Bid Bingo

Hope is not a strategy, but what if it works? I remember a time when a tender document came in that was every bid manager (and bid team’s) nightmare: insufficient time to respond, no opportunity to ask clarification questions, fully fixed price, hellish terms and conditions (unlimited liability et al), unclear requirement meaning Operations couldn’t define what would be needed and being paid in a volatile currency. In short, it was near impossible to manage the commercial risk and to plan (and cost-model / price) to a level of certainty that meant a firm fixed price was viable and sensible. Added to this, the sales team didn’t know anything about the requirement, and we had received it through a random ‘send to all’ general enquiry channel.

Three bid-bingo phrases were stated very early-on by Executive Management: “got to be in it to win it”, “this is a key strategic opportunity” and “you’re a bid team, your job is to bid – so bid it”. Of course, those doing the bid didn’t get closure pre-bid on “can we win?”, “can we deliver?”, “can we make money? “…just a simple “get on with it”.

With all of that in mind, the team did bid, did win, did deliver and did make money; a lot more money than planned. It also secured a valuable client for further work and further associated clients. A huge success story: it could be argued that this was simply on “hope” from the very beginning.

But how? It had all the hallmarks of a disaster or at least nugatory effort and the expense of goodwill and morale within the company. Quite simply – the bid team bonded together by forging a lead of each component part of the bid: bid lead, operations lead, project management lead, sales lead and bid finance lead (me). Each lead then picked their support team and on it went. The leads analysed and dissected the documentation and put forward what would work best and proposed viable offerings against the vague requirement. The submission was firm and decisive and put forward what the team were (sufficiently) comfortable with. It was hard work to get the bid in on time, but the offer was robust…and won.  The conduct of the team was truly collaborative and supportive with the mind-set “no matter what we think of it, we will bid this and bid this as best we can”.

Coming back to the start: “Hope is not a Strategy”…in this instance it was, and it did go on to inspire a lot of other hopeful bidding – which was not successful and was nugatory. The lesson I have learned is that hope can be a strategy from time to time, but only in very rare instances.