Ask The Expert
Alison Gurd
Expertise:
Deal Management Expert
Industry Experience:
Financial Services
Subjects:
Proposal Management
Alison is Head of the Proposal Team at BNP Paribas (Securities Services) in London. The team is responsible for managing global RFPs, partnering with their sales teams in 34 locations. Alison also ensures global best practice for local offices that are completing bids in local language.
Alison has extensive experience in deal management, having undertaken sales, relationship management and proposal management roles during her career in the securities industry that spans 25 years.
Alison joined BNP Paribas in 2014; prior to this she worked for JP Morgan, covering a variety of client facing roles.
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Bidding Quarterly Contributions
Recent Questions
Performance Management
Hi Alison,
I am a Bid Manager in a global bank based in the UK. I would like to know how you impose measures for success for your Bid Writers. Win ratio is the obvious, but given we often find ourselves responding to RFPs we have slim chances of winning, and are regularly used to benchmark tariffs, this doesn’t seem fair as the only tangible measure. Do you have others you use?
Thanks in advance
Sarah
How should you brand your proposal documentation?
I have long been of the mind that at the bid stage any documentation supplied should be supplier branded rather than the buyer. Excluding any mockups (I’m in software).
However, our company has recently been acquired and upon meeting my contemporaries within the new company I have found that they heavily brand their proposal documents and swear by it. They go all out on the cover, include a smattering of on brand photographic imagery where appropriate and even place logos in the header and change bullet points to a brand colour or simple logo. The only supplier branding that remains is in the footer in the main.
I can appreciate both sides but wanted to reach out for an expert’s opinion.