THE BID MANAGER’S ROLE

Of all the roles in a tender, the bid or proposal manager’s is probably the hardest and surely one of the most important. Typically part of an organization’s central bid support team or dedicated to the bids of a particular product/service line or practice group, they manage the internal logistics and moving parts of the bid process, effectively acting as the project manager. They make the bid happen.

If they fall down on the job, the whole process falls apart, with disastrous consequences. Clients pick up on poor internal organization; some will even score you on it. For instance, if you’re slow out of the blocks in asking for meetings or posing clarification questions, or if you submit your bid too close to the deadline, the client may mark you down. So a bid manager can make or break a bid.

And that’s why they must manage the bid like a project.

Like a project, a bid has an output (the bid document or presentation); an outcome (contract award); prescribed timescales (clarification window, submission date); internal milestones (kick-off and review meetings, document drafts, rehearsals, presentation etc); a scope (defined by the spec and the ITT/RFP); and it requires stakeholder management (the bid team and other contributors to the bid).

So the bid manager should drive the process with a realistic timetable that everyone involved buys into, with agreed milestones, deadlines, deliverables and accountabilities, ensuring that every stakeholder in the bid understands what is expected of them, why and when.

Where bid management differs from project management, however, is in the value that the best bid managers can add to a bid in terms of shaping its content and getting the best out of the bid team. And that’s where good bid managers must field an awesome array of knowledge, skills and attitudes.

KNOWLEDGE: WHAT MUST A BID MANAGER KNOW?

If you’re a bid manager, you need to understand proposals best practice, so you can guide the bid team in the right direction. Demonstrating this knowledge gives you credibility with the bid team, making it likelier that they will listen to you and follow your advice. Citing effective approaches, experience from previous bids and insights into client needs will win you brownie points with the team.

You must also know where to find relevant material for the bid. These range from corporate policy documents and certificates (especially for public sector PQQs) to relevant case studies and latest CVs. If you have access to an electronic proposals library where all this core material is gathered in one place, great. If not, you may find yourself reinventing the wheel.

You clearly need to know your own organization, the key players and stakeholders in it, what it does, what makes it different or special, its USP, its strategy. The larger your organization, the harder this is.

You also need to know the client and, if possible, the competition. Even if you don’t do the actual desktop research yourself but delegate it to your library services or knowledge management function (if you have one), you will probably be the conduit for distributing that information to the team. When it comes to championing the client’s viewpoint, you will need to understand their business and what commercial, organizational, political or economic issues are driving the tender.

On a practical level, you need to know how to plan, structure, draft and edit a powerful bid document, as well as brief and edit other people’s contributions. So knowledge of grammar, punctuation and overall business style, document design and management – much of which we covered in Principle 4, ‘Persuade through the written word’ – is essential.

If there is a beauty parade, you also need to understand what constitutes a good presentation, how best to help the team prepare and when to recommend an external pitch coach or consultant, if you find the team’s needs exceed your own experience or capabilities. It helps if you already know the team members.

You need to know yourself, too. Your strengths are important, of course, but you need to know your weaknesses so you don’t let them scupper the process. A game-critical weakness might be non-assertiveness, disorganization or panic under pressure. The risk of being in denial about a weakness is that it may show up under pressure and stress the team when they are already stretched. Recognizing your weaknesses and adopting strategies either to mask them, manage them or make up for them takes emotional intelligence and maturity.

Finally, knowing how to interact with the bid team is key. Dealing with different personalities in the white heat of a tendering process – including bid team members who are more senior than you – brings its own pressure. The more thought you give to their individual styles and how best to communicate with them and get on their wavelength, the more you’ll get out of them. You might want to refer back to Principle 2, ‘Choose the best team’ to remind yourself of the four basic motivational styles of Carer, Driver, Professional and Adapter and their influence on behaviour.

SKILLS: WHAT MUST BID MANAGERS

KNOW HOW TO DO?

A good bid manager needs a jamboree of skills, which can be grouped under three headings: Communication (written and oral); Management; and Organization.

To be a good bid manager, I believe you need to be proficient in all three areas.

ATTITUDE: WHICH ONES DO BID MANAGERS NEED?

• Positive, can-do

• Energetic but calm

• Flexible, adaptable

• Patient (but not a pushover)

• Persistent, determined

• Professional, i.e. demanding high standards of themselves and others

• Objective, realistic

• Resilient, i.e. doesn’t wilt under pressure

• Creative

• Assertive, but not aggressive

• Confident

• Treat their internal stakeholders as external clients

• Committed and motivated to win.

And the King of these? For me, it’s the last bullet, ‘Committed and motivated to win’. If your bid manager has that burning desire and is gagging to do what it takes to win, they’re much more likely to have the other attributes too – or at least be prepared to develop them. But if their heart’s not truly in it, they’ll just be going through the motions and won’t run that extra mile either for the bid or the bid team.

I met a bid manager like that once. Within seconds of being introduced, I sensed he was the wrong person for the role. I got negative ‘vibes’ from him; he had one of those auras that seemed to drain energy rather than generate it. He had a low-energy, unassuming, non-assertive personality whose body language (slumped in his chair, semi-scowling!) betrayed his mindset. He was full of ‘atti’. At first I thought it was me, that he was reacting to my being brought in to the bid by his MD and he’d interpreted that as implicit criticism of him. I imagined he was thinking something like ‘Damned consultant muscling in on my patch...’.

But over the next few weeks of working with him, I realized that he possessed hardly any of the above attitudes. He wasn’t a monster or a bad person, and it was nothing to do with me; that’s just how he was. But I felt duty bound to mention my concern discreetly to the MD, who acknowledged there was a problem. The truth was that, with him, our chances of winning were much lower than without him. Fortunately, he recognized he was in the wrong job and by mutual consent soon left the organization. (We managed to rescue the bid at the 11th hour, but it was touch and go.)

I talked a moment ago about ‘going the extra mile’, but in bids and tenders it may only be inches. A bid manager’s ability to get the best out of people, sometimes more senior than themselves, comes from understanding that the margin between winning and losing a tender can be as little as half a percentage point or a fraction of a mark.

To continue the sporting analogy, the British Cycling Team swept the medals board in the 2012 London Olympics by making small improvements to every aspect of their performance. Besides the obvious gruelling training, this ranged from developing tyres that could be pumped a few millibars harder than their rivals and spending hours in a wind tunnel to refine their body position on the bike, to sleeping in the right position and on the same pillow when they were away from home.

The British Cycling Team leader, Dave Brailsford, explained: “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you’d get a big increase when you put them all together.”

They called this the ‘marginal gains theory’… and tenders are no different. When competing at the highest level for a lucrative contract where award decisions are often made on the tiniest margins, the best bid managers and their teams should pay similar attention to every detail of the process.

WHERE DOES BID MANAGEMENT END AND INTERNAL CONSULTING BEGIN?

The top bid managers go beyond simply managing the logistics of the internal bid process and add value to the bid itself, influencing the client’s experience of it. The four dimensions of a bid that good bid managers must handle simultaneously I see as a compass:

At magnetic North, the bid manager must manage themselves and their behaviour. This is about managing their impact on and relationship with the bid team, their energy levels, personability, presentability, language and overall professionalism.

Moving clockwise to due East, they must support their internal customer, especially the bid leader. This involves establishing themselves as a vital support to the team by adding immediate value from day 1, e.g. asking probing questions, challenging assumptions, summarizing the ITT/RFP and pulling out key requirements, creating a compliance matrix, reminding the team of proposals best practice, editing first draft text.

Due South is about managing the logistics of the process, so that it flows smoothly and everyone is clear about what’s expected of them. The bid manager must be on top of every aspect of whatever step of the process they’re at. This is where a split-screen mind comes in: they hold the big picture of the bid alongside meticulous attention to detail. They must drive the process and be seen to do so.

The fourth dimension lies in the West, where they can add value by championing the client’s viewpoint and making the bid team reflect on the buyer’s experience. ‘How are they feeling about us?’ ‘Where else can we add value for them?’ ‘What do they think of us?’ ‘Is our team right for them?’ ‘Are we on the right track?’ ‘Do we still think this is winnable?’ can provoke changes of tack or direction. This is where the bid manager needs the confidence to challenge the team, provided it’s in the ultimate interests of the bid.

HOW DO BID MANAGERS GET THE RESPECT

THEY DESERVE?

LET ME KICK THIS OFF WITH A STORY.

A bid manager had just joined a law firm and was introduced to the senior partner. “Trevor, this is Paul. He’s just started with us as a bid manager on the BD team.” “Oh, an overhead,” retorted the senior partner, turned on his heels and walked off.

How does the central bid or proposals function in an organization get more respect from fee-earners? How does the BD director get a seat at the top table?

I see BD teams around the world under-valued by their organization. There are several reasons why:

they’ve allowed themselves to become glorified administrators or expensive secretaries

the fee-earners don’t appreciate how hard bid management is

some fee-earners don’t value marketing and sometimes confuse it with business development

the head of BD and/or their team are poor at promoting/defending the value they add

they’ve recruited the wrong people

they’ve recruited the right people, but they’re doing the wrong things.

Besides mastering the skills, knowledge and attitudes I’ve described in this chapter, bid managers need to take the time and trouble to build long-term relationships with their internal stakeholders, just as they would with an external client if they were client-facing.

And that can be fun. It doesn’t have to be a chore or a bore.

One of the most successful people I ever worked with was a fellow consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Most of the time Howard was to be found either in the local pub or a restaurant, spending time with colleagues, prospects or clients. He pulled in more business than virtually anyone else… and managed to do so without hurting his liver. He enjoyed their company, and on the odd occasion he didn’t, he made sure they enjoyed his.

My point here is not to encourage you to become a feckless lush who falls into a drunken stupor after lunch (RIP those days of boozy lunches), but to spend time building solid relationships with your internal, bid team customers. Those relationships will pay dividends when you need their engagement on and commitment to a bid.

By mastering the ‘hard’ skills of managing a bid like a project and the ‘soft’ skills of communications and relationship-building, you will add huge value to the bid, reinforce the credibility of your organization’s business development function… and win more bids, tenders and proposals.

WINNER TAKES ALL BOTTOM LINE:

If BD and all who sail in her want the respect they deserve, they need to do more than simply manage the bid process. They must be more than project managers. Their role must be to support and challenge the team in equal measure and influence the structure, content and delivery of a winning bid.

[ FOOD FOR THOUGHT ]

We’ve come to the end of our brief journey through the 7 ½ trusted principles of proposals best practice. But I don’t want you to close the book, stick it on your bookshelf (unless, of course, you’re reading the e-book) and forget about it. I want it to become a well-thumbed, dog-eared, coffee-stained book that you refer to every time you start work on a bid.

Please take some time now to skim back over the principles, reminding yourself of a good idea here, a novel approach there, or those places in the margin where you’ve noted something of interest.

Now think about what aspects of tendering you’re good at and write them down in the left-hand column, without limit. Revel in those strengths. Congratulate yourself on being good at that stuff. Be proud of them and don’t under-value them.

Now think about what you’d like to be better at and rank the top three. You may want to analyze an ITT/RFP faster, write more concise bid answers, be a more effective presentation coach, or learn to be more assertive with senior people. Rank them in the order that will have the greatest impact on the bids you work on.

Finally, when you’ve done that, brainstorm some ways you could achieve those top three improvements. Could you go on a training course, hire a coach, read a book, talk to an expert? Build a simple plan for improving those three aspects of your tendering toolkit, with a time-frame allotted to each. Then implement the plan!