The original version of this article was published in Jordan's Pursuits Academy. The starting point for knowing how to pip your corporate competition at the post, is knowing what their common weak points are. In the now-25 years I’ve been conducting pursuit leadership, bid strategy and bid writing consulting work, there are some basic issues that continue to show up across all industries’ submissions. The following are some of the most common observations / recommendations I make when furnished with a cross-section of a new client’s (historic) submissions to provide commentary on: A bid is not a brochure. Ironically, (what I call) “brochureware” copy is just as likely to flow from the keyboards of technical and other subject matter experts, as it is from marketing personnel. Marketing and sales support personnel are prone to producing this type of “empty, generic and salesy” copy when they don’t have a solid, detailed and user-friendly bid strategy blueprint to inform and guide their content. However, technical staff and subject specialists (engineers, for example) just as readily fall into the same trap – albeit they do it for a completely different reason: they’re under the impression that they are expected to produce marketing-style copy. (They’d do better to simply articulate their content in their normal fashion, even if this were more of a dry and academic style. At least there would be more chance of some real substance appearing in their written contributions. Each new bid is a process in its own right. A bidder must view the preparation and production of each bid as having nothing to do with the last . Each bid must be based upon its own unique strategy which, in turn, is formulated from dedicated research into the background of the project or contract being bid for and the prospective client. That makes templating and importing concepts and content from previous bids a nonsense. Start earlier to (a) go beyond face value, and (b) get a jump on the competition. Becoming adept at satisfying the many unwritten and unspoken needs (including information/reassurance needs) of a prospective client necessitates the identification of those needs in the first place. This listening between the lines, and deeper level of research, is rarely achieved when the bid strategy process isn’t commenced until the client’s Expression of Interest (EOI) or Request for Proposal (RFP) document is released. An Executive Summary is neither a covering letter nor a sales front-piece. The Executive Summary is exactly that: a summary . . . a summary of the key themes of the overall submission, and a summary of the proposition itself. With rare exception (or any), has any Executive Summary I’ve ever seen been both directly connected with and into the core content, and yet also functioned adequately as a stand-alone summary. More often than not, they are a “We are pleased to submit our proposal for ETC / It is our pleasure to respond to ETC” unnecessary second covering letter, or an inappropriately self-promotional piece. (Fully) Customise Staff Profiles Properly and diligently customise staff profiles and Curricula Vitae. This is rarely done – or rarely done thoroughly. Further, beware of superlatives and highly subjective language. All claims should be specific and measurable, and consistent with claims in the main body of your EOI or RFP response. (One submission I received wrote of two project delivery team members’ “50 years’ combined experience”. When I reviewed their CVs and did the math, it turned out the true figure was little more than half of that.) Write – or at least edit – case studies to reflect their specific relevance to the procurement in question. Leaving the evaluators to determine all points of relevance between your submitted case studies, and the product or service being sought by the prospective client, is a lazy approach – and it comes across that way, too. Case studies can be a powerful supplement to a submission, and if you’re allowed their inclusion, you should maximise their impact by drawing every point of relevance with the client’s / customer’s project or procurement, and associated needs / concerns / priorities. Don’t undermine your submission with poor grammar, poor editing and typographical errors. It would seem logical that, if a bidder is submitting a response for a project or a contract worth in the tens or hundreds of millions, the least investment they’d make would be the services of a good editor. Yet, either they haven’t availed themselves of an editor, or that editor wasn’t particularly “good”.
Here’s a fact: You don’t have the wastable budget that your “tier one” and “tier two” corporate competitors have. If you waste your money on what you’re unlikely to win, you’ve already strained your budget in the event that more winnable, more profitable opportunities emerge. You also risk damaging your reputation with the same prospects you’d otherwise have a far better chance of turning into clients in another, future, more strategic bid. I’ve seen numerous companies insist on investing huge resources in a bid they didn’t have a chance of winning. And most times that bidder should have known it, if they were being realistic. Their pre-sales engagement was inadequate or non-existent. Their knowledge of the prospective client organisation was insufficient. They were vague about the competitors they were up against, or the competition’s standing with the prospect. There were numerous other knowledge gaps they’d left it too late to address by the time the EOI / RFP / RFT came to market. So with all of the above inadequacies and vagaries, they certainly didn’t have any authoritative idea as to whether their offering was the prospect’s best option – and absolutely nil idea of how to customise it to present a truly client-centric, competitively superior option. Sometimes they hadn’t even done sufficient research to determine whether or not the EOI, RFP or RFT was the real deal. They didn’t know if the issuing organisation was just “testing the water” or even if they had the funding for the project or contract. Or if they were just keeping the incumbent on its toes. ‘Oh Well. We’ll Just Go For It Anyway.’ But still these keen bidders insisted on going through the resource-draining motions of submitting a Response. And at the predictable outcome, there were demoralised staff members to console, all of whom now had to peddle furiously just to catch up with the responsibilities they’d put on hold during the all-consuming madness of the bid production period (which is more than ever the case with a smaller organisation where personnel wear many hats). So why does a company take the decision to produce a submission for a bid contest it has little chance of winning? And why would a small player do this to itself? Let me give you just some of the reasons: 1) They errantly think they’re ready to go up against the bigger players in their industry. 2) To be seen to be “in the game” because primary competitors are, or are assumed to be, bidding. 3) Their inadequate background/pre-sales research failed to identify a bad technological or cultural fit. 4) The contract is with a high-profile organisation that would look impressive on the bidder’s client list and jettison them up to a higher tier within their industry (in the unlikely event that they are successful). 5) Unrealistic thinking, plain and simple. Let’s consider each of these “reasons”. ‘We’re ready to move into the Big Time.” In reality – without heavy-duty research that started very early in the piece, they’re certainly not ready, because they can’t compete on price and they don’t have anywhere near sufficient intel to determine how to differentiate themselves or their offering). To be ‘in the game’. If your competitors have done a better job of their pre-sales research and relationship-building and – assuming they can put together a halfway decent proposal – how will it behoove your cause to have your half-baked bid laid out beside theirs in front of the evaluation team? Failure to identify a bad technological or cultural match. A poor technology fit is going to be obvious from the answers you provide in your submission. Most switched-on evaluation teams don’t like wasting their time any more than you’re going to have appreciated squandering your own resources. And conveying the impression of an ill-researched or unrealistic bidder is not the impression you want to leave with an organisation with which you may want to bid for work in the future. The ‘If We Can Get This One’ syndrome. The higher you fly, the harder you fall. If a deal’s high-profile enough to “make” you, imagine how quickly it can break you if you do win it and you’re not really up for it. Lack of realism. See all the above. Upskill your personnel with a deep dive learning experience into making correct and strategic bid / no bid decisions with my self-deliverable training program, ‘ To Bid or Not to Bid '.
There’s one way that’s superior to all, in terms of reducing the cost of bidding: That’s when you don’t have to bid at all. And what could be better for a smaller operator than skipping the heavy investment of a formal tendering process (which, in some cases, rules the lower-tier player out of the game without the chance to even enter it)? In my three-Part series you’ll find here on the Beating the Big Boys At Bids blog ( Differentiating in A Highly Commoditised Space , Think from the Client’s Head , and ‘ The Tangible Value of A Client-Focused Bid ) , I give an overview of how to avoid differentiate your organisation and your offering, based not on price but on a deep and well-researched client focus. I also provide (in Part Three ) a brief case example. In that example, I pointed out that the starting point for genuine client-centricity is the ability and willingness to (a) be humble, and (b) put the client first. Not just pay lip service to putting the client first but actually doing so – in every aspect of your research, your communications, and the formulation of your offering (all of which will ultimately show up in your end-submission . . . and that will be the topic of future articles). The deeper you go into the research process (and most corporates don’t go very deep at all; they only think they do), the more immeasurably different you become, in the eyes of the client. Imagine if, unlike your Tier One and Tier Two competitors (who have developed a mindset of reliance on their extensive libraries of templates and pre-existing material, which they readily succumb to the temptation to rely on after the tender release), your early and intense focus on the client and its world is so overt and obvious to that client, that it pre-positions you as a preferred relationship partner way before an EOI is even in formulation? Arguably, the client and its evaluators would be anticipating the usual corporate same ol’, same ol’ template-style, supplier-centric dross from all Tier Ones (and Tier Twos), and it would be increasingly clear to them that they’re dealing with an entirely different class (albeit not size) of operator when it comes to you. And so (if it’s within the client’s power) the seeds of an informal, sans-tender aware are sown. Let’s map out a quick overview of what your cunning plan would look like. In the case of a pursuit in which a formal tendering process is not yet a foregone conclusion, your best chance of avoiding it turning into one is to: Progressively formulate an offering based on an increasingly deep knowledge of the customer or client organisation’s specific environment, needs and circumstances (which involves quality questioning, deep research and formulation of the solution and strategy in incremental stages), Careful alignment of every aspect of the customer’s / client’s need with the strengths, and preferably, the uniquenesses, of what you are able to offer, A de-risked solution or proposition, and Real-time evaluation of any competitive threat and offering. With the patience and tenacity to progress the pursuit in accordance with this strategy, you’ll stay close to the action as it evolves. You may even end up driving the action with the information the client sees you uncovering and the insights you’re producing. And if you’ve made your offering a natural fit, your quality questioning will enable you to table all the right information, which – in turn – will support the drawing of the logical conclusions, in incremental stages, that a formal bidding process may be unnecessary . . . particularly if you have also identified and presented a maximally de-risked proposition.
In Part Two , ‘ Think from the Client’s Head’ , I wrote about the attitudinal distinction – the fundamental difference in approach – between vendor or supplier-centricity and a genuine “client first” mindset (and thus, modus operandi). You’ll see from my observations of my 25-year career working with and observing the “big end of town”, that an overwhelming majority of BD’s mindsets can be described as follows: “OK, this is what we want to propose. Let’s talk to them and see if we can convince them it’s what they need and get some comments and information from them to support it when we put it forward in the EOI.” And you’ll have read that your opportunity for differentiation – both by virtue of the product or service you put forward as a “solution” (that is, a genuine solution to the client’s actual problem or need) and as a supplier or provider – lies in digging deeper than your corporate competitors. Way below surface level. And from a genuinely “client first” perspective . A Courageous Pursuit Let me give you an example of how hard companies of all shapes and sizes can find it to be humble. What’s humility got to do with it? Again, as you’ll have read in Parts One and Two, without the willingness to be humble (or worse still, where arrogance is mistaken for confidence), you won’t have, or be able to sustain, the interest level to drill deep into the client’s world, wants and needs. So, here’s the very real example (and there are many others I could have used that would all have demonstrated the same point): I conducted a series of strategy sessions for a steadily growing mid-tier organisation whose leadership wanted to engage in a highly courageous pursuit for a Facilities Management (FM) contract with a very large mining consortium. After leading the senior management and its bid team through a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the competitive landscape, the surprised and humbled team made the collective observation that, “We’re not anything special after all! We don’t do anything more or anything different than anyone else.” And they were right. Except . . . as I assured them, in this case, they did. They had done something very different indeed – by conducting a series of detailed, in-depth analyses of their prospective client’s objectives, its fears, its concerns, its priorities, and of their own capabilities in the context of this newfound knowledge. They’d followed that with forensic research into each of their competitors (all of whom were household-name multi-nationals). And then they’d taken apart all their pre-existing assumptions about what they’d initially intended to offer up to the client in the RFP – now, from the deeply researched and well-considered position of the client’s world – they’d formulated something meaningfully differentiated .
In Part One (titled ‘Differentiating in A Highly Commoditised Space’) , I wrote about the “why’s” for differentiation (both of your organisation and of your offering), and as far as the “how’s” go, an outline of basic principles. And I pointed out how the willingness to be humble (including by default, if you’re a smaller organisation without the “big brand” to tout) can and should be employed to your very significant advantage. In this article – Part Two of the series – let’s look, from a philosophical perspective, at what the process of turning your otherwise-disadvantaged “small player” position to your advantage, looks like. Here’s an observation I have made repeatedly when working (as I predominantly have throughout my 25-year career in the bidding game) for very large corporations: Their business development executives (“BDs”) are too immersed in their own “brand” superiority and so ready to believe their own marketing hype, that they can’t see very deeply into the client’s world at all (although they think they can and they think they do . . . but they don’t ). They go well past the point of confidence in their company, their brand, and their “solution” (“solution” being a term they use to describe their product or service, rather than in accordance with the true meaning of the word i.e. a solution to someone’s specific problem). Their “confidence” is more akin to arrogance. And therein lies your greatest opportunity. The point of self-focus from which the vast majority of the household-name corporate bidders come when responding to an Expression of Interest (EOI), Request for Tender (RFT) or Proposal (RFP) renders it hard for them to see what’s most meaningful to the client . Sure, what the client wants is articulated in the selection criteria . . . but, in some industries particularly, these criteria can be pretty bald and (often, if the client documentation is template-based) not nearly as contract-specific as they could be. And even in industries where RFPs are specific, and where BDs have engaged frequently prior to its issue, the degree of client-centric research, investigation and analysis (and thus, their “solution” formulation) could go deeper. A lot deeper. Frequently, for example, questioning, research and information-gathering activities by BDs is focused on the ways in which the pre-existing “solution” they want to table, can made to “fit” or can be held up as “just what you need”. But it’s always the same process: Both the starting point and the finishing point, has always been the bidder , not the client. The client’s been in the middle of the process. They’re sandwiched between the bidder’s interests and perspectives. Conversely and more correctly, the client should be at the beginning and then again at the end . That’s where you obtain, and then later test, the clues and cues you use in your solution formulation, which then, logically, occurs in the middle of the whole process. Do you see the difference? For a deeper dive into this critical, bid-winning distinction, go to Part Three.