Extraordinary People

Bid & proposal professionals are, by definition, professional. It’s in our DNA. We’re committed to getting the job done, working late to meet deadlines and doing whatever’s needed to please the evaluators. We want to succeed, and we like to win. This in itself is praiseworthy and extraordinary compared to other professions – like auditing – that play it safe and lack the obsessive restlessness needed to continually innovate and improve.

It could be argued, therefore, that our profession is already extraordinary. Our benchmark is high. We go the extra mile. How is it, then, that we know we can always be better, quicker, have more energy, and win more? Truth is that most of the time we’re not extraordinary. We’re just busy being busy – for others. Hiding in our silos, playing safe, doing what’s expected of us, following the process and cranking the handle. Like balls in a pinball machine, we whizz around from pillar to post at incredible speed until we realise that we’re not in control of our destiny. We then either brace ourselves for a bumpy ride, or fall through a hole at the bottom.

To be genuinely extraordinary, we need to take control: turning things around by not being busy for a while. We need to step out of the day job – to rest, do some training, and reflect on how to do things better. We then need to take action, doing the things we know are important at a pace that keeps us ahead of our competition. It’s like the old proverb of the carpenter who, exhausted by 24/7 sawing with a blunt saw, simply doesn’t have time to stop and sharpen the saw. ‘Too busy sawing’ he says.

My hunch is that we’re too busy striving for excellence to actually be extraordinary. For consider: when did you last take a look around to see how your behaviour, win rate, proposal output, tools, resources, qualification and experience compare to others within and outside your industry? If it was more than six months ago it’s too long and you’ve become complacent. You might not even have the network of bid & proposal peers to ask the questions. And, even if you find the information you seek, do you have a trusted mentor or independent auditor who can benchmark your ability? If not, how will you know what extra-ordinary looks like?

To be in the top quartile, you have to know what the top quartile is doing. To be better than them, and be genuinely extraordinary, you have to be doing things they’re not. You have to innovate, be hungry for change, continually learn, have the time and budget to make it happen, know where and how to deliver value, understand the ‘why’ of your existence, want success more than everyone else, have a high-flying team around you, and do things differently and better than your peers – things that our profession has never seen or done before.

That’s a big ask, not least because we’re don’t always know what’s been done before. Fortunately we have the APMP to keep us abreast of latest good practice. But ‘good’ isn’t enough when we’re talking about extraordinary. We want to be the best. We want our win rate and capture rates to be above 90%. We want to be working on 20 bids at a time without breaking a sweat, because our tools and systems do the heavy lifting for us. We want to be so good that the competition decline to bid, or withdraw their job application, as soon as they know we’re at the table. We want to be truly extraordinary.

We’re not there yet. In fact we’ll never be there. And that’s the point. Because extraordinary people constantly push the boundaries of the possible. They’re the trailblazers that light the path for others. Wouldn’t it be great if one such person made it to the top of their business – a FTSE 100 CEO with a foundation and background in bidding. Now that really would be extraordinary.