HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

My 18 years of working on bids have spawned the seven and a half principles of proposals best practice that this book is about.

If you have any experience of tendering, none of the principles should confuse or surprise you. They’re generic, so they can be used in virtually any industry. But it’s how you apply them that determines whether a bid is won or lost. So in the pages that follow, I will share under each principle what’s worked for me and what hasn’t.

This is my take on proposals best practice for your benefit, so that you know how high the bar is and how to reach it. Of course, it would be unrealistic – and probably inappropriate – to expect to reproduce every aspect of best practice for every bid. But I want you to fill your tendering toolkit with as many useful tools as you can and know which ones to use when.

WELCOME NEWCOMERS!

If you’re new to tendering, thank you for picking up this book.

Maybe you’ve just joined Sales & Marketing, Business Development or Proposals and you need to grasp the basics quickly. If you want to make an immediate impact on your new team and the other stakeholders in the business that you’ll engage with on bids, I suggest you get to grips with three aspects of tendering.

First, you need to understand the process governing how private, public and voluntary sector contracts are tendered and let. Second, find out about the core principles of best practice if you want to win more bids than you lose. And third, get familiar with the language and terminology that is bandied about in Proposals Land (you don’t want to look blank when someone says ‘restricted procedure’, ‘RFP’ or ‘value proposition’).

The principles of this book follow the logical order of the bidding process. So if you only read the chapter headings and the summaries at the start of each chapter, you’ll get a sense of the flow of the process. Then you can decide which particular stages of the process interest you, or the ones you need to know about for your job, and read those in more detail.

Ultimately, I recommend you read the book from cover to cover. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

If you flick through the glossary at the back of the book, you’ll also find what I consider to be the tendering terms you should be familiar with if you want to be credible in this field. And ‘credible’ is a vital word if you’re working in any bid support role.

Whatever path you take through this book, my goal for you is this: when you make your first contribution to a bid, I want your colleagues, internal customers or external clients to sit up and take notice.

WELCOME EXPERIENCED BIDDERS!

If you’re not new to tendering, you’re likely to be seeking something different.

You may want to complete your mastery of the craft of tendering. Or perhaps you want to bring your team up to your level of expertise. Specifically, you may want to use this book to help you:

• pre-qualify opportunities more robustly (Principle 1)

• get a new angle on team selection (Principle 2)

• personalize your bid to each of the five typical buying roles (Principle 2)

• out-fox the competition before you’ve even put pen to paper (Principle 3)

• structure any free-form proposal for maximum impact (Principles 3 and 4)

• use the written word as a competitive weapon (Principle 4)

• produce compelling executive summaries (Principle 4.5)

• pitch with power (and coach others to do the same) (Principle 5)

• get candid, useful feedback from the client (Principle 6)

• manage bids better (Principle 7)

Whatever your situation, I’ve tried to make the book as ‘real world’ as possible; hence the number of times you’ll see the phrase ‘How to…’. It’s short on theory and long on practice. Relevance is also a goal, which is why each chapter closes with an exercise called ‘Food for Thought’. I want you to relate whatever I’ve said in that chapter to your own experience and context, so you gain insights and ideas that you can apply to your very next bid.

Whether you’re a novice or a veteran, my ultimate goal is to help you win more contracts, instructions, commissions or mandates more efficiently and with less stress on you and your organization.

So it matters not if you head up BD, Sales or Proposals in a multi-national, a partnership or an SME, if you’re an overworked bid manager or proposals writer, an internal or an external consultant. Whoever you are, whatever industry you’re in and wherever you are in the tendering process, there’s something here for you.

Yours tenderly,