WHY DOES CLIENT FEEDBACK MATTER

AND HOW DO YOU GET IT?

Win, lose or draw, you must research every major proposal once the client has made their decision. Otherwise, how will you learn and improve? Your goal in conducting post-proposal research is to get candid feedback from the client on your bid. Understanding how being on the receiving end of your bid made the client think, feel and behave, and how that shaped their decision, will help you refine your approach and improve your submissions.

The key word in the paragraph above is candid. Too often, clients fob us off with a vague or boilerplate response that offers no useful insight into the strengths or weaknesses of our bid. They’re either scared of offending us with their candour or worried we might appeal against the decision if they disclose any dubious evaluation.

The main reason bidders get poor feedback is that the wrong people ask for it.

Most bidders send a member of the bid team either to the debriefing session or to the client interview. But if they are the very person the client happened not to like on the bid team, the client’s unlikely to be open and honest about that. So it makes sense to use a third party.

At Ernst & Young, we briefed an independent research company to interview the client after every major submission. Most clients gave an hour and the researcher posed our questions, recorded the interview, transcribed it and produced a summary of the findings.

We quickly learnt what we did well, what to do differently next time and what to stop doing altogether. To us in the National Proposals team, the feedback we received was gold dust. It gave us the ammunition and the authority to spread the word of proposals best practice throughout the firm, as well as give the bid team in question feedback that they could apply to their next opportunity. It helped us to promote a culture of bidding best practice in the firm, ultimately resulting in the firm doubling its tender win-rate.

PLEASE DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER…

Sometimes the client’s feedback was personal. I remember one occasion when the client said that the only member of the bid team he didn’t like was the bid leader, a senior partner in the firm. Ouch. The client felt that he had dominated the meetings and the pitch and that his arrogance had destroyed any sense of teamwork. Despite everything else in our bid being fine, the selection panel had decided that they couldn’t work with him.

It was down to me to give the partner that feedback.

I framed the client’s comments as a gift to his future proposals: the client was doing him a favour in being so direct. And I couched it in terms of his observable behaviour on those occasions being perceived as arrogant, rather than labelling him an arrogant person. It was an uncomfortable experience for both of us, but to his credit he recognized that he could improve his behaviour. If nothing else, it made him more aware of how he treated his team and came across in competitive situations.

Besides getting invaluable feedback on specific bids, over time this post-proposal research grew into a wealth of insights, hints, tips, tools and techniques that we turned into a bible of best practice. Collated, professionally designed and bound, the book was compulsory reading for anyone joining the National Proposals team – or who simply wanted to win more bids, tenders and proposals.

So, if you want candid, timely feedback, it’s vital that you do three things:

1. prime the client at the outset of the bid process that at the end, when the dust has settled, you will be seeking their feedback on your bid;

2. reassure them that your intention is not to pick holes with their evaluation or dispute their decision, but to constantly improve each bid you submit;

3. employ a third party to conduct the interview, to distance the bid team from the process and make the client feel less defensive.

If you time this request right – when you feel you’ve established rapport with them, probably in the pre-submission meetings – most clients will agree to it. And telling them how you close your proposal process will show them how seriously you take it, which is likely to impress them.

If the client’s feedback is negative, you may be tempted to get defensive, to discredit or dismiss it. ‘They don’t know what they’re talking about/they’re too junior/they’re lying/I don’t care’. Whether you agree with the feedback or not, remember that they are the buyer and their perception is your reality. It’s not a matter of whether they’re objectively wrong or right; it’s how they experienced your bid and their interaction with you that counts.

WHAT SHOULD YOU SEEK FEEDBACK ON?

Start with their evaluation criteria. It makes sense to get their take on how you addressed what matters most to them, i.e. the key elements of your proposal that they judged you on.

The standard and most obvious criteria are:

• your technical bid, including your proposed solution

• your commercial bid

• your service delivery and team

• your ability/capacity to deliver the solution

• your credentials

Bear in mind that many buyers will have a template for giving feedback, so it would be politic to use that. If they don’t, and your bid adopted a new, experimental approach or featured a new product or service, you may want to focus on that instead.

Here’s a real example of candid, specific feedback from the Contracts Officer of a metropolitan local authority in the UK to a small supplier on their failed PQQ (Pre-Qualification Questionnaire):

You can see for yourself how clear the feedback is and what the supplier will have to do the next time they submit a bid to this authority. They now know how high the bar is and what it will take to reach it.

You are probably aware that UK public sector bodies are obliged by law to give bidders the following information:

• award criteria, i.e. which criteria and weightings governed the contract award decision

• their total score

• the name and score of the contract winner.

THE UK PUBLIC SECTOR ‘STANDSTILL PERIOD’

If you are unsuccessful in a public sector tender and decide to challenge the award decision, you can use the ‘standstill period’ to do so. This is a mandatory 10-day pause between notification of the awarding of the contract and the signing of the contract with the winning supplier. Also known as the ‘Alcatel Period’, due to a court case involving that company, this small window of time allows bidders to get more information about the award decision if they feel they have been harshly dealt with.

A legal requirement that all public authorities must comply with, the standstill applies to all procurements covered by the full scope of the EU (European Union) Procurement Directives. In other words, it applies to all EU contracts equalling or exceeding a certain financial value for supplies, services or works (see EU thresholds in the glossary of terms for the current levels).

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION (FOI)

If you miss the standstill period deadline or are still unhappy with the feedback provided by the contracting authority, you can submit an FOI request. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 gives the UK public right of access to information held by public authorities in two ways:

• public authorities must publish certain information about their activities

• members of the public are entitled to request information from those authorities

Simply send a written request (email is OK) to the Information Officer at the relevant authority, who is obliged by law to respond within 20 working days. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the authority will release the information you ask for, especially if they deem it to be commercially or legally sensitive. But those exemptions are rare.

Under an FOI request, you should be able to get the score, ranking and evaluation comments of your own PQQ and bid, plus a summary of why you were unsuccessful. As you might expect, information about the other bidders and their bids tends to be off-limits.

FIND OUT WHY YOU WON, TOO

As Anthony Robbins says in Awaken the Giant Within, ‘When we win we tend to party; when we lose we tend to ponder.’

Winning bidders are usually too busy celebrating or going into delivery mode to ask why they won. But once the Bollinger (or the Prosecco, depending on the value of the win) has stopped fizzing, find out why you won. That way you know what to reproduce next time or do even better.

It’s also much easier to get feedback on a win than on a loss: the client knows you’re unlikely to dispute their decision! And as you’ll be working together to deliver the contract, they’ll be open with you.

HOW SHOULD YOU APPLY WHAT YOU

LEARN FROM THE CLIENT?

The most effective way to embed the learning is to share it with the bid team in the ‘wash-up’ meeting or internal debrief, then add it to your proposals ‘library’, if you have one. The wash-up meeting is an essential final step in the tendering process, where you assess your own performance and overlay it on the feedback from the client. Sadly, most organizations fail to hold a structured debrief at the end of the process. Why? Either because the bid team rush back to their day-jobs (which they’ve neglected in order to work on the tender) or they’re already onto the next bid (they’ve become a proposals factory).

The broad questions you want to ask and answer in the wash-up meeting are:

‘What did we do well?’

‘What could we do differently or better next time?’

‘Who’s going to make sure we apply those improvements/lessons learnt to the next bid?’

You could map a simple matrix onto your process to analyze each stage of the proposal, to create a ‘bid improvement plan’ for your bid team:

Improvement ideas can range from building a library of model responses to standard tender questions and pre-qualifying opportunities better, faster mobilisation, more robust team selection and betterprepared pitches.

Much of the feedback I’ve talked about so far in this chapter is qualitative and subjective; it tends to be the ‘soft’ stuff. But it’s also important to look at the harder metrics and measure your bidding performance quantitatively too.

KEEPING SCORE: HOW TO TRACK

YOUR TENDERING PROGRESS

For me, the most valuable metric is the Return On Investment (ROI) of your tendering activity. This measures the profitability or cost-effectiveness of your tendering.

ROI is usually applied to investment decisions, but I see no reason why we can’t also use it to evaluate tendering activity. In the same way that investors want to know that the return generated by a financial instrument will be greater than the original cost of that investment, we need to know that our resource-hungry tenders will generate a return for us, i.e. that they’re worth all the blood, sweat and, occasionally, tears.

The standard ROI formula is:

So how do you calculate your tendering ROI? Here’s my six-step, back-ofthe-envelope formula:

1. DEFINE YOUR SCOPE.

Will you include all bids, i.e. single, non-competitive proposals and reproposals, or just competitive tenders for new clients that followed a formal process? Does your scope include or exclude PQQs?

2. CHOOSE YOUR TIME-FRAME.

What period will your measurement cover? You need a time-frame that will include enough tenders to give you meaningful data, like a financial or calendar year.

3. CALCULATE THE TOTAL VALUE OF ALL NEW CONTRACTS WON BY TENDER IN THAT TIME-FRAME.

This is the total revenue value to your organization over the lifetime of each contract.

4. CALCULATE THE TOTAL COST OF ALL TENDERING ACTIVITY IN THAT TIME-FRAME.

This should include all your staff time and material costs, like printing and design, research, travel and accommodation for all the contracts covered in step 3. What did it cost you to win them? This figure is the cost of your investment.

(Some people think you should also include your ‘opportunity cost’ when calculating your tendering investment. This is the cost of missing out on other opportunities or neglecting existing clients because you diverted resources into the tenders whose ROI you’re measuring. Though this is virtually impossible to quantify, one thing is certain: tendering for major contracts has an opportunity cost, meaning that your actual ROI is probably lower than you think. Yet another reason to pre-qualify every opportunity.)

5. SUBTRACT YOUR FIGURE IN STEP 4 FROM YOUR FIGURE IN STEP 3.

The resulting number is the gross profit of your tendering activity.

6. DIVIDE YOUR FIGURE IN STEP 5 BY YOUR FIGURE IN STEP 4.

The resulting number is your ROI.

For instance, if you won £100,000 worth of new business in a certain period and you spent £10,000 on the tenders to win it, you’d have an ROI of 9 or 900% (100,000 – 10,000 => 90,000 / 10,000). In other words, every £1 you spent tendering generated a return of £9. Your organization needs to agree a target ROI zone or range. Clearly, if your investment is greater than your return, something’s wrong!

Win-rate might be easier to calculate…

As you can see, calculating your ROI is no simple matter.

A simpler metric is to work out your win-rate, i.e. what proportion you win of the total number of tenders you respond to. This is usually expressed as a ratio, e.g. 1 in 3 (1:3), or as a percentage.

Provided you’re comparing like with like, it’s important to track your win-rate: you need to know if you’re getting better or worse. And you can measure win-rates for different aspects of your tendering. For example, you can compare the performance of different business units or teams across different geographies or service lines.

A falling win-rate should prompt some organizational soul-searching:

‘Are we going for the wrong opportunities?’

‘Are we over-bidding?’

‘Are we submitting lower-quality bids?’

‘Is our proposals team overworked and stale?’

‘Are we choosing the wrong bid teams?’

‘Has our reputation been damaged?’

‘Is the market changing? Do we understand the new market dynamics?’

‘Is price even more of an issue than usual? Can we be smarter about pricing?’

Whatever your answers to these questions, if your win-rate (and therefore your ROI) is going south, you will need to change some element(s) of your sales and tendering activity to stop the rot. If you’ve read this far, you should already have learnt some practical ways of doing that.

Measuring customer satisfaction

Another metric to consider is customer satisfaction. Your primary customer is, of course, external: the buyer(s) in the client organization. If you play a bid support role, you may also want to measure the satisfaction levels of your internal customers, like the fee-earners on the bid team, as well as functions such as Finance, HR, Compliance and IT.

Getting regular feedback from them through surveys, focus groups, interviews and other research tools on what it was like working with you is useful. In the interests of continuously improving, it gives you insight into the strengths, weaknesses and perceptions of you and your performance, and shows them that you take customer service seriously. Provided, of course, that you act on the feedback and are seen to do so, it will also strengthen your relationship with them.

WINNER TAKES ALL BOTTOM LINE:

Whatever you measure, establish an accurate baseline first.

That way you’ll know if your tendering performance and ROI are getting better or worse.

[ FOOD FOR THOUGHT ]

Try responding to the following statements by putting a big, bold X in the appropriate column:

If you put an X in the last column (‘No/disagree’) for any of the statements, chances are your proposal closure process is not serving you as well as it could.

Given how onerous but potentially lucrative tendering can be, you owe it to yourself and your staff to keep track of how you’re doing, both internally and from a client perspective.

Think of your proposal closure process as an early warning system: if you’re investing valuable, finite resources in bids with questionable returns, you want to know sooner rather than later, so you can course-correct quickly and become the business development powerhouse you know you can be!

See you overleaf for the seventh and final principle: ‘Manage the bid like a project’.