BACKGROUND TO

WINNER TAKES ALL

My journey through the landscape of proposals and business development (BD) started in March 1994 when I joined Ernst & Young as a grand-sounding ‘National Proposals Consultant’. I’d been having a ball in London and Melbourne as a freelance copywriter writing recruitment press ads, product brochures, user manuals, newsletters and the odd radio commercial. But the 1990/91 recession hit me hard, so I decided to come in from the cold.

Recommended to Ernst & Young’s Head of Proposals by the sister of a good friend, I found myself working in a small but perfectly formed team of five people whose mandate was to help practice teams in the firm bid for and win major tenders. This mission was part of a broader campaign to make the firm more sales-oriented, including turning service lines like audit from a commodity into a distinctive business tool.

Beth was Head of Proposals; her brief was to take the firm’s bids and tenders to the next level. She believed passionately in what she did and spread the word about her team and the value we could add. Naturally shy, on the subject of proposals she became an Emmeline Pankhurst, fighting our cause, protecting us when we were exhausted and overloaded with bids, bashing partners’ heads together when necessary and impressing them with her insights into an opportunity, a team selection or a document section.

In her own words, she was an umbrella over us: she shielded us from the flak, the thunder and the hail, and closed the umbrella up when the praise came down. And in turn, Bob Forsyth, the partner in charge of marketing for the firm, did the same for her.

We worked tirelessly. Ninety-hour weeks were common. Internal and external audit, corporate finance, tax, management consulting – after months of Beth’s evangelizing, we had people banging our door down to enrol us in their bid. They knew that they stood a much better chance of winning with us than without us. So we saw the entire tendering process, from start to end, through the filter of different industry sectors, service lines and teams.

We learnt on the job, resilience forged in the white heat of the tendering process. At our height, we were advising partners on the bid/no bid decision; pre-submission client meetings; team selection; win-themes; drafting, editing, design and production of the document; design, preparation and delivery of the oral presentation; and post-proposal research.

Eighteen months later, the UK firm’s tender win-rate had doubled.

I’m not saying National Proposals should take all the plaudits for that, but we certainly helped.

You will have gathered that Ernst & Young was a formative experience for me, moulding my view of the tendering process. Inevitably, I absorbed that learning and have added to it in the ensuing years as an independent business development consultant and trainer, building on it with successive layers of experience like geological strata.