Here are seven key questions to ask your organisation to determine exactly how much scope you have for improvement in your pursuits and bid submissions.
1) How well do you do your (a) primary, and (b) secondary information-gathering in terms of understanding your prospects’ businesses?
The depth of information you gather and your skill in gathering it dictates the degree to which you are able to make your organisation relevant to the client’s/customer’s world.
In short, you can’t utilise what you don’t know. But your competitor can.
2) How accurately is it conveyed back to the relevant parties? And whom do you deem the relevant parties to be, and why?
The condition (including the degree of comprehensiveness) in which that information makes it back into your bid strategy sessions, in turn, dictates the degree to which it can inform your ultimate bid strategy.
Your strategy can only be as good as the inputs fed into it. Garbage in, garbage out.
3) How effectively is this converted from raw information into competitively valuable intelligence?
Information, in its own right, is not intelligence.
Intelligence is information made meaningful . . . and made meaningful in the specific context of the client’s world, challenges, fears, desires, visions, goals – and your evolving plans to mitigate, satisfy, quell and achieve, on behalf of the customer or client.
Competitive intelligence is subject to the same equation: What you know or unearth about your competitors is value-less until you decide how that information is best utilised.
4) How well is your resultant bid strategy documented?
A series of bullet point notes on butcher’s paper, pinned up around the walls of the room in which the workshop was held, does not constitute a “strategy”.
Yet that’s precisely what 90 percent of organisations (that is, of those who even conduct “strategy” sessions) deem a “strategy”.
In short, a strategy isn’t a strategy until it’s documented.
5) How well do the relevant user parties then understand that strategy document?
A genuine strategy will not only be documented, it will be documented in comprehensive, user-friendly detail for the guidance and input co-ordination of content contributors.
6) How well is it then articulated in bids?
While your “Bid Strategy Blueprint” should make writing your EOI, RFP or RFT response a reasonably simple, join-the-dots exercise for a qualified writer, section authors may not always be writers for a day job. They might be technical subject matter experts, for example.
Thus, it’s the both the bid strategist’s and the bid manager’s job to ensure both the full understanding of the bid strategy document, and adherence to it. (It should be noted that some content contributors like to exercise their individuality at the expense of consistency in the articulation of the bid strategy.)
7) Is the end submission framed in a genuinely client-centric manner?
By this I don’t simply mean starting a paragraph with the prospect’s name versus starting a paragraph with the bidder’s name.
While this certainly is one very basic indicator of client-centred thinking versus self-centricity and (what I call) “brochureware”, if achieved only at the level of writing and editing, it can risk coming across as know-all, untested arrogance.
If the strategy is a solid, substantial and genuinely client-centric tabling, the end submission – theoretically – should, by default, also be client-centric, since it is an expression of that strategy, albeit in the context of the client organisation’s specific questions.
However, this outcome can’t be taken for granted – especially where writers and other content contributors may have ingrained practices and processes (and their own ideas) for developing that content.
I recently watched one of my clients deliver his AGM presentation to shareholders with extreme skill, deftly articulating his company’s philosophies, performance achievements and competitive advantages.
I couldn’t help wondering, though, if he and his senior sales executives understood their customer organisations’ businesses equally deeply, and whether they could articulate those organisations’ goals, strengths, visions, concerns and challenges. And whether they could explain every aspect of direct relevance between each of those elements and their own company’s capabilities, competitive strengths and uniquenesses.
It is not possible to overstate the credibility, authority and persuasion power that would result from a bidder’s ability to do this.
Taking the time to investigate the warts ‘n’ all answers to these seven questions (and to address the issues you unearth) would represent a more-than-worthwhile investment in the efficacy of your sales pipeline and thus your organisation’s bottom line.
