Winning bids and proposals
Winning bids and proposals
Six more ways to reach bid and proposal Nirvana in quiet periods!
Here are another six ways in which you can use a quiet period to help save time during the next proposal preparation period, and reach your own Bid Nirvana!
To keep things in context with the last podcast, I have numbered the points from 7-12 on this episode soundtrack. The next 6 areas that we will be looking at in this episode are: Competitor analysis; Review of sections that can lose you a bid; PQQ/SQ answers; Horizon scanning for new prospects; Capture planning and pre engagement process reviews; Previous proposals lessons learned review.
I will be dealing with some of these topics in more depth in later episodes. Download the full fact sheet and notes for this episode here.
Let me know what other areas you would like me to cover by contacting me at www.willsconsultants.co.uk
Hello, my name is Jack Wills and welcome to 'Creating winning proposals', a podcast series designed to give you hints and tips on ways to improve your bids and proposals so that you can win more business. In this episode, I was going to do something completely different following the first episode I did on six ways to reach bid Nirvana in quiet periods. But, as soon as I published that, someone dropped me a mail and said, 'Oh, come on, Jack, you're always telling us about the ways that you can save time during the proposal production process and try and get to bid Nirvana. So why don't you give us another six'. So I thought about that during this week, and I decided to do another six. Now don't panic. I'm not going to fill the rest of the podcast series up with another six and another six. No, no. What I'm going to do now is take you from seven to 12. And you'll end up therefore with the two episodes together. 'Six ways to reach bid Nirvana', and this one, 'Six more ways to reach bid Nirvana during quiet periods', giving you a total of 12 hints, things to look at so that you can aspire to reaching this mythical place called bid Nirvana.
Jack Wills :As usual, I've created some show notes. And I've also created a fact sheet which you can download. If you can't get it from the podcast service go to www.willsconsultants.co.uk and you'll be able to download it from there. You can leave comments in the usual way and don't forget to subscribe to the series if you want to keep in touch with what's going on with my podcast series 'Creating winning proposals'.
Jack Wills :So let's get going with number seven. Competitor analysis Now one area that causes a lot of concern in the proposal development process is competitor analysis. What are the others doing who are going to pitch against you in this competition? Loads of time can be wasted trying to carry out a formal competitor analysis, once a proposal development process is underway. Most of you out there, of course, will know that a competitor analysis should have been completed long before we actually get to the stage of putting a proposal together. But you know, there are organisations who don't do this and leave it until we actually start the proposal development process. Other organisations, of course, will have set procedures that they will follow to complete a competitor analysis very early on. So what I'm proposing is that during quiet periods, it can be quite straightforward to review your own past experiences with a view to identifying repetitive patterns in relation to competitors. For example, if you can see that there are a number of competitors that appear regularly, then now is quite a good time to analyse how they're likely to respond to future opportunities. Now, I'm not suggesting, of course, that this analysis has to be perfect. It doesn't have to be detailed at this stage. It can be no more than identifying a list of key competitors together with what their potential solutions might be. When they come up against you in the future. Let's say you've identified an opportunity that's coming from the pipeline. Then what I would recommend you do, during this quiet period, is is do some form of basic analysis, war game if you like, how competitors might act. One way of doing this might be to use colleagues in small teams. Perhaps two of them could take on the role of a competitor to research and speculate how they might react in a certain situation. Now you can do all this virtually, of course, coming together to share the results. You might even take it to the next stage where a Bidders Comparison Matrix or BCM is produced. Again, I'm not suggesting you go into any great detail, but a little bit of analysis now is going to save you an awful lot of time in the future.
Jack Wills :So let's go on to number eight. Review those sections that you know can lose you a bid. Now, most organisations will spend a lot of time on describing a detailed technical solution to a customer's problem in their proposal. Obviously, a customer wants to know how you're going to solve a particular problem. However, nearly all of the competitors will achieve high marks in any technical solution that they put forward because the customer is expecting that However, there are some areas in the proposal which attract significantly less effort during the proposal development process. And these are areas which actually can lose you a lot of marks. I sometimes nickname these the 'quicksand questions. They're the sort of questions that nobody really wants to answer. Everybody wants to talk about the technical solution. Everyone knows about the technical solution, but these quicksand questions are the areas which can often lose you the bid. They are questions like, 'Describe the social impact of your solution', 'Describe how your organisation deals with corporate social responsibility', and Describe the environmental impact of your solution'. Often, you'll find, when you're looking at the evaluation criteria, some of these questions have lower marks attached to them. And I don't know what it is...it's just that some people feel that because they've got lower marks, they're not as important as the ones with the higher marks. Well, that's true. But actually, at the end of the day, if you don't get the lower marks, you can lose the bid. So ignore these at your peril. Try to look at previous examples from other ITTs that you have been involved in to gauge what sort of information potential customers are likely to ask for. Once you've identified these, start producing some model answers for them. Any effort expended now is going to save you time in the long term. Never be frightened to think outside the box. For example, if you're looking at social impact in relation to a solution that you have often put forward, look at local authority or government websites to see what programmes they have in place for things such as social regeneration, social inclusivity, and so on. Start to think about answers around the general principles you find and mirror the language that they use. Chances are that, in the evaluation of a larger important public sector opportunity, a specialist will be engaged to assist in the evaluation. Seeing familiar language and principles that reflect current policy will help you enormously.
Jack Wills :Let's go to number nine. EQs and SQ answers. Pre Qualification Questionnaires and Selection Question (sometimes referred to as a Standard Selection Questionnaire), are part of the standard procurement process, particularly in the public sector. Now, we're all quite familiar with PQQs. The SQ has been developed to simplify the supplier selection process for businesses, in particular smaller firms, when they're bidding into the public sector. In developing the SQ the opportunity has been taken to make the questionnaire compliant with the European Single Procurement Document, the ESPD, which is currently in wide use across the European procurement process. Now, essentially all of the documents ask for standard information used in the procurement process. Consequently, for most procurements, the information requested is pretty much the same from questionnaire to questionnaire. Things like company financial information, ownership details, previous examples of successful contract outcomes, these sort of things always seem to come up. That said, PQQs have now become really quite bloated, and they can ask for a lot of information, almost as much as being asked for in a formal proposal. The main message here is that all of the standard information can be produced now. I suggest you put together a small team to look at PQQ and SQ answers that have been submitted previously, with a view to refining them and keeping them for future use. Bear in mind, of course, that great care must always be taken, as with anything to do with any 'boilerplate' solution, that information is checked prior to reuse. Lastly, I suggest you have a look at the crown Commercial Service guidance in their own website. There is a link in the fact sheet that I've produced to take you there. And here you'll find some up to date advice to help you prepare the information that these organisations are looking for.
Jack Wills :So what are we got it number 10? Well, its horizon scanning for new prospects. Now, it seems an obvious thing to say that during any quiet period, we should be horizon scanning, but we really should be. And now is the sort of time to look at potential new areas and sectors within markets, pretty ruthlessly, actually, to see where future business might occur. Always remember, of course, that even in quiet periods, procurement will still be going on somewhere. I suggest what you try to do is to predict where new opportunities might occur and make plans to see if these areas can be exploited. How do you do that? Well, you can scan the general and sector press for any ideas, look at the Internet to get ideas of new opportunities. For example, you might spend some time looking at identified areas for exploitation and generate a plan to see if some pre engagement can take place. We'll look at this in more detail in the next section. But again, the key message is to make use of the time now to see what might occur in the future and aim off and plan for it.
Jack Wills :I think we're up to number 11. And that's capture planning and pre engagement process reviews. Leading on from horizon scanning, the whole thing of pre engagement or capture planning is something that can be done now. The first thing is to look at is whether or not you have a system for any form of pre engagement in your organisation. If you do have one, is it fit for purpose. Now, a lot of organisations have some method of collecting information about future prospects, but many don't have any form of Customer Relation Management software (or CRM programs) to document and formalise the process. Now that said, purchasing a CRM isn't necessary or essential. You just need some method or a process to capture information about a prospect as it occurs. Taking that into account, it might be possible to look at potential prospects now and start documenting contact matrices, making simple action plans to gather information about customers and what they're doing and what they're thinking during this time. Lastly, don't forget to consider some of the assets that you can create now, to pre engage more effectively. For example, you could consider developing some white papers to send out to prospects to let them know about some particular aspect of your operation. White papers are really effective, where you know you've got some leading position in the market and, say, a particular type of technology that is fairly unique to you. It's always quite useful to let customers know where your thinking is going. Some organisations are now producing this sort of thing in vlogs, and blogs and indeed in podcasts like this, to send that to the customer. Don't forget to think outside the box. There are many, many things you can do to try and engage with your potential customers right now. I'll leave this section by just briefly mentioning that you should also look at your social media plan. To help with pre engagement, there's a lot of work that can be done on social media right now. And I would really recommend that you look at the plans quite carefully so that you can start to pre engage more effectively.
Jack Wills :And here we are at 12. Previous proposals lessons learned review. Now generally once a bid has been submitted, there's usually a huge sigh of relief and teams want to move on to the next challenge. However, organisations that really want to improve their proposal development processes should always make use of lessons learned from previous experiences. It's important to look at losses as well as successes... and, of course, internal reviews. It's generally accepted then that there are three times when you can learn lessons from a previous bidding experience. First, that internal lesson review. How was the experience for everyone in the team? How did it go when you were putting this proposal together? What can we do to make it better next time? Next, it's when you lose a bid, and you receive feedback from the customer as to where and why you didn't win. And I guess lastly, of course, it's when you win something. Most organisations, most customers will feel a lot more comfortable about giving you feedback when you won something. That said, of course, never underestimate the idiosyncratic nature of the public procurement feedback systems that can often lead you to becoming really, really frustrated. So now is a good time to look at previous wins as well as losses in some detail. Look at some of these areas. Did you capture the lessons learned from previous bids? Did you circulate those? If you were successful, why did you win? Did you answer the questions, fully and correctly? Were the pictures and graphics fit for purpose and did the action captions give the key messages? Were Value Propositions (VPs) effective for key messages that you were trying to put across in a section? Were the headings informative, rather than just one liner and very telegraphic in nature. Did the proposal flow well? Did it make use of the customer hot buttons that you might have identified early in the process? Indeed, did you actually identify hot buttons in the early stages? And did you have previous engagement with the customer? It may be that you managed to have good engagement with the customer with your winning bids and poor engagement in the losing ones. Just a few areas for you to look at.
Jack Wills :As I said in the last episode, nobody wants to be in a quiet period in business. After all, we are bidding people! We want to create business, but sometimes it happens. And of course, now is no exception. So let's use these times to get rid of those areas that we know causes a lot of angst and other problems during the proposal production process. Let's see if we can find areas where we can fine tune and prepare for when it becomes really busy again. And I have to tell you that the one certainty in our world is that it sure will get busy again at some point!
Jack Wills :I'm Jack Wills. And thank you very much for listening. Remember, there are some notes attached to this podcast and you can always get back to me via www.willsconsultants co.uk. Or you can leave any comments in the usual way. You can also reach me on LinkedIn at any time and I'd be happy to get back to you. Thank you again for listening. And I hope you'll join me again for the next in the podcast series 'Creating winning proposals'!