Bid to win

What is your hit rate and your win rate for RFP responses? I was chatting to a bid manager the other day, and his company has a win rate of 2%. Wow! He'd do better by going to a casino. He was less concerned about actually winning a bid, and more about the number of proposals his department was getting out.

This is clearly a KPI (key performance indicator) problem. Don't get me started here - so many companies measure their people's success against the wrong criteria. (I said I wouldn't get started, but I did - sorry. Back to losing bids.)

As an RFP evaluation specialist, I see the bid-by-volume problem being reflected in the quality of bids. Take the case of Ettienne (names are changed to protect the incompetent). The question was asked: "Describe how you would transition from our existing supplier to your service solution." And the supplier responded with the simple, but totally inadequate answer: 'Etienne'. Clearly, Etienne was meant to fill in the answer, but forgot to do so. Or perhaps Ettienne, poor boy, did slave away, cutting and pasting a solution, and the compiler of the bid forgot to include the answer in the bid. Don't fire Ettienne, fire the bid manager, because "the Ettienne response" became a standing joke among the evaluators, and how positive would they be about the rest of the supplier's response after having such a good laugh?

Of course, bidding is more than answering questions asked (or not, in the case of Ettienne). Suppliers qualify their bids. But this usually takes the form of a go/no-go decision, and then the bid team swings into action. What a waste of energy.

The 'no-go' decision is useful, but when a 'go' decision is taken, how do suppliers use their qualification process to identify their differentiators in that particular circumstance? For example, how many existing clients do they have in the target client's industry? Say there are five clients in the mining industry, and a supplier's bid is sent to a mining company? How does the supplier leverage its existing clients - through references, endorsements, and examples of how specific mining problems were solved? Also, suppliers should use their qualification process to identify weaknesses of their solution in that particular circumstance. What if they are not price negotiable and their target client is equally immovable on payment? Does the supplier emphasise value, or does it granulate its services to fit client requirements exactly (and so remove unnecessary cost from the bid)?

Once a supplier has identified its differentiators and weaknesses specific to a client, it should write its executive summary before doing anything else. This summary should stress the differentiators and mitigate the weaknesses. Then, the summary should be distributed to all the personnel preparing their sections of the bid. Hold a workshop, drum it into them, but get the respondents to emphasise differentiators as a central theme in the bid.

Here's something most suppliers don't get. When evaluating a bid, evaluators read the first few paragraphs, and then scan the rest. In every section! So a lengthy response is worse than useless. It forces evaluators to search for answers to specific questions, and in doing so, tires and annoys them. And what kind of score will they give?

I recommend the headline approach - treat every section as if it was an article in a newspaper. And a headline has to grab attention, to make the reader get to the detail.

A headline: "Our product is the best in the world", is much less effective than: "XYZ solution will save your company X million per annum". Get the picture. The evaluators hear the "best in the world" argument in every response they are evaluating. They are more likely to latch onto the latter headline.

There's much more to bidding, but I don't have the space here to go into it. So let me cover the actual bid documents.

Most RFPs ask for soft and hard copies of a bid. This isn't to make life difficult for the supplier - it's to make life easier for them. The hard copy is only looked at by evaluators to verify something said in the soft copy. So please make sure they match.

And some bidders have the unfortunate habit of submitting in PDF format, and protecting their Excel pricing sheets. Why? The hard copy is the control. The soft copy must be searchable by evaluators, and the pricing must be editable - evaluators often want to group prices or add different sections.

Submit the soft copy in PDF and protected worksheets if necessary, but also provide editable soft copy - that's where the bid gets evaluated.

And most importantly, submit fewer bids, but do them well.