The Reluctant Bid Manager

[thereluctantbidmanager]

Win-Loss Reviews

When you lose a bid, do you review it to see why you lost?  It makes sense, doesn’t it?  If you know why you lost this time, you can avoid making the same mistakes next time.  But do you also review bids to see why you won?  Do you have the right people involved in the review?  And are you involving the most important reviewer -the customer?

Review the wins as well as the losses

It sounds counter-intuitive to review a win.  If the bid won, it must have been right, mustn’t it?  Well, kind of. Do you know, for example, which bits were exactly what the customer was looking for and which were merely OK?  Did you leave the competition standing or were you just a nose ahead?  Did your internal processes deliver the right answer because they knew it was right or was it just a good guess? The answers to these questions are very important if you want to retain the customer’s business in future and if you want to know which of your competitors are gaining on you and which are fading.  Don’t forget, your competitors are who the customer thinks they are, which may not be the same as who you think they are.  Don’t forget also, that when you review a loss with the customer, they won’t want to rub your nose in it; they will want to be constructive and to let you down lightly so that you will still want to bid for future business.  By contrast, once you have won the business, you are on the payroll and can take your kicking like anyone else, so you may well find that you get a much clearer and less forgiving view of your shortcomings after a win than from even the most disastrous loss.

Who’s in the review?

In all too many organisations, the reaction to losing a bid is for the members of the bid team gather and with the notification from the customer in front of them attempt to analyse the failure.  Sometimes the discussion is rational and ego-free; changes to methods are proposed, discussed and implemented, and work goes on to the next bid.  Sometimes the discussion degenerates into “blame-storming”; fingers are pointed, voices are raised; no problems are identified, no improvements proposed, but work still goes on to the next bid.  

In both these scenarios, an important voice is missing: that of the customer, which is strange because the customer, and only the customer, makes the decision about where to award the business, so only their view of the bid has any real weight.  Because of this, to make win-loss reviews worthwhile, they must be done in two stages: first we talk to the customer to find out what needs improving, then we work with the team to decide how to make those improvements.

Review with the customer

In the long run it is to the customer’s benefit to have their potential suppliers as well informed as possible about what they are looking for but, in the short term, reviewing a bid means one or more busy people taking some time out of their day to help you.  It’s a favour, so put some thought into choosing the bids to review.  Don’t expect to review everything, but do review the wins and do review the surprising results.

If possible, have a face to face meeting with the decision makers, or at least a conference call.  The review will always be more productive if it takes the form of a conversation.  If you can’t get a meeting, then ask for written feedback in the form of open questions.  Surveys with scores and ratings are good and everyone is used to the idea, but on their own they make it difficult to bring out the more subtle points of a review and you may miss an important piece of information because the survey didn’t ask the right question.

Don’t have members of the original bid team present at the customer review.  Particularly, don’t have the original sales lead involved.  By all means have them set up the meeting, but it is always more productive to have the meeting itself conducted by people not involved in the original bid.  A new set of faces can legitimately act as a quality assurance function, there to find out how it was for the customer, not to rake over old ground. If you can, have at least two people go to the meeting: one to lead the conversation and one to take the notes.

Have a structure for the meeting by pre-preparing the topics to discuss and questions to pose to kick off and maintain the conversation.  The best conversations, and therefore the best meetings, come from following a  thread, such as getting the customer to talk through the bid chronologically, describing what happened at each stage from their point of view and how they felt about it.  The conversation may jump about a bit, because items will crop up that trigger memories and if you have more than one customer representative  present, they will each remind the other of factors that might otherwise have gone unmentioned, but this is helpful rather than a hindrance because if means the final picture is more detailed and more complete.  Your role in all this is to keep the conversation going and to write down what the customer says.  Don’t get sucked into responding to criticisms or complaints.  

At the end of the customer facing review you will have a quantity of notes, which can be written up as a formal report to the rest of the bid team and used for the next stage in the process, the review with the bid team.

Review with the bid team

After you have seen the customer you will have a long list of reactions to your bid, and how it compared with what the customer really wanted.  What are we to make of this heap of raw data?  Customers are human like the rest of us, and they will tell you some things because they feel they ought to, or because they want you to bear it in mind for the future.  For example, it is not in any customer’s interest give you the impression that your price could not be improved and you will likely hear that your price was too high and your service level too low.   Of course, if your price was 50% higher than your nearest rival and nobody in their right mind would have paid it, then it may be as simple as that: you were simply too expensive.

Mostly, however, the customer will have told the truth as they see it, because doing that makes it more likely that you will submit a better proposal the next time they invite you to tender, something both you and they want.  You want it because you’d like to win the business and they want it because they want to be able to choose the best of the best, not the best of a bad bunch. Assume that what you get from the customer at the review is the truth, and base your follow up actions on that assumption.

First, review the transcript of the meeting and identify all the separate messages it contains.  Group the points made, wherever they occurred in the conversation, and construct a list of things the customer identified about the bid.  Some of these will be positive, some of them negative.  Next, hold the review meeting with the bid team.  The agenda for the meeting is simply the list of items from the customer review.  This focus on what the customer said removes the finger pointing and keeps the meeting on the straight and narrow.  For each point the customer made, there is a discussion to be had and decisions to be made.  If the point is a positive, how do we build on it?  How do we make sure we retain that positive for all future bids?  If it’s a negative, we have to look at how the problem arose, and how we can prevent it happening in future.  Is it something that would be a problem for any bid?  Is it something specific to this customer that should be noted as a preference for them?

The outcome from this second phase of the review will be a list of actions and information points to carry forward to future bids.  Because they will be based on things that a customer said, there should be no need for internal dissension: the customer is the final arbiter, so if  the customer said there was not enough detail in your bid then there must be more detail next time.  If the customer said the bid had too much extraneous material, then there was too much material and on the next bid you need to reduce or eliminate it.

Closing the loop

Reviewing your wins and losses with the customer ought to be a no-brainer. Direct feedback from a customer about the good and bad points of a bid is gold in the world of bidding.  Yes, it takes a bit more work and needs some time and effort spent on it, but to carry on bidding in the absence of solid data like this means you are gambling, not bidding.  You are relying on getting lucky, and tests prove that getting lucky is not a reproducible strategy.

[thereluctantbidmanager]

Who’s going to read the bid?

Whenever you aim something at an audience, you should consider who that audience is and what they expect from you.  In the world of bids and proposals it is tempting to think that the detailed and rigorous requirements specified in the tender documents already set out what the audience expects in complete, even excessive detail.  However, the customer is not a single, amorphous entity.  Procurements are undertaken by teams of people, just like proposals. The members of the procurement team will each have their own roles and objectives. They may even compete and conflict with each other just like the members of any other team.  

It is useful to consider the roles that appear frequently, what they will look for and how to keep them happy.  I’m going to look at three roles.  This is by no means the only way of categorising the players in a procurement and remember that one role may be carried out by several people and, conversely, one person may have more than one role in the course of the procurement.

The three roles are:

The scorer

The adviser

The decision maker

The scorer

The first role to consider is the scorer, not least because the first people to see the proposal will probably be one or more scorers.  In the case of pre-qualification questionnaires (PQQ) or request for information (RFI) documents the scorer is not only the first but may be the only person to read them.  Scorers are frequently relatively junior, may be inexperienced and will have little leeway in how they evaluate the bid.  They will likely work to a marking guide and will have been told how important it is to mark accurately and consistently.  The scores from these preliminary exercises are frequently reported to more senior people as a list of names and scores, sorted in descending order, with a line drawn at the pass mark.  You want to appear in that list above the line, so make it as easy as possible for a scorer to award you those marks.  

To keep the scorers happy, stick to the customer’s format, use their terminology and answer the question as it was actually written, not the way it might have been.  A scorer probably won’t spend a long time searching for the answer to a requirement; if the response is not where they expect it to be, or if the response is expressed in terms that don’t match their marking guide they are likely to award zero marks and move on.

With PQQs and RFIs, in general, don’t repackage the customer’s documents, don’t apply branding, don’t write long introductions or summaries, don’t include extra documents (at least don’t include anything not asked for) or do anything to distract the scorer from comparing your response with the marking guide and awarding you full marks in each case.

In summary, the scorers:

Carry out the low level checks for compliance

May be quite junior in their organisation/role/profession

See all the bids and see them before anyone else

May be the only people to see PQQs or RFIs

Are persuaded if you provide the information specified on their marking guide

The adviser

Advisers are typically subject matter experts – commercial, technical, legal. Advisers are there to assure the decision makers about the technical merit of a bid and to reduce the risk to the customer from adopting a given solution. They are the people to whom the decision makers will turn and ask “Is it ok?”  They will investigate the elements of the bid that touch their particular areas of expertise: they will look closely at the contract terms and conditions, check the dates on your insurance policies and verify your ISO certificates; those with P&L responsibilities will take a microscope to the costs, looking for ways to reduce the final price; IT specialists will examine the network diagrams, equipment lists, hardware specs, versions of software and so on.  

Advisers will spend some time looking at why your bid is the way it is: how is the price made up, why is one thing recommended and not another.  They will check to see that the requirements listed in the tender documents will be met by your bid  ‒it’s quite likely that the adviser looking at a particular aspect of your bid wrote the requirement in the first place.  They will also ask a lot of “what if” questions to understand the amount of risk the customer may be taking on.  Accordingly, advisers need to be convinced that your answers are “right”, which usually means they must fit the external standards that the adviser believes to be correct and they must show that you are alive to what might go wrong and have good counter measures to keep everyone safe.  

It is not always easy to get this right – good account knowledge is at a premium here.  Spinning the answer so much that it fails to address the question undermines your credibility, as does bluffing because you don’t know how else to respond.  Your answer must carry the conviction that it is right, either because the calculations are visible and correct or because the examples used (and you’re always going to give examples when you can, aren’t  you?) show that you have understood the requirement and have a good answer.

In summary, the advisers:

Tell the decision makers if the technical, legal or commercial details are ok

May well have technical objectives or preferences

Protect their own positions

Are persuaded if you conform to checkable standards and policies - especially external ones

The decision maker

The final role is the decision maker.  The decision makers will certainly read the management summary and overview but may not give attention to much else.  They need to hear their scorers and their advisers say “yes” to the bid, but in addition they must be convinced that the overall proposal meets their business needs and comes from a company with whom they can do business and feel happy about it.  These readers need to know that you’ve seen the forest as well as the trees, so for them you must present a persuasive picture of how their situation will be improved by your proposal.  By themselves, capabilities, accreditation or standards won’t carry the day.  What will carry the day is their problems being identified and solved by your proposal, preferably backed up by good case studies and references.

This is important, because up to now the people looking at the bid have been able to kick it out of the process but they will not have had the ability to say yes.  The decision maker has the ability to say “yes” and carries the responsibility for it accordingly. Their priority is to achieve their business objectives, not necessarily to adopt a given technology or service.

Decision makers:

Sign the cheques

Have business objectives, not technical ones

Distrust those who think the answer to everything is technology

Are persuaded if they believe you’ll help them achieve their business objectives

Overall

The objective of writing and submitting a proposal is to persuade the customer to buy.  To do this, a proposal must meet the needs of all the readers and so in summary will:

Answer all the questions the way the customer asked them.  (RTFQ applies.)

Contain sound technical and financial information.

Show how you can help the customer achieve their business objectives rather than set out the contents of a technical toolbox.

Fortunately, not all parts of the proposal need to appeal to all three audience roles.  The scorer is interested in the checkable facts, the advisers with the meeting of requirements and the decision maker with the business benefits.  Once you have worked out which audience you are writing for you can focus your actions accordingly.

[thereluctantbidmanager]

Bid Content Libraries - part 2

Tagging and maintaining your bid library

In the first of these pieces we saw why it’s a good thing to put tags on bid content and not rely on files and folders and we saw a couple of ways of adding tags to documents and storing them without needing much investment in software or technology.  This time I’m going to look what to tag and what tags to use.

Tagging schemes -you’ll always have more than one

Any tagging scheme is a way of classifying items in the library and, to work properly, a classification scheme (a “taxonomy” in the jargon) must be exhaustive and exclusive –that is to say each scheme must leave nothing unclassified and have no classes that overlap.  Any practical repository will have more than one tagging scheme because there will always be more than one way of classifying anything in the library; this is the reason for using tags and not folders.  For example, at the very least we are going to classify each item according to which of our products and services it describes and according to the format in which it exists.  It’s easy to see that for a catalogue of products we can have a tag for each item, corresponding to part or catalogue numbers.  Other classifications could include: the relevant target customer industries, whether the item is a specification, a case study, a set of relevant contract terms, geographic availability or delivery skill-sets and groups.  Finally, all items should carry ownership and expiry tags so that we can make sure a piece is in date, know who to contact if it is not and have a basis for regular review and update of the material in the library.  

What actual words are we going to use to tag our material? We could just make them up as we go along, picking terms to suit each document as we add it to the repository, and this is the way many tagging schemes are created: every time someone notices a useful term, it’s added to the collection and used for tagging documents. But there are problems with this. If new tags are constantly being invented, then newer documents will be classified using a set of tags that were not present when earlier items were added to the library and there is a risk that those older documents will be “lost”, not because they are missing, but because they are tagged with labels nobody looks for.  There is also the risk that different contributors will use different tags to refer to the same thing and again anyone searching the library may miss finding useful documents because they were tagged using a term that the searcher doesn’t think of or doesn’t use.  

From this you can see that it is a serious and sizable piece of work to develop the tagging schemes for a content library.  You can set up tags on the fly, and for small organisations with limited resource and smaller content libraries, that may be practical, but for most organisations it will be worth setting up a project to do it: you will have to live with the results for a long time, and it will be unique to your business, so invest in getting it right from the beginning.  Set up that team, hire some consultancy if it seems appropriate, and put some resource into adopting and implementing the result. You will be glad you did.

Where does library content come from?

When you’re building a content library, one of the hardest bullets to bite is the realisation that most of the content must be written specially for it.  It’s tempting to think that there will be lots of useful collateral already to hand, and there may well be some things you can repurpose, but the material in the bid library must be ready for use and fit for purpose from the word go and there is no real way to achieve this without putting in the hours on it.  The bid library must cover as much of your offering as possible; it must be as accurate and up to date as possible; it must be customer neutral; it must be written with the right messaging and “tone”. It must also be written in such a way that you can later adapt it to the right differentiators for each particular bid. This is so important that differentiation is worth considering as part of your tagging scheme.  Everything written for the bid library must be reviewed for correctness (what it says must be right) and for quality (it must be written, spelled and punctuated correctly).  Set up a review process for content approval and have a gatekeeper who makes sure that anything in the library has been through that review. The same review process is also the ideal point to determine the tags that should be on the item, which helps to keep the tagging consistent and means that the items will be retrievable later.

Strangely, the template and formatting of the content is less important: content is king.  The template you use for an eventual bid may be dictated by the customer, making your standard irrelevant, and your own branding standards may change over time, so it’s not worth the effort to force everything to a current template (with one exception, which I’ll mention later).  One of the best corporate bid libraries I have seen used a Lotus Notes database with most of the collateral held as plain text.  Technically it was very basic, but functionally it was excellent.

Like the tagging schemes, it is worth putting resource into creating and maintaining your content.  Large organisations sometimes have dedicated teams for this, others it part of existing functions such as bid management or marketing or a combination of these.

Company facts

There is a type of information that will be needed for pretty much any proposal, any request for information or pre-qualification questionnaire: the basic information about the company.  This can include an enormous number of things, such as registered addresses, the name of the contracting entity, your company registration number, VAT number, your ISO certification (9001, 14001, 20000-1, 27001 etc), your trade certification (CHAS, RoHS, ATOL etc), financials, locations, numbers of employees by skill set and location, staff turnover, company organisation, group structure (if applicable), insurance provisions, and so on, in an almost unending stream.  This kind of information is needed all the time and for most buyers is part of filtering potential suppliers out of the process, so you need it ready to hand and up to date.  It’s so often needed and so standard, that it’s worth creating a special section of your content library just for these “company facts”.

What about previous bids?

Will your previous bids be part of the content library?  This is a perennial question, and the answer is just as perennial: no.  It’s very tempting; you’ve just created a wonderful customised bid that answers such a lot of requirements.  What could be more natural than to use it as a reference source for future proposals? Except, it’s probably the most dangerous thing you can do.  For example, sooner or later (and it will be sooner rather than later), someone will leave the previous customer’s name in a bid and submit it.  And when that happens you might just as well move on to the next bid because there are few ways of recovering from calling one customer by another’s name that do not also require the ability to walk on water or leap tall buildings at a single bound.

In addition, using previous bids as collateral assumes that those responses were any good and ignores the fact that they were for a particular customer with particular needs on a particular occasion, so there is a good chance that when you come to re-use it, the material will turn out to be poor quality, not relevant, not relevant, or all of the above.

So, don’t do it.  Previous bids are not part of the content library; don’t treat them that way. Keep them separate as a record of what you said to customers in the past and as a learning and review mechanism, but don’t use them as collateral for future bids.

Extracting what you can from a previous bid

Although we are not going to put previous bids into the content library, that’s not to say that there won’t be useful material in a bid and, if there is, we should capture it for the library.  Make sure your post-bid process includes a review specifically to identify any reusable material and allocate resource to putting it into a reusable format.  Some of the things you might want to harvest include performance data for products or services, financial analyses, regional or functional resource information (in fact anything in a table – it’s amazingly difficult to complete tables in many organisations) also any processes and procedures not already documented.

Pictures or diagrams that you create for a bid should always be looked at for potential inclusion in your library.   Graphics can eat up a lot of your time on a bid, whether you are creating them from scratch or making pre-existing drawings into something presentable (which quite often turns out to mean creating from scratch anyway).  This is the one exception to the rule about not needing to enforce templates and formatting on bid library items.  Make sure that any graphics are in your “house” style, have the right colours and icons in addition.  If you have in-house artists, get them to do the work, because the average subject matter expert was not hired for their artistic ability and many bids demonstrate why.  It is startlingly easy to generate truly horrible graphics for a bid and, again, it is worth the effort to head this one off.  

Make sure that the resulting library item is editable with tools you have available, and make sure that those places that need a customer’s name adding are heavily flagged (it’s not quite so bad as having the wrong name, but “customer’s name here” in a bid doesn’t go over well).   Similarly, review the newly created item for quality and consistency before it goes into the library.

Was the library useful?

Finally, it is worth spending some further effort to determine which parts of the library get used and where there is demand.  There is no point in having large amounts of collateral that nobody uses, while real requirements for bid material go unmet.  If your library is intranet based, it’s possible to put some analytics on it, but it’s also possible to get some idea of how useful the library was from the re-usability reviews: if most bids have reusable content not already in the library, that shows you where the gaps are. Similarly, if a bid has material dealing with content already in the library, it means either the bid team did not check the library or could not find the material when they did search it.  Either way, it is straightforward to identify the corrective actions required.

[thereluctantbidmanager]

Bid Content Libraries - part 1

Technology is not necessarily your friend

You regularly respond to requests for proposal (RFPs) or invitations to tender (ITTs) and you know that having some content ready before you start is a good idea: it saves you time and by using material you have had plenty of time to prepare, you get better quality. However, knowing in principle that it’s a good idea is one thing, putting it into practice can be a world of hurt.  This article and its companion pieces will give you some ideas on how to start a good library, how to maintain it, what to put in it and, by no means least, what a content library can and cannot do.

Don’t rush to implement an expensive system.  There are many software solutions to the problem of keeping a library of bid content and they all work pretty well, given two pre-conditions:

1.   You know exactly what content you want to store 2.   You know exactly how you are going to use it

If you implement a bid content system before considering these factors, you run the risk of automating a bad manual process to produce a worse automated process.  Start with a halfway house: something that can be implemented cheaply and easily, experimented with and used to inform decisions about what content to keep and what processes to follow to create it, use it and maintain it. Then when you come to implement your full scale, industrial strength system, you will know exactly what you are looking for and how you want it to work.

How to build a halfway house

One very straightforward method of keeping content is to organise it into files and store them in shared folders on your network.  This allows you to keep the content in whatever format you first produced it (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint, Visio etc), so it is easy to edit and to customise.  At this point, however, we run up against two problems, one to do with human nature and one that comes under the heading of “Ye canna change the laws of physics, Captain”.

The laws of physics problem is that a given piece of content may be relevant to more than one topic.  For example, if you offer defined service levels for your service desk, does a document describing these service levels go into a folder called “Service Desk” or into one called “Service Levels”?  We could create both folders and put a copy of the document in each, but that way lies madness, both in terms of disk space needed and in trying to keep multiple copies of a document in step with each other.  

The human nature problem is that people rarely agree on how a document should be filed and what one person stores may be functionally inaccessible to another, who would never have dreamt of putting it in the same place –if you have ever tried to find something in someone else’s kitchen you have already encountered this problem.  So, simply creating the folders and expecting people to be able to store and retrieve material won’t cut it.

The answer is to have an index – look up what you want in the index and then go where the index points, just the way you would look up something in a reference book.  Windows can already find files by keyword.  Type some search terms into the search box in File Explorer and it will produce a list of files that contain the words you were looking for or have those words in the title.  This is already very useful, but it’s a rather indiscriminate tool for what we want. Not every document that contains a particular word will be useful.  (I once worked in an organisation that included all RFPs in the same large SharePoint system as the bid collateral; every search produced a list that prioritised the RFPs asking for the information over the collateral with the answers, so the first few screenfuls of results were generally useless.) The answer is to tag the files to show the topics they cover.  This solves both our problems: one file can have several tags and, provided it is tagged and shows up in the index, it doesn’t matter where the file is actually stored – someone looking for it will find it through the index.  

Good, we’re making progress.  We don’t need to do anything special about the index itself, Windows already does that for us. We just need a way to put tags on the files.  There are two ways to do this: add words to the files themselves or add custom properties to the files.  Both are simple and both are transparent so far as searching is concerned.  

Tags

First, let’s think about the tags themselves.  We know that the File Explorer search facility will find documents that contain the search words we use, but we need some way of limiting the search results to just the tags – a list of every document containing, for example “service level” won’t be much use.  The trick is to make the tags so that they can’t be confused with ordinary words.  An everyday example of this is the hashtags used in Twitter.  If we tag a document with “#ServiceLevel” and search explicitly for that tag, we can be sure of getting only the tagged documents and not everything with even a single mention of “service level”.  It doesn’t matter how we make up the tags, provided the result is not an ordinary word. Any symbol added to the tag will make it stand out, so such forms as “#ServiceLevel”, “xServiceLevel”, “tag:ServiceLevel” or “+ServiceLevel+” will all work.

Adding the tags

Now let’s think about adding the tags to the files.  The first way is to add the tags by editing them into the documents themselves.  For example, at the top of the first page of a Word document, on the front sheet of an Excel workbook or the front slide of a PowerPoint presentation. You can actually put the tags anywhere, but putting them at the front is simple and it also makes it simple to check whether the file has been tagged correctly, or at all.  The disadvantage is that you need to open the file to do it.  The second method avoids this at the cost of a slightly more involved method of applying the tags in the first place.

Microsoft Office documents have a set of properties associated with them.  You can see them by opening a File Explorer window, choosing a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file and right-clicking on it.  At the bottom of the list that pops up, click on “Properties”.  In the properties window that appears next, click on the “Details” tab.  At the top of the details list, in a section called “Description” you will see a list of items: Title, Subject, Tags, Categories and Comments.  So we have a place to put tags already.  To add a tag or tags to a document, open the folder containing the document in File Explorer, open the document properties and click on the word “Tags”. Start typing and what you type will appear in the tags field.  You can add as many tags as you like, just separate them with semicolons. When you have finished, hit return, click “OK” and the job is done.  

The File Explorer search facility will find documents that have “#ServiceLevel” in the tags property just the same as those that have “#ServiceLevel” at the top of the first page.  If you want to be really smart about it, you can frame the search as:

tags:=”#ServiceLevel” 

(note the quotes around the tag itself). This makes File Explorer look only in the tag property of each document and on a big set of folders, this can make the search run much faster and more efficiently.  As a further bonus, you can directly view the tags on all the files in a folder or a search by adding the Tags column to the display in File Explorer – just right click any of the column headings on the display and click on “Tags” from the drop down list that appears.

The next steps

The mechanics of tagging and retrieving documents really start to deliver benefit when we go on to think about the meanings of our tags and the way we are going to use our library. In the next episode: how to control the process, what to tag and what tags to use.  More on this next time.