It’s important to make sure that your bid tells a good story that explains all the value your company brings. It’s also nice to have a sprinkling of nice graphics to ‘lift’ the tone.
Unfortunately, with many high value contracts – particularly in the public-sector, this is no longer sufficient to give you a good chance of winning.
Increasingly, savvy buyers are using advanced methods to evaluate bids. This often involves distributed evaluation using specialist software, such as QinetiQ Commerce Decisions’ AWARD™ evaluation suite. If this is the case, and the evaluation is carried out according to OGC Best Practice guidelines, you could be wasting lots of money preparing bids that are destined to fail.
On many occasions we have been involved on the side of the buyer, briefing unsuccessful bidders for large, high risk projects. By far the biggest cause of failure is that questions designed to be evaluated, were either ignored, or answered with ‘standard’ text taken out of context from a previous bid.
One bidder invested huge amounts of time and money putting together their multi-volume, superbly illustrated and bound bid. Sadly, he ignored the fact that it would be evaluated solely on the basis of thirty carefully worded (and deeply probing) questions. He was dismayed that the biggest – and most expensive – proposal he had ever written, was dismissed with an appallingly low score by the evaluators. Stories and illustrations are great – but bear in mind that on some of these larger procurements, each evaluator only scores one or two questions – and therefore is only given access to the parts of the bid that allows them to do so.
As well as having years of experience preparing bids, we have also advised many organisations on the decision processes required to support major Competitive Dialogue and Restricted Procedure selection competitions. There is only one way to win a bid – that is to present it in the way that is required to score maximum points in evaluation.
We can work with you in the bid preparation, advise on strategy, or provide highly qualified ‘Red Team’ reviewers to ensure the bid is fit-for-purpose. We can also provide a full-service bid team, taking over the direction and management of the whole bid process.
Links:
> I want to be better at deciding which bids to go for…
> I want support for an important bid we are working on.
> I want to check that our bid is the very best it can be – before we submit it…
> What level of public-sector experience sits behind Stablebridge’s success?
> What level of private-sector experience sits behind Stablebridge’s success?