Relevance and importance

A company that presents well-designed bids will be successful in gaining the business. There are many examples of companies with the 'best products and services' failing to win business because of a poorly presented bid.

Successful organisations aim to win between one and two bids out of five submitted, therefore the better the bid process, the fewer times you need to do it.

There can be a lot of work required to put together a bid, so it is important to make sure that your efforts are targeted to where you have the best chance of success.

Overview

The bid process usually follows a set of steps.

Many companies form small bid teams made up of a few people who contribute their knowledge of sales, marketing, project management, product and technical experience, as required. In this way the team work together to produce the bid. The person who is best at writing proposals and the person who is best at making presentations can be allocated these roles, but with the help and expert knowledge of the others in the team.

It is essential to understand what the customer is wanting. This may not necessarily be what they have written down in the bid, so make contact with people in the organisation and find out what the problems are that they are hoping to solve. This should help you to match your proposal to their requirement.

Other companies will also be submitting bids fort his work, so it is important to make your bid stand out from the competition. For many customers, the main differentiating factor is that you can show in your bid that you understand their business environment and their business needs.

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Recommendations and practical tips

	Find out as much as you can about the customer, their business background and current issues
	Meet the people that will evaluate the bid to find out more and try to form a good working relationship with them. Show that you are really interested in them.
	Put together a professional bid document, that clearly shows how your offering meets their requirements
	Involve your technical and product experts in the whole bid process, not just sales people.
	Arrange to present your bid as a formal presentation if possible, so that you can deal with any questions and provide answers there and then.
	Understand the culture of your customer and try to fit in as much as possible e.g. if they are very formal, you should be very formal.

Warnings and potential pitfalls

If you really cannot meet the customer requirements in the terms of the products you are offering, the timescales or the costs being stated, it may be worth considering going back to the customer to tell them and ask if there is any flexibility.

It is better not to bid at all than to win business and then fail to deliver.

Check and check again what you are proposing so that it is achievable in terms of your time, resources, capabilities and costs.

If you do win the business, will you be in a position to start immediately, the customer will be expecting this.

Be clear about roles and responsibilities and state explicitly what you expect the customer to do and when.

Include flexibility to manage changes during the project and specify how these will be managed explicitly, especially where the customer changes the requirements due to internal or external factors.

Be clear about reporting progress.

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