APMP - Association of Proposal Management Professionals

The Leading organization for proposal management is the APMP.  

They used to have lots of good free content, but now it seems like most of that is members only. 

There is still the great page with tips for MS Office Users and there is also the page with nice podcasts 

The APMP forum, however, sucks and you likely wont notice any new posts unless you visited it two haircuts ago!

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.