Utopia In Public Sector Bidding

Preparing for the Aftermath

Your “must win” bid is submitted on time.  It has been branded a success at your independent Final Document Review.  You have sent the team home for a well-earned rest and cleared the remnants of stale pizza and cold coffee from your war room.  You can take the next day or so to relax a bit, prepare for the next one, and you can let the bid team return to their day jobs.  Phew!

You are in your office chatting with the Operations Director about another opportunity when one of the sales team puts their head around the door, “I have had a couple of clarification questions from the client.  Shall I send them to you?”  When they arrive in your inbox, you and the Operations Director have a quick look.

The questions seem fairly straightforward and together, you pop a few words in an email and send it off to the client.  “Now, what was it that we were chatting about before?”

Then later, you hear you have lost the bid!

Why does this happen?  Well, one reason may be that you did not see the clarification request for the opportunity it presented.  You treated it with less care and attention than the other text in your bid.  But in fact, it turned out that this was the most important text of the bid!  Another reason could be that you thought it was all done and dusted when the bid had been put in and you no longer needed the full team to support you.  It was not!

We have put together a few pointers about how the savvy bid leader can achieve bid utopia in a Public-Sector bidding environment and not fall foul of such traps as these.

Dealing with Clarifications

When a Public-Sector client asks a clarification question it means that it cannot decide what your evaluation score under that question should be.  It signifies that from your entire bid, these are the areas that could still make a difference. Your answer will be the decider.  It may even affect the scores in other areas of your bid, as well!

Clarification questions are clear signposts from the client about those areas they are seeking to make choices in.  They are also your opportunity for an additional communication with the evaluators, which may have a wider and major impact upon your bid win chances.  So, your bid process needs to plan for these as opportunities to be exploited.

We believe that clarification questions should be treated with the utmost seriousness.  Indeed, we have seen two clients lose their bid as a result of a lacklustre response when asked for more information like this.  So, when a clarification question arrives we think you should reassemble the core bid team with some urgency.  Then, as a team, you should examine the questions in detail, relate them to the specific wording in your bid and see if you can uncover the underlying reason why the question was asked in the manner it was put.

Next, you should test your response against any competitive intelligence you have.  You must “Ghost” what you think your competition may be promoting in your answer, to tilt the blance in your favour.  Finally, for any complex or lengthy response, you should précis the response as a short executive summary and include this as a preamble to the answer.  Make it easy for the evaluators to show their bosses that you should be awarded the maximum marks.

We do not believe any of this can be done most effectively by the Bid Manager and a salesperson alone.  It needs the same attention as the original bid strategy planning.  It should be a result of a brainstorm meeting with everyone involved in that area of the bid.  Get them all back together and treat the exercise with the same attention as you gave the original bid planning decisions.

Setting up the Presentation

Worrying about the presentation whilst firefighting all the other aspects of getting your bid out on time is an unnecessary distraction, isn’t it?  So why not leave it to the sales team to do it, the day before the presentation takes place?  This is what can happen all too often.  However, we think that this lack of attention can seriously impact upon your chances of success.

Winning bidders plan the presentation with the entire bid team as part of the overall bid creation activity.  By this method they can have a presentation which compliments the bid and doesn’t just repeat it.  It harmonises with the core bid concepts and supports the key discriminators.

Moreover, presentations are often scored.  Even if they are not, the presentation will be used to justify the evaluators increasing or decreasing your scores in specific areas.  Sometimes the client’s team will give you some guidance on what they want you to cover.  They are not doing this for the fun of it; they have specific issues with your scores in these areas and they are going to use the presentation to resolve them!  In other words, a clarification opportunity.

To get the best results, you must plan the presentation key elements with the entire bid team as the bid is constructed and then get the bid leadership and senior management together once you have the client’s presentation instructions.  Oh, and don’t just go through your bid response; they will have read it. Think about what you can express in a presentation that you can’t easily express in a document and weave that in.  For example, empathy with the client situation, exuding confidence in delivery, being good people to work with.  And, certainly, do not have a section titled “About Us” or similar.  They are not interested in the number of worldwide offices you have and you will only irritate them (unless, of course, they have specifically asked for this information).

Finally, the presentation is the very best chance you will get to Ghost the competition and their solutions.  Build it in!

Leveraging the Success

You have been told that you have won!  Hooray!  Let’s send (leak) a press release out right now so they will not be able to change their minds.  After all, the Alcatel period is a joke!  If you do that then what happens next is probably not going to add to your joy!

If you want to seriously irritate Public-Sector authorities, then do something which will not only break their processes but embarrass them, to boot!  On the other hand, having a press release which boosts their egos ready to go and then “slipping it in” to them for approval at the right time, may win a friend or two?  Of course, you would only do this to get their feedback if you were fortunate enough to win, wouldn’t you?

Preparing the Ground for Challenges

You want to give your bid the best chance of success?  Then you must lay the preparations for a challenge right up front.  It must be part of your strategy.

This is easiest to achieve when the instructions ask for “Innovation” or “Added Value”.  If it is not clear how innovation or added value will be measured and scored, you can define this in your response.  Then, if you are not awarded maximum points for a response where you have described one or both, you will have good grounds to challenge the decision on the basis of a “manifest error”.

You could, of course, legitimately ask the Authority to define their marking criteria for these ambiguous terms; but why telegraph your intentions to your competitors, before bid submission?

This is a tricky area, but one full of promise if you start thinking about it at the very beginning.

Negotiating when it is all over!

Sometimes there is a small but significant contractual point which is a real issue for your team and which you have, reluctantly, decided to accept to get the contract.  When the dust has settled and you are about to sign the contract, you could turn to your Public Sector opposite number and say, “We have been relooking at the insurance level for XXX and we think it is unaffordable so we need to reduce it to £??? before I can sign!  This is not going to be a problem, is it?”

Of course, if this is a material change and you stand your ground, the entire competition will have to be re-examined or even restarted.  However, if it is not material, the Procurement team will have to balance the aggravation of sorting out their alternatives against accepting your bid with a “minor” and easy change?  They may well concede rather than going through the whole procurement exercise again?

We call this “the Nibble” and it needs to be planned as part of the bid strategy.  Will it work?  Most often, yes.  But it is not guaranteed and you need to be prepared to negotiate hard and then capitulate if it looks like you are going to lose.

Beneath it All

Underpinning all these pointers must be, of course, a sound bid with a compliant solution.  However, these pointers are the bits that can turn a good win rate into an excellent one, a sound profit into something exceptional.  It can take you to that goal we all seek – bid utopia!

If any of this strikes a chord with you and you would like to discuss the points further, or if you are facing clarification questions right now, do give us a call for a chat on 01227 860375.  We would be delighted to hear what you are up against and give our feedback.