long. Don’t set yourself artificial page limits but more importantly, make sure every sentence in the EXEC summary is saying something relevant. If a sentence does not do its job, kill it and you will automatically end up with a powerful and yet short executive summary!!!

Watching Glenngarry Glenn Ross Again

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Even if you are not in sales, you have to watch this classic. I watched it again after a gap of a year and this time, I was watching it as a salesperson. Beyond the exceptional acting (I haven't watched any movie with better ensemble acting) and the incredible (but heavily expletive-laden) dialogue, this movie does have some lessons for salespeople. 

The importance of getting rid of your inhibitions, like making unpleasant calls to rude prospects, is one. The importance of persistence and patience is another. The need to focus on deal outcomes (though the line from the movie Always Be Closing is a bit extreme) is yet another. Even the Al Pacino character's slow and steady psycho-philosophical approach to selling is educative in how we can get closer to the sale by an empathetic approach and by putting the customer issues first before ours.


Of course, there is lots of bad sales practices in the movie we dont want to follow like stealing leads, like squeezing every drop of blood from your sales team and of course, and most importantly selling an undesirable product that your customer would soon regret buying.


Having said all that, I would recommend you first watch it for the acting, then for the dialogue and only then for the ideas. 

Presales 101 - How to respond to an RFI

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Every year without fail, a client who has plenty of free time on his hand comes up with a bunch of questions to throw at his vendors to spoil their Christmas holidays. I am referring to that very predictable new year eve present from clients called the Request for Information or RFI, and I am suggesting some cool ways to coast through this nightmare every bid manager must endure periodically!

When you are responding to questions in an RFI, ask yourself even more questions (it works a bit like vaccines - if you get my drift :-) ) like the ones below:

1) Does my response address every part of the Customer Question or am I responding to only the beginning of the question? Or only the end?

BTW, Did I check my eyesight recently?                

2) Is the response understandable? Does each sentence in the response make sense to a sane person like me?
 

How about if my 12 year old nephew were to read it?  

3) Are all acronyms expanded in the response? Even very obvious ones like ISO? - 
Don't say "the customer didnt expand RFI when he sent it to me so why should I expand PMO?" 

4) Are there any boilerplate or motherhood statements (‘We put our customers before everything else’. ‘We have profound understanding of your business’ ‘We are eagerly waiting for this deal’ etc.) that I need to obliterate? 

Don't plead with the customer, especially around Christmas time!

5) Does the response mention at least one of the following?



- A previous experience or Customer Story (with or without customer name)
- A specific plan of something we will do for the client
- A metric or result or outcome
- A specific approach

...anything at all that hides my hard cut and paste efforts?

6) Does it stick to some reasonable length or does it go on like a Tolstoy novel? - A response too short means we are not using the opportunity to differentiate ourselves. A response too long won't be read.
When in doubt, chop-chop-chop!!!

7) Have I included a one line summary message  at the bottom of each  response - Customers like it sweet and short, so give it to them in one sentence after you have polluted the environment for half a page.

8) Does it differentiate us in any way? Can we mention an award, a unique methodology, a tool we use, an endorsement from someone, a unique metric, or at least a unique message? At a minimum does it sound honest and sincere?


You see, it is just like proposing to someone...everyone can't emulate Shakespeare and write sonnets, but vomiting the truth should be easy? 

They Buy the Package

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I was talking to a German friend this weekend and he was telling me how the (German) small to mid companies decide on vendors for IT projects. He said they dont buy the solution or the proposal but rather the 'Whole Package'. I probed him a bit and he said, 'They want to see who is proposing, where he comes from, what he has done before, how he behaves and many other things before the make a decision. That is what I call the Whole Package'.

I was not convinced and asked 'Doesn't every customer decide this way? What is special about these smaller companies?'

He said the difference is in their perception of risk as they consider and understand the Whole Package. The smaller companies cannot afford to take that risk which a big company could take with eyes closed.

Then it entered my slow brain. These small guys look at the Whole Package to gauge their risk. If they see any yellow lights (leave alone red) in the horizon they brake and look elsewhere. The big companies, on the other hand do look at elements of the package but not in the same wholistic sensitive way and certainly not as a precise indicator of risk. They can and do take a risky decision.

I thought about this during my thirty minute train ride back home this saturday. It seemed obvious and not.

Credibility - That elusive thing

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One of my friends, a lawyer with a mid size law firm, told me a story of a bid they made and eventually won with a large bank. After the bid, when he was talking to an insider about why they won, the reason given was, 

You guys admitted you could not do several things we wanted done. All others said they could do everything. Your statement matched your firm profile and size. Your story was believable. We felt your story had credibility. We decided to work with you and help you bridge your gaps in capability. 

You can win deals (and deliver successfully) if you can retain your credibility. Dream big certainly, but be careful not to trample on your credibility!

Win Post Mortems are better than Loss Post Mortems

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You win some and and you lose some is the old saying set to music by mushy singers like Bryan Adams. In modern life, however, no one seems to takes things so philosophically. Especially the losses. 

And why should we? Why should we ignore lost deals, lost projects and lost success?

Look closer and you will find that reality is in fact the cliché
- we do win some deals and we do lose some others. And, mostly we don't know why.

Why we lose deals seems to be every sales manager's pet source of worry, at least for a few days or weeks after a loss. He claims to worry about the loss and why it happened and what to do to prevent a repeat. He resolves to improve the win rate so that he can eliminate losses - as if deal losses were a disease like Polio that could be systematically eradicated from most of the globe. Alas, most of these sales and presales managers dont know how to do this.


They break their heads for a week, sometimes for a month after a big loss and claim to do post mortems and lessons learnt analyses and Kaizens and try every trick including Yoga and psychoanalysis. They claim to want to implement the best practices and eliminate the bad practices in all future deals. Of course, six months down the line, not much changes and yet another big loss comes calling!


Familiar Story? 

Why? It is not because these sales managers don't want to improve their win rates. It is not because they don't have the right data. It is not because they dont have the time to worry about losses. It is not because they are not serious in their intent to know the truth about lost deals. It is not that they do faulty analysis of the data they do have. It is not that they don't implement those improvements their analysis of lost deals tells them to do.

It is something more basic. Losses can't tell us nearly as much as wins. What is a lost deal after all? A deal not won. So, rather than worry about why they lost this deal or that deal, the question sales managers must ask themselves and their clients and their sales force is this: 

'What was needed to win that deal we just lost? How did the winner manage to eat my cheese?'. 


It's not the same as taking apart your lost deal which is totally focused on your bid and your mistakes. You were only one of the losers. Every loser would have made different mistakes. One would have put in a bad solution. Another would have had no clue about client requirements. Yet another would have overestimated costs. A fourth one surely under-priced his solution putting the project and client at serious risk.

The real answer is in the winning bid which most of the time has solved the key problems seen in all the other losing bids.

Obviously, you can't always find out how the winner won a deal when you have been on the losing team. And if you analyze just your bid and even if you (rarely) do a great job of it, a lost bid analysis can only teach you so much. But there are ways of finding out. Often clients are willing to share why someone else won.


One way to get around this is to systematically analyze your own won bids. 

Get your winning team to contribute to buidling a repository of practices that led to each deal win, immediately after the win if not during the bid. Now, it is not enough for everyone to identify the best practices. Knowledge needs context. Best practices need a setting. The deal story has to be written inter-weaving the context with the best practices, like a Grisham thriller with heart-stopping action at every juncture. 



The best part is, as you write the story and you re-live the story yourself, those subtle, nuanced best practices and smart ideas emerge from their hiding places and take a bow.  


I have been part of deal winning teams, and of course I have also been part of deal losing teams. The hardest question to answer for me has been 'Why did you win this deal' - much more difficult than 'why did you lose that other deal'. If someone asks me 'Who won that deal for you' I would probably be happy to blush and say thank you. If someone asks me 'Why did you lose that deal', I will have a ready list of people to blame. But how about ' How did you win that deal'?

I am not talking about the reasons we tell the press or the reasons we broadcast to our company executives but the real reasons which helped the client decide to do the deal with us.

So, when I have been asked this question, I dont have a simple answer. I tell a long story. In the story are lots of characters, from the client's side, from our side, from competitors, consultants and advisors and so on. There is relentless action - customer lobbing the ball over our heads, our team scampering and returning with a drop shot, competitors inching ahead only to be overtaken by us later, near death experiences, and ecstatic events making up the deal story.

The best practices come flooding, those wonderful insights which dawned eurekaesque on you as you cooled your heals between meetings in some seedy Extended Stay suite in small town America missing your family 3000 miles away and dreaming of the win that seemed ever elusive. So, when you tell yourself the story, when you tell other people the story, you begin to see those best practices, those critical innovations, those tipping points which enabled your win.
 

During this, something else amazing dawns on you. You realize how many different ways the client was playing along with you, was actually helping you win the deal, in the end almost longing for your win, almost as much as you.

A deal win is less a collection of events and practices than the collective experience lived together with the client. You win the deal with the client. The client wins the winning bidder that is you. What is born in the deal is not a contract but comfort and confidence in each other for a win-win outcome.
 
It's not unlike when you want to select a painter to paint your house. After all the stories, work samples, reference checks and price negotiations, it comes right down to  which painter's face you like, who you feel is least likely to let you down. In the end it is  down to feelings, hunches and risks for the client. Painting your house can go awfully wrong in spite of everything. And you know it well as you select the painter. I have alluded to this aspect in another post recently.  

So, why do we win some and lose some. I think we win those deals where we are one team first internally within our company, then we become one team with the client, sincerely and purposefully. Then, together, we, the client and us, decide to tell the world, `well, guess what, we just decided to do a deal yesterday!!!`

Now, how much of that deal can you find out about, talking to the losers?