Essence of bidding

• 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.

• 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