Against The Odds

You’ve been on the courses. You’ve attended the conferences, popped up at the chapter meetings. Your well-thumbed copy of ‘Proposal Essentials’ sits alongside the APMP Study Guide. You check Twitter every morning: LinkedIn groups every week. The certificate on your wall shows that you’ve attained at least the Foundation level qualification.

Ours is a profession that’s matured. Where proposal centres were a back-office factory, they’re now recognised as a source of competitive advantage. (Usually). Where proposals looked awful, they now look impressive. (Often). Where salespeople looked down on their bid and proposal colleagues, they now treat us as equals. (Sometimes).

Even as I write, I find myself qualifying my own statements. Has every company’s proposal operation even reached that first base, never mind positioned itself to move forwards to new heights? Sadly, I doubt it. Too many of us are still fighting age-old battles for resource, budget, attention. Proposal management’s not yet in the DNA of every company, by a long stretch. It’s still far from the case that – to quote BJ Lownie, who founded Strategic Proposals thirty years ago – all those involved in proposal development have been trained in the necessary skills.

But, increasingly, we find ourselves working with teams who are doing amazing stuff. Whose senior management truly get it when it comes to winning work. Whose sales teams view proposals not as an inconvenience, but as an opportunity. And whose leaders are now looking for further ways to create differentiation and to win more business.

And so I’d point to four main directions of travel for the most successful proposal teams.

First, we see sales teams who genuinely appreciate the power of strong pre-proposal planning. If the first you hear of an opportunity is a week or two before an RFP lands – or once it’s come crashing in – you’ll have missed so many chances to build momentum behind your bid. Someone else, not you, will be on the inside track. We’ve talked about if for years: we’re now seeing it happen more widely than ever before.

Second is the move to a renewal culture. Sure, it’s more glamorous to win new business. When do people in your company get more excited – bringing in a new client, or retaining an existing one? Yet I’d argue that protecting the jobs of colleagues delivering current services is just as important, if not more so, than capturing new deals.

So we’ve increasingly found ourselves helping teams to build their processes (and skills and capacity) for renewal proposals. Why wait for a competitive RFP, if you can circumvent that – or at least wire it heavily in your favour? (And note that I’m not talking about ‘rebidding’. If you end up in a ‘rebid’ when you’re incumbent, you’re already on a slippery slope you want to avoid).

Third, throughout the process: understanding the role of bid competitive intelligence, and establishing processes for capturing and managing it. You don’t have to bid blindfolded every time, or rely on the salesperson’s often ill-informed gut feel to determine “why us, why not them?” You can research, capture and share information in a way that changes the game – with the right resource and mindset to drive the process.

Finally: the far greater role of the proposal team in the pitch. We’ve seen for too long the utter nonsense of the presentation being developed by a different team of specialists to the one that helped with the proposal – when the skills of storytelling, creating buyer empathy and top-notch design are fundamentally the same. The best proposal teams support the proposal and stay engaged until their colleagues have delivered a killer, mike-dropping pitch.

Wherever you are on the journey – still struggling in the valley, passing base camp, or climbing to the heights – I know that this profession is full of wonderfully, creative, committed individuals. We do great work, often against the odds. But when we start to stack those odds in our favour, great things happen.