Are you a good Bid Manager?

People often ask what it takes to be a good Bid Manager.

I believe it’s a balanced combination of the following skills and competence to make an effective and efficient bid manager (not necessarily in the order given):

• Ability to plan, lead and drive the bid to closure
• Effective Business Communication skills
• Technical and functional analysis
• Ability to look at the big picture
• Art of building, articulating and narrating the story around customer needs
• Ability to comprehend the customer need and propose solutions
• Being unbiased and appreciating the customer needs
• Focus on specifics than being generic
• In-depth Domain and Technical understanding
• Understand the nuances of pricing and prepare an effective deal
• Being a customer’s advocate
• Don’t sell …but address customer needs
• Understanding your organization
• Understanding the competition in order to deliver an optimal solution
• Ability to coordinate and work seamlessly with the pursuit team
• Ability to deliver quality under stringent timelines
• Ability to deliver effective content while ensuring compliance to legal and financial terms
• Ability to foresee and Manage risks
• Relationship Management with all the stakeholders
• Ability to negotiate and persuade

To conclude, Bid manager’s role demands a blend of communication, management, lead and the ability to deliver.

Quick tips for effective proposal response

Writing my first proposal response was a big challenge. While I still struggle at times to come up with the most effective response, I thought of penning down some quick tips to help prepare a good proposal response based on my experience. 

Analyze your RFP
Without a thorough analysis of any RFP, building a RFP response is futile. Hence this is my first tip before you even start building any RFP response

Tip: 
While analyzing the RFP:
1. Read through all the documentation; understand the various implications (legal, financial, HR, compliance, etc.), timelines of the RFP and evaluation criteria
2. As a part of the analysis, divide the scope into functional, technical and activity scope (most of them tend to miss this) 
3. Understand the client objectives and client needs
4. Prepare a RFP synopsis document with the above points 
5. Identify the right team to work with you
6. Identify the missing elements in the RFP in order to prepare a questionnaire

Aligning your response with the win themes:
Win themes play a crucial role in any RFP response and go a long way in making you win the RFP.  

Identifying win themes before you start preparing your RFP response is an essential step but ensuring that your response reflects the identified win themes is even more important.  

Tip: 
1. Don’t forget to map the win themes to appropriate sections in the Response document

Responding to the questions in a crisp manner: 
The clients don’t want to end up reading stories in response to their questions especially when they ought to read hundreds of similar pages from different vendors. 

Tip:
To write a crisp and precise response:
1. Acknowledge the question 
2. Ensure your response does not exceed a paragraphs or two (unless required) 
3. Support your response with factual data and credentials wherever possible
4. And most important, ensure the response answers the question and aligns with the client requirement 
5. If you see a risk in a particular question, highlight it in your response with possible  mitigation plan 
6. A good practice to build the response is outline the main proposition, elaborate the proposition, conclude with key benefits

Avoid Copying responses from a previous RFP:
The most common and grave mistake that we all tend to do is copying from a previous RFP response. While it makes our job easier it could lead to disastrous results.  

Tip: 
1. Don’t do a plain copy and paste from previous responses, your responses may not be relevant to the client requirements
2. If you do intend to use generic content, ensure it is the latest and greatest and customized to client’s asks
3. “One solution” fits all doesn’t work. Every client is different with different needs so it is vital to respond accordingly

Highlight why your organization should be the preferred choice:
Highlighting the key differentiators of your organization forms an integral part of the response. Stressing on why you should be the preferred choice helps the client make informed evaluations between vendors.  

Tip:
1. Identify the differentiators for the RFP; ensure they align with the client requirements. E.g. if one of the evaluation criteria in the RFP document is resource scalability, you can highlight the overall strength of your organization and the global network as well.
2. Articulate the key differentiators and showcase how they will benefit the client 
3. You could also point out valid credentials/similar past experiences 

Effective Executive Summary 
Although you write your executive summary in the end, it is something that marks your first impression. And as they say first impressions make the last impressions! Executive summary is the most vital component of your RFP response since it sets the tone and also gives client a flavor on what they can expect in the response document. 

Tip: 
While writing an effective Executive Summary:
1. Ensure it not more than a page and half 
2. It should brief  on what is the client objective and how the solution aligns with the client needs
3. Highlight why your organization is the preferred choice for executing the RFP
4. Summarize the pricing 

Create a Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM):
Use the RTM frequently when you want to do a quick run to ensure that all the requirements stated in the RFP have been covered.

Tip:
1. Create a RTM during the RFP analysis stage
2. Update the RTM with all key requirements including functional, technical, financial, legal, compliance, etc.
3. Upon response completion, map the requirements to the response sections in order to ensure requirement completeness and compliance

Don’t oversell the organization in the response, understand and align with the client needs:
The most common mistake people tend to make while responding to RFP’s is to oversell the company offerings in the response. It is very important to understand the objective of the RFP and the client needs rather than focus on over-selling.  

Tip:
1. Showcase your offerings in a manner that they align with the overall client needs and solution
2. Ensure you highlight  how it will benefit the customer with each offerings that you claim

Weighing your response against the evaluation criteria: 
Every client will provide evaluation criteria along with the RFP document. 

Tip:
1. It is good practice to weigh your response against the evaluation criteria provided. This will help you understand your response positioning as compared to the criteria.  

Know your competitors: 
Knowing your competitors always gives you an edge while writing a response. You have an idea on what to expect from other vendors in their response and you can focus on preparing your response accordingly

Hope some of these tips help you all to write RFP responses in a better way.