bid team
Essence of bidding
Improving your proposals – what’s holding you back?
Essence of Bidding – objectives
You want…
- everyone involved in your bids to understand the activities, skills and behaviours central to successful proposal delivery
- everyone involved in your bids to be effective (and motivated) contributors
- everyone involved in your bids to be catalysts for change, improvement and the propagation of best practice.
Essence of Bidding services and training workshops from Bid Dynamics….
- help you understand why you lose – and (just as important to analyse) why you win
- set the ground rules for quality proposal development and bid management
- explain the tasks and activities required to prepare and deliver proposals and client presentations.
- position the importance of bidding in your sales and market strategy
- help you develop the highest quality proposal responses
Essence of Bidding covers two primary areas of activity – Bidding Excellence and Proposal Excellence
Bidding Excellence
Effective qualification for the bid/no-bid decision: before and throughout; why you do it, how you do it;
Your bidding context: internal/external, company expectations, services and facilities available
The RFP/ITT: how to analyse it, what to look for
The client: what is THIS client looking for in THIS bid at THIS stage of the procurement?
The buying centre – understanding your client evaluators and what they are looking for
Risk assessment and management: what types of risk the company looks for and why; how you track and mitigate risk;
Commercial implications: terms and conditions, guarantees, legal and regulatory issues
Analysing your competitors and how they are likely to bid each time
Leading and managing a bid team: skills, behaviours, strategies
Review, fix, learn, improve: what happened with this proposal and why?
Proposal Excellence
Defining the standards: what makes a winning proposal for your company? What does good look like?
Changes in the nature of bidding, including e-procurement and “bidding by portal”: implications for delivery and presentation of content
Planning and storyboarding the response
Understanding and articulating your value proposition
Defining and articulating business solutions
Compiling the ONLY output the client sees: presenting your solution and sales story in compelling proposals and presentations
Structuring your response: making your proposals and presentations easy to evaluate (and approve) through enhanced readability, sign-posting, way-finding
Writing for your audience: style, language, jargon; targeting your material to suit how different evaluators take in information
Helping you derive best value from our services
Enhance – improve – coach – mentor
Improving your bidding capability and client outputs for the long term means more than a tick-in-the-box “Training delivered – back to business as usual”. To make sure you derive best value from our services, we recommend a range of actions, to support your people as they apply their new skills to new bids:
Direct support to bid managers and bid teams – this can include mentoring, coaching, shadowing bid managers and sales managers and preparing/rehearsing presentation teams as they plan, lead, contribute to or write their next bid, with individual progress reviews at the end of the bid.
Direct support to bids and presentations: direct support on site or remotely for proposal and presentation planning, development and delivery covering ITT assessment, bid strategy, writing/editing proposals and presentations, storyboarding, proof-reading and Red Reviews.
Identifying and developing best practice proposal materials. This will include helping you develop on-line information repositories and associated update and maintenance procedures to make sure you retain and optimise best practice materials.
Train-the-trainer services for all aspects of the Proposal Excellence and Bidding Excellence programme.
Ad-hoc and pre-booked support available on-site and remotely
Specialist Hotline and out-of-hours service for 24×7 support