In my last post I noted that I had concluded a number of tender-winning rules, having led and managed bid response teams since 2003. Whilst those rules are true, they are rather less helpful than the bid methodology developed by the management team I worked with over the last twenty years or so.
This methodology was born as a result of time, pressure, and experiences both good and bad. An unsuccessful bid is only really a failure if the management or bid teams don’t learn something from the experience. I’ll get into the details over the coming weeks, but here is a summary of it — because it significantly increased our win rate as we conceived and developed it over many years.
1. Qualify and Requalify
Sales qualification is a critical discipline. Given the volume of work involved in even small RFPs, it is even more important to use a qualification methodology to understand your chances of winning and therefore whether you should commit your time and resources.
You can use whatever suits your business, but we use a quantitative evaluation approach that converts the specifics and informing factors of a bid into a score showing a weighted chance of success.
It is worth remembering that facts change. Some are within your control, some less so, and some not at all. It is important to recognise this in your process and use it as an opportunity to improve your weighting as the bid proceeds — or equally, to no-bid without apology if a win becomes unacceptably unlikely.
2. Read In and Brief Your Team — Including the Non-Readers
As a leader, it is important to read and digest the entire bid pack. If you don’t, you will miss something vital and risk disqualification on a technicality. Ideally, everybody involved should read the majority of the tender pack.
However, we know this is unlikely in practice — particularly where subject matter experts are writing only one or two responses. And who really expects the whole team to read the contract, let alone understand it?
You must account for this in your methodology. The best way is to create a briefing pack that summarises the key elements of the RFP and your approach to it. Everyone gets the context they need. Nobody gets a surprise.
3. Build a Comprehensive Bid Response Strategy
If you have got this far, you will already have been engaged with the buyer and will have been using a sales strategy to progress your cause. It is time to ensure that strategy is up to date with the documented tender requirements and all the things that have come together since your final pre-tender contact.
Your bid response strategy brings together four key elements:
- Customer context — their requirements, their stakeholders, their organisational and sector nuances
- Your capability — your solution, your unique selling points, your track record
- The competitive landscape — how you leverage your relative strengths, mitigate your weaknesses, and position against likely alternatives
- Scoring optimisation — how you write, present and focus to score as highly as possible, balancing price, features and quality to play to your strengths
4. Write to Win
Follow a written response optimisation approach to ensure you score as highly as possible for each question. This typically means working in stages:
Deconstruct each question so you answer every point and address every interaction between each element. Make the scoring mechanism clear for the writer, including evidencing statements with references and case studies, and highlighting innovation and value-added elements. Get third-party review before moving on.
Write a bullet-point outline before committing to paragraphs. This makes it easy to see whether you are answering the deconstructed question thoroughly — points are not obscured by wordy prose. Ensure bid strategy points are covered: competitive mitigations, win themes, innovation, value-add. Review and augment before moving on.
Draft from the bullets. Third-party review and augmentation. Then review again.
Final review. Ensure that the scoring points are covered in each response and that the question has been answered to maximum effect.
Structure before words. Evidence behind claims. Review as discipline, not afterthought. That is what consistent winning looks like.