Bid Director
The Dilemma
The sales team believes that if they get a solution description and a price together in a pretty binder that they will win. The only thing that matters to them is to get the lowest price and they just cannot see that although the price is important, it is not what will decide which bid the customer will choose!
When it comes to choosing the right strategy for the bid, the sales team are not interested. They do not understand the politics in the customer's organisation and how the only way to be confident of winning is to harness those politics and use them. When it comes to bid messages, the only one they know is "we are best!". What surprises you is that they continue to be amazed when yet another "dead certain" bid is lost.
There is never sufficient time to get the bids out, especially when the resources assigned to you don't live up to their promises. They always have valid excuses, but it does not help you meet your deadlines if they don't do the work, or they hand in a rushed and poor quality job at the last minute. You routinely give out artificially short timescales to give you a chance to recover any problems, but the safety zone always disappears and you end up working late again.
It is unusual to see any member of the sales team around when you are still working in the early hours of the morning in an attempt to get all the documents finished to meet the deadlines. How many times have you had to miss or postpone your social plans because of bid priorities? These days it is better not to make any plans for evenings and weekends because that way you do not have to let down your friends and family so often.
Often the information you need to work with has been in the company for ages before you get to see it, and then you find it is incomplete. The sales staff are more interested in you "just producing my bid on time" than they are in helping the bid production process or retrieving the missing information you must have.
Some of the bids you have to work with just seem impossible to win and you have a feeling that you are only working on them so that the salesperson can save face and report back that "at least I have one bid in the system and that will make my numbers!". You feel that if you did not have to waste your and your team's time on the "no hopers", you might be able to do a better job on the ones with a greater chance? However, you usually manage to recover the situation and submit a pretty good bid document on time. Then things seem to go wrong and, despite a sound and competitively priced solution, the win rate is below what it should be. Inevitably, the sales team blame you and your poor bids. Thank heavens you are "thick skinned"!
The Solution
Sixfold knows that the only way to get a smooth running bid machine is to combine sound internal bid processes with a business culture that allows the bids to be won. The Sixfold approach has been proven to work in a range of companies and is based upon the analysis of the winning methods used by a variety of highly successful multi-national IT companies. We have techniques which will improve bid win rates whilst cutting sales costs and possibly sales support costs. We can demonstrate methods which get the bid team to examine what they produce in a new light and increase the innovative bid content. The trick is to use the right tools, techniques and processes at the right times with the right people. Why not have a look at our Bid Management services and then give Sixfold a call and see if your issues have been successfully overcome in the past?
