Keep Calm and Carry on Bidding
I’m a big fan of technology and what it can do to make our lives more efficient and more importantly, less stressful. But I’m not always an early adopter. I’m rarely first in. I’m cautious. I’m not averse to change but that’s often how I’m typecast.
As we ‘come of age’ as a profession my wish for the cautious, or perhaps more fittingly, considered amongst us, is to become less typecast for asking sensible and searching questions. It’s understandable that people become fearful of what the future holds with unprecedented advancements in technology. Trailblazers will always shout, but we can admire their knowledge and achievements without immediate engagement. Waiting, watching, and analysing is not necessarily a flawed strategy – I personally believe it’s a measured one. Of course, the vital thing is not to ignore the change or bigger opportunity, but perspective is crucial. Waiting and watching has been likened to burying your head in the sand in many social posts I read, and that’s simply not true.
The best bid teams I work with are philosophical about the latest technology. They value and understand its place, but they are already creating winning customer-focussed proposals. They have strong leadership, a firm grasp of their win themes, win strategies, bid plans and bid content – fundamentally, they understand their customers.
Over the years, I have frequently heard salespeople say, “If you don’t adopt this, you’re going to get left behind”. As a potential client on the receiving end, I’ve always found this ‘selling by fear’ strategy the most offensive (and most immature). If I see another pitch deck glorifying the death of the typewriter with the arrival of a PC, I might just implode. It’s like comparing apples with cars. We are all infinitely more tech savvy than we once were.
Unquestionably, bidding technology has massively improved work-winning practices, but I don’t remember anyone getting left behind. As solutions have been introduced, some watched from the sidelines, others waited until solutions and markets matured, and (naturally) some were resistant to change. But I repeat: NO ONE GOT LEFT BEHIND. And let’s not pretend everyone will lose their job overnight. Your organisation has obligations to train you if it suddenly deploys new systems and tools that affect your role. It usually requires huge organisational and cultural shifts – and lots of time.
For me, the bigger challenge isn’t about embracing change, it’s about finding the time to do so. So many of us are ridiculously time poor. As the owner of a small business, and with two young children, I already work long and unsocial hours to balance everything. I simply don’t have the luxury of time to study. Many colleagues are in a similar predicament. Huge swathes of the workforce simply can’t magic up hours or days to absorb the latest tech.
LinkedIn is awash with AI ‘experts’ sharing cheat sheets, best practices, or their top 100 new AI tools. If AI really is so difficult to grasp, how have so many people become overnight experts? And if you can suddenly achieve an 80% win rate increase by adopting a piece of bid tech, I’d argue there are much deeper questions you need to ask of your organisation and employees.
Right now, I see bidding tech helping more businesses catch up to the best bid teams and organisations, rather than leaving people behind. But it can be a very expensive strategy to get wrong. Just because the tech has been purchased, it doesn’t mean employees will adopt it or apply it correctly. It’s the same with many of the daily bidding productivity tools we use. Next time you open MS Word, Excel or the Adobe suite, examine the toolbar and sub-menu options. How many features do you really use (or even understand)? Just because the tech exists doesn’t mean we want or need it to do our jobs well. GenAI or Agents may fix many problems but without original source material, we may all ultimately end up with indistinguishable, similarly scoring RFP responses. The age of accepted plagiarism appears well and truly upon us.
While bidding technology will inevitably lead to redundancies in bid teams because of efficiency gains, the explosion of bid vendors has also shone a bright spotlight on our profession. For me, this is a positive change and will ultimately create more jobs than we lose – just redefined jobs. Right now, this redefinition should be our absolute priority as a profession. If we don’t take ownership of this, you can be assured someone who doesn’t really understand our value will.
In my experience it’s team interaction on the bidding journey that delivers real enjoyment, purpose, job satisfaction, and ultimately success. Without that, what’s really left? A computer driven process that ‘plays’ human in the hope another human using computer algorithms to assess our bid buys from it? That’s not work-winning in my humble opinion, and with quantum computing just around the corner, GenAI feels to me more like a trailer rather than the main movie.
BQ21 – Coming of Age, is out next week and has 26 amazing expert contributions, full of fantastic advice and thought provoking ideas for you to ponder as our profession comes of age.
Bidding has never had a greater global platform from which to become a respected profession.
Please people, keep calm and carry on bidding.