The 25th issue of Bidding Quarterly has landed: FRICTIONLESS – The Stakeholder Issue.

We’ve all felt it. Sales engages too late. SMEs go quiet. Execs swoop in the night before submission. Procurement seems determined to make a hard process harder. It’s tempting to frame it as “us vs them.”

This issue is the antidote to that rhetoric. Because stakeholder management isn’t a battle to be fought — it’s a craft to be practised.

Across 20 leading voices*, we explore how trust, empathy, structure and a little well-directed curiosity turn friction into flow:

✏️ Why there’s no “them” in a winning bid 🌊 How to fix stakeholder engagement upstream, long before kick-off 🦎 The art of being a “bidding chameleon” 🍾 Uncorking the SME bottleneck by collaborating smarter 🤝 Why, after all the AI and automation, people still buy from people

Huge thanks to every contributor who shared their hard-won wisdom. 👉

Read the issue now.