| No. 06, July 2008 |
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An Ode to the Bid ManagerThe proposal bid manager is, without doubt, one of the most thankless tasks for anyone working in the realm of sales. It demands grueling efforts, for weeks at a time, and the degree of cooperation from the various supporting bodies can be dismal. A bid manager is the proposal “owner”. He has ultimate responsible to ensure that the proposal is completed on time, that there are responses to all RFP requirements and they are comprehensive, correct and convincing, and that pricing is sufficiently well structured to keep your company in the running. If you start off right, the chances of producing a winning proposal are considerable better than if you run the show by muddling through on a day to day basis. In this newsletter, I provide some organizational concepts for bid managers (and their bosses) – for the initial states of the proposal process.
GETTING STARTED If an RFP arrives as a surprise, then you are certainly not in good shape. If you have not been fostering relations with the customer – even influencing the scope and content of the requirements – something may be wrong with your sales organization. In any event, as soon as an RFP pops up onto your computer screen, the bid manager should be appointed. He/she, ideally, is the person who has a working relationship with the customer and understands their basic positioning within the market. This could be an account manager or your presales representative. From that moment on, the bid manager should be totally involved in all facets of the response process. The very first thing for the bid manager to do is to decompose the RFP into working items and evaluate the efforts associated with each item. This will provide an overall understanding of efforts required in terms of manpower (number and expertise, e.g. do you need support from R&D) and scheduling. This information should be placed in a Division of Work (DOW) table – an Excel sheet which is the master tool for controlling the work flow over the coming weeks. If your customer has been kind enough to provide a ready-made compliance table then, by all means, adapt it to your needs. PRIOR TO THE KICK-OFF MEETING As the bid manager you must build your proposal team based upon your specific understanding of the customer’s needs. Before you start distributing assignments, give some thought to what your bottom line is. What is the best possible configuration that will make these guys happy and how well positioned are you to structure such an offer? Be very sure that you are going to offer a clear set of direct benefits that the customer will understand and appreciate. Don’t list your solution’s features. Describe their added value. Nothing is more important than that. Your proposal will win or lose on how you position your solution. In RFP parlance, this is called a theme and it is certainly one of the trickiest concepts to develop. I have considerable experience in this area and have helped several Israeli companies to get their positioning right. Print the whole RFP. Do not try to read on screen. You will definitely miss critical items if you do. You should immediately (even the same day the RFP arrives) distribute the RFP documents to the relevant people. They will not take you seriously if there is a major gap between received date and the date of distribution. Work out a realistic schedule which should include:
Probably, the most important issue at this stage is to allocate team-member tasks and to make sure that all key players will be available until the end of the process: management, development, sales, commercial, technical, legal, professional services, etc. You must assign action items to each team member in the DOW, so that they know their roles as well as the other’s assignments. Don’t forget to include time for production. Block out holidays. Check vacations and reserve military service obligations. Determine mode of delivery (if a printed version is requested). Invite all required participants to the kick-off meeting. Call each individual personally to let them know how important they are to the process. You need an integrated team to write a successful proposal. Put the emphasis on "team." THE KICK-OFF MEETING The kick-off meeting should be no later than a day or two after receipt of the RFP. This can make all the difference in obtaining internal support for the project. If you present a convincing case, your people will go the extra mile and make sure that you have a winning proposal. The following are some points that should be handled during the kick-off meeting.
THE FOLLOWING FEW WEEKS A key task is to ensure that your information providers maintain schedules. Daily status calls are the best way to keep things on track. Don’t trust your reviewers. Read every word of every response and consider the information from the customer’s perspective. Keep a very close eye on the deadline for submitting clarification questions to the customer. Asking the customer leading questions about what they mean can provide a lot of insight about what they really want. Make very sure that your associates review the requirements so that you can organize and submit the material on time. Also, carefully study the questions that other bidders have submitted. You can learn an awful lot about their understanding of the requirements – and their strengths and weaknesses – from the questions they ask. Before delivery, perform a QA review of the printed copies and the CDs. Be very sure than nothing is missing and the binders are assembled in proper sequence. I suggest you organize a formal lessons-learned session after submission of the proposal. In this session you should look at the proposal itself, how it's laid out, how well it sends the message, how easy it is to read. Furthermore, you should analyze the proposal preparation process you went through to identify what worked well, and what you need to improve on. |