My presentation at APMP Dach Conference

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

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.

How to Ask and Neil Postman - First Post

 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. 

Neutral Navigators

Sharon Drew Morgan has a post in her blog with this fascinating passage:

``...it’s quite possible to have an understanding of the decision making process – the route that buyers must make through their unique decision criteria – and recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators – Buying Facilitators if you will – much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend who knows where they want to go but doesn’t know the exact route to get there.``

I have often tried to be this neutral navigator to clients. There was a European client who rightly decided to save a pile of TPA (Third Party Advisors - see here for what a TPA does and one TPA´s recent perspective on their changing role ) consulting money by attempting to do an outsourcing deal with internal staff. They formed a project team and gave them sufficient operational freedom to do what it took to get the project done. The only problem was, the project team did not know how to do it. So, they took their time, met with vendors who gave them bits and pieces of information and over time, put together a solution they could bid out.

As bid manager for one of the vendors in the fray, I recognized a great opportunity to be the ´neutral navigator´ or ´buddy´ to the project team. While I still had to manage my bid and my deliverables, I realized I could play a strategic role for our company by advising the client as a truly neutral party. I would help them with templates and checklists and processes and frank advice (even things which would place our company on a weaker wicket competitively) on a variety of topics without selling them anything, activities which would appear to be strictly not in my role as bid as a bid manager. Over time, the client´s project team began to trust me and would take my opinion seriously before deciding something in the project.

Following that phase, the client bid the solution out to 4 vendors including us. What I noticed, when for example I was defending our proposal, was the amount of credibility I seemed to carry. I could coast through some of the uncomfortable moments (gaps in our ability to deliver, our readiness to deliver and son on) because of the trust the client seemed to place in me. We won almost half of the business eventually bid out.

When I look back, it was not the proposal or the bid documents or the pricing that made the crucial difference in that bid, it was that short period playing neutral advisor to the client...

In the beginning,

it is appropriate to talk about my beginning. I have been doing Proposal and Bid Management (there is a difference between those two, more about which later) for more than ten years now. Most of these bids were in the Outsourcing and IT Services business. Most of the projects or jobs we were bidding for were with large multinational corporations, including the Fortune 500. These clients were all over the world though mainly headquartered in the USA, Europe, and Japan. The competivive and single source Bids I have participated in ranged in value from US $50000 to US $ 200 Million. The Bids ranged from Outsourcing and Offshoring of IT and Engineering Services to Engineering Design of mechanical parts to development of custom IT solutions to solve business problems and needs.

To me, Bid Management has several dimensions. First, Bid Management provides the thought leadership for the bid (which is strategic, which has decision making authority, which requires deep and experiential knowledge of the subject matter). Second, it means managing the bid operationally (often called proposal management since the bid invariably consists of a significant proposalling phase, about which you can learn at the premier organization for proposal managers, APMP ) and third, managing the creative aspects of it (writing or deciding the key winning messages and the executive summary, signing off on the bid documents, presenting the bid to the client and so on). - Of course, I must state that every organization treats these roles differently and they are often attached to different organization roles, such as for example business development or sales or solution architecting or presales. Also, every organization has a different terminology and nomenclature which will hopefully achieve some level of standardization over time. -

I have played these different roles separately at times and often together in the same bid. So, in my blog you will find aspects dealing with each of these 3 dimensions of Bid Management

The Strategic
The Operational
The Creative

Why do I want to blog about Bid Management?

I am writing this so I can clarify and crystallize my opinion and improve my knowledge. I am also hoping that presales, proposal and bid management and sales professionals (especially rookees trying to find their feet in these professions) will find something of interest here, including hopefully, the ability to electronically interact with similarly hazardously occupied souls.

I am also writing this because I believe bid managers play a crucial yet little understood role in business (and dare I say, Society) and I would like to lay my little brick in building up the recognition of this profession and its practitioners.

And mainly because, Bid Management has given me immense intellectual satisfaction and thrill - I want to tell my stories - and maybe you will tell me yours.