Bids, Pitches, Proposals and Tenders Blog : Calyx Communications

29 July 2009

Value Proposition - an NLP perspective

Value propositions have been much mooted recently, with a lot of debate about how to create them easily.

The trick is to arrive at a statement that is meaningful and TRUE to this prospective client in their current situation. That needs two skills: first getting inside the heads of the various decision makers to understand what they value and, second, being honest about what your organisation really does.

This morning a colleague ranted about a well-known retailer's customer service. It was a sorry tale in value proposition failure.

The retailer is a high-end women's clothing chain, with outlets and a mail order business. It boasts a value proposition of excellent quality garments, and FREE returns. Given that the cost of returning goods is a regular customer complaint, this is an attractive value proposition.

Many of its competitors do likewise. They enclose free return labels with the goods.

Not this company - it uses a well known courier service. That impressed my colleague - until she came to return goods. She called the courier company - they would call between 9am and 5pm on a weekday. But she couldn't be there. Well, could she nominate a neighbour? They all work. Well they could give her a time but could not commit to keeping to it because they don't communicate with van drivers during the day. Not good enough. Well, there's nothing we can do.

Nothing to do with us, said the retailer's Customer Service. Yes, it's difficult but that's the system and there's nothing we can do.

Colleague was annoyed enough to return the whole order, postage paid at the Post Office.

You see, this customer values her time, and she believes that she deserves to be well served. When a premium brand fails to deliver, and blames a subcontractor, then its value proposition has failed twice for her. What it actually offers isn't meaningful to her, and what it claims to do (provide free returns) isn't true because she couldn't accommodate her supplier's systems.

A tiny, and insignificant example - yet a useful wake up call. All the carefully crafted value propositions in the world will only work if they are credible. Especially if you are bidding to an existing client.

Make sure your Value Proposition is meaningful and true.

Posted By Anne Perret At 13:48 • Comments (2)

15 July 2009

Future pacing - NLP in tendering

When you begin a bid, where do you put your attention? Do you look at a project plan which lists key milestones, allocate tasks to people, check resources and begin 'business as usual'? And if you do, what - honestly! - is your expectation of the outcome?

The thing is, your expectations of the outcome will affect every activity which you undertake - whatever your role in the bid. And that will also affect the outcome. Because if you're thinking 'Loss' or 'Waste of Time', you'll cut corners, you won't try quite so hard and you'll give off slightly more negative vibes to your team mates and maybe even to your clients. You may think that you look and sound professional and positive - but the difference in your attitude will be picked up subliminally by those around you. But if you're thinking 'win', you'll try that bit harder, you'll feel more cheerful and that will be communicated to everyone around you.

So how can you test if something needs to change?

Every once in a while, a future pacing exercise might be useful. This is, if you like, 'Time Travel For Grown Ups', but make no mistake - it's powerful stuff.

Take yourself somewhere where you can be quite alone and quiet. Calm yourself down by concentrating on your breath for a few minutes. Then ask your mind to present to you a win. Maybe a bid you're working on now, maybe one that you lost in the past. Maybe a hypothetical bid. Whatever, you've just got the result and you've won.

Now, really get into how you are experiencing this imaginary situation? What can you see? Hear? Feel? Who is there? Who isn't there? Are there different team members from those you would expect to see? Is the office your usual one? Ask yourself - what did I/we do that won this bid? You will be amazed at what comes up.

This isn't the stuff of which 'normal' business is made and if it sounds whacky, consider this:

Athletes spend considerable time imagining whole races, running every part in their minds and focussing on the minute detail of crossing the finishing line first. It is one of the things that informs their training programmes - noticing how their bodies feel and their minds work in these imaginary races and acting upon the information they receive.

It helps them to overcome limiting beliefs.

And the biggest limiting belief of all time was the one which said: 'No-one can run a mile in under four minutes'. Have a look at this YouTube video. It might be familiar, but pay close attention to the very end and what happened because one man took a different view of the finishing line.

The Impossible Dream

Overcoming individual and corporate limiting beliefs is one of the largest pieces of work we do with our clients.

If you took a different view of the finishing line - what would be the end result for you, your bid team, and your organisation?

Posted By Anne Perret At 15:58 • Comments (6)

26 June 2009

Value proposition - from another angle

NLP in bidding

Much is written about 'value add' and 'value proposition' in bidding these days and rightly so. Articulating the business reasons why a prospective client should do business with you is essential in any sales situation - and particularly so in writing bids and tenders.

But there's one value proposition that could do with rather more attention than it currently gets - and that's the value proposition that an organisation's senior management gives to its bid teams.

Sounds odd doesn't it?

Consider this: in NLP terms, 'beliefs' (discussed in last week's blog) are what people believe to be true. What they believe will help to create a positive or negative outcome. A win or a loss.

Of even more importance is what people value. A 'value' is something that a person considers to be important - and it affects our behaviour even more than our beliefs. For example, we all know that regular exercise is important (belief). So what stops so many of us either getting up earlier to go to the gym, or stopping work a little earlier to do likewise? Usually it's because that at the moment of decision, something else is more important - like another half hour in bed or finishing that report.

Organisations with low win rates often have skewed values at senior levels. You'll hear a lot of talk about numbers of bids submitted and how it's essential to get bids done faster and more efficiently, but very little serious talk about win rates. Often that's because quantity is valued over quality.

Where this happens, employees understand clearly what's required of them. They'll be valued by how much they do - not always by how well they do it. They'll do what they're measured on.

For organisations new, or new-ish, to bidding, there's another dangerous value proposition. That's when there is no dedicated bid team, and people have to write bids and tenders in addition to doing their usual work. When I hear phrases like: "We can't get everyone together [to decide on a bid strategy perhaps] because they're all so busy," I know that they are valuing their day jobs higher than working on bids - because that's how they are measured.

Values in organisations with high win rates are different. There's far more emphasis on doing things 'better' - which may, or may not, also include 'faster' and 'cheaper', but these come second to 'better'. Employees are measured far more on outcomes than on output - and they are given the help they need to identify the behaviours and resources that they need to grow and improve in their roles. And if they are working on a bid, their day job can be put on hold, delegated or handled differently.

What value proposition do you give or get?

Posted By Anne Perret At 14:39 • Comments (3)

18 June 2009

Successful Bid Management - what does the bid team believe?

I've been asked recently what Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) has to do with bidding for business.

NLP looks at three areas:

Neuro - the way our minds work and how we think
Linguistic - the words we use and how they reflect and affect our behaviour
Programming - how we habitually behave and how this affects the results that we get.

So - what's this got to do with bid team management?

Management want bid teams to deliver winning bids. In my experience, this happens consistently when bid teams share empowering beliefs about their organisation, its management, its products or services and its position in the market place.

So where does NLP come in?

NLP teaches that our beliefs run our lives; we act according to what we believe is true - and what we believe to be true comes from our life experiences. In other words, success breeds success and failure breeds failure.

When working with bid teams, I pay very close attention to what the team experiences in terms of its management’s behaviour and declared beliefs. For example, consider the beliefs contained in this statement: “It’s a numbers game – we’ve got to keep our bid rate up because it’s a one in five chance of winning”. There are three beliefs in that sentence, predicated on there being a known number of ‘usual suspects’ likely to be bidding for any piece of business and the likelihood is that they will all achieve a similar win rate. Which may, or may not, be true.

What does tend to be true is that this language often goes hand in hand with management behaviours based on an expectancy (belief in) of an 80% loss rate (how different does THAT sound?). Senior management may be very aloof from bid teams; they may pay very little attention to the quality of the written content and they may expect teams to work long hours to keep up the bid output rate.

And the team’s beliefs will be formed from what they see and hear. They will experience lack of effective management focus, realise that most of the time they’re working on a loser, and start finding ways of making their own working life more bearable. It’s quite astonishing how often I hear from bid team members that they don’t intend to stay in their job for long because it isn’t a good career move. If that’s not a negative belief – what is? And what are the implications for the bidding organisation?

Where management beliefs are more positive, you hear very different language and see different patterns. Senior management (bid directors and bid managers included here) are very hands on and always approachable. They constantly look for better ways of doing things, and ensure that staff input is encouraged, listened to and acted upon. They are ruthless in qualifying out opportunities that are unlikely to lead to profitable business, and they use sophisticated mechanisms to do this. You hear statements like: “Bidding is an important part of our sales function”, and “This bid is really important to us. We’re making it a priority.” When the teams hear this, they believe it and they give the bid their best shot. There’s a buzz in these bid teams because their experiences are positive and they believe that they have a real chance of winning.

And they often do.

Posted By Anne Perret At 14:13 • Comments (2)

08 June 2009

Down to earth with a big bump

Bid Psychology

Over the last few weeks, we've seen one key question crop up again and again in companies responding to tenders and putting in proposals.

Is it about pricing? No.

Is it about strategy? No.

Is it about solution quality? No.

So what is it then?

Ready?

It's WHO'S GOING TO WRITE THIS?

What a mundane question - and hence the title!

When we ask 'Who should write the documents' it's often the case that everyone names someone else.

It's understandable.

Writing is difficult, time consuming and not valued. Having to sit down and write can bring back unwelcome memories of school English lessons, and it can be a struggle to write properly structured answers to tender questions when the last time you did anything similar was when you did exams. Just sitting down and getting started can be difficult with those kinds of mental patterns running.

So it's no wonder that many people find ways to delegate writing. Management will argue that sales people should be 'out there' selling, not sitting in the office filling in tenders. Often quite junior staff are expected to write tenders in isolation. The hapless writers will tell us stories like this one from late last year:

"We got the invitation to tender and my manager told me I had to write the bid. I didn't have a clue what I was doing so I just did what I could. It didn't seem right to just leave me to it."

That person worked for a large SME and came from a clerical background. And she was left alone to produce a bid because no one wanted to write it. She had no relationship with the client, and no idea of what her company's USP would be in the context of the bid. Not surprisingly, they didn't win the bid, which was worth a large six figure sum.

Her needs were very simple - she asked to be shown how to structure answers to questions, and how to write a transmittal letter and an executive summary.

She's not alone.

And yet what is a tender or proposal if not a written document? What is a presentation if not a collection of words?

Procurers often comment that bidders are marked down if their documents are hard to follow, poorly written and badly presented. "You didn't answer the questions" is one of the most frequently received comments by the also-rans.

So it's really down to earth with a bump time when we realise that we can lose a tender not because of decisions taken in the managerial stratosphere, but down at the level of Sharon in Marketing struggling all alone to put it all into words.

So who should write the tender? Whoever is best placed to do so. That's usually the sales person - but they may very well need help from a properly skilled bid writer in articulating and refining their message.

Posted By Anne Perret At 15:44 • Comments (2)

22 May 2009

How to Answer ITT Questions - Bid Psychology part 2

When your organisation receives a formal Invitation to Tender (ITT), or other document from a prospective client or customer, the chances are that it contains a whole load of questions. What’s your approach to answering them? If you think that sounds like a competency question from an interview – you’re quite right, it is. Because what you think when faced with those questions will determine how you answer them. And how you answer them will determine your success. If you carry on concentrating on the day job, putting off what’s important for what’s urgent, you’ll allow yourself very little time to analyse and absorb what the ITT is really asking of you. You might regard writing responses to ITTs as a hugely boring, tedious or maybe even scary proposition. Or perhaps it’s something to be got out of the way as fast as possible. If any or all of these describe your mindset, this will show in the document you produce. Because you’ll probably cut and paste vanilla flavoured corporate statements from your website or brochures instead of answering the questions. Or just ‘put something together’. Your evaluators will notice not only the poor quality of the answers – they’ll also notice your organisation’s lack of professionalism. But a different mindset will produce better results. If you regard each question in the same way as you would a question in an exam, you’ll strive to give concise, yet full and complete, answers. You’ll look to answer both the letter and the spirit of the question. You’ll make sure that your answers are suitable You’ll get help if you feel you need it. In short, you’ll do everything you can to ensure that your completed document answers the client’s written question and anticipates their unwritten and maybe even unthought-of ones too. You’ll ensure that everything you write is suitable for this client, in this situation. You’ll think carefully about why they might want to do business with you. They’ll get the message. And you’ll stand a much higher chance of winning. That’s why we spend so much time on the mental game of bidding. Winning in bids is all about psychology.

Posted By Anne Perret At 11:38 • Comments (3)

12 May 2009

Who wins in bidding? Bid Psychology Part One

One of the basic tenets of life coaching is that you get what you focus on. While that sounds like basic common sense, it is interesting that when looking at companies with high, or low, success rates, there is always a correlation between their focus and their results. Those who concentrate on ‘the process’ tend to be very efficient indeed at getting documents out of the door. They create teams whose members have defined roles and they run the bid projects as well oiled machines. Which is terrific, but not always successful. Often companies who focus on the process - ‘hard skills’ like project management – have far less focus on ‘soft skills’, like watching and listening for signals from their prospective client, which could have enormous significance for the success or failure of their bid. Focussing on 'efficiency' can lead, for example, to divorcing the bidding process from the sales function, which can have a profoundly negative effect on the win rate. Focus is essential, and it needs to be through a wide angled lens.

Posted By Anne Perret At 11:47 • Comments (3)

06 May 2009

What price efficiency?

Shopping at the supermarket this week I was struck, not for the first time, by the large number of fully-laden stock replenishment trolleys left unattended in the aisles. No doubt someone was supposed to be filling the shelves with their contents – but no one was visible. Since this was at peak time, all they did was cause traffic jams as cross shoppers with loaded trolleys tried to find their way round them without damaging each other.

This is a familiar sight so I’m sure that someone has done an efficiency study which shows that this method of doing things is cost effective.

But it upsets the customers. I heard quite a few dark mutterings as I went round and, indeed, curtailed my own shopping, deciding to get other items elsewhere.

It reminded me of a bid I reviewed a few weeks ago. My client asked me to look at two rival bids for a multi million pound contract. One was beautifully produced, looked terrific and just shouted ‘winner’. The other didn’t look as good – although its appearance was perfectly acceptable.

But things changed when I started reading. The good looker was clearly the product of a very slick bid production team. It bore little resemblance to the format of the Invitation to Tender and as I read, I got a strong impression of being bulldozed. About half way through I realised what was going on – they’d automated the bid writing process. This was a beautifully written template with the client’s name dropped in and some information created to answer the Invitation To Tender (ITT).

By contrast the less glamorous bid was a joy to read. Everything was created for the prospective client: the format was that of the ITT; every answer completely met the evaluation criteria and the overall impression was “This company cares”.

Yes, the second bid won. The first one confirmed its company’s reputation in the marketplace of insisting on having everything its own way.

Efficient it might be, but the client shopped elsewhere.

Posted By Anne Perret At 11:55 • Comments (2)

29 April 2009

A normal win rate in bidding?

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Aristotle

“It’s all very well to say ‘qualify your bids’”, said a company director last week, “but in our industry, a two per cent win rate is the norm.” Two months ago, I was assured by a director of another company in the same industry that a twenty per cent win rate is the norm. Both of them used their figures to justify one of the costliest habits in competitive tendering: the bid for everything mentality.

I wonder if they’ve ever thought about the real cost of going for everything and losing 98% or 80% of the time? Have they really watched their staff frantically dashing to get the darned things out of the door at the last minute? Or listened to the gripes about yet another weekend lost or parents’ evening missed? Wondered what the cumulative effect of the losses might be on morale and profitability? Or thought that, if there’s an acceptance that most bids will lose, what’s the point of trying?

Where do these figures, quoted with such authority, come from anyway? Why are they so readily accepted? How do these companies afford the waste of resources, not to mention the opportunity costs?

What I’ve noticed is that the most successful bid teams are those managed by people who are ruthless in qualifying opportunities, and who insist on frequent debriefs at regular intervals throughout a bid cycle. There’s a buzz in the air when these people work together and a general expectation that they’ll win. If they don’t, they put what they’ve learned to good use next time. Our favourite client has a mantra: “How can we do this one better than the last”. They win more than they lose. It’s a habit.

Posted By Anne Perret At 16:42 • Comments (5)

21 April 2009

Tendering to Win at the Institute of Directors

What does it take to win new business these days? Often it takes a well thought through tender, and a new set of business skills to make that happen.

On Friday morning I’ll be the guest presenter at the Institute of Directors’ (West Surrey) 8.59 Breakfast Club at the Refectory, Guildford Cathedral. We’ll be discussing key trends in tendering, and what this means for organisations looking to expand, and for the people who want to produce bids that win profitable business.

The 8.59 Club is always very well attended and hosts lively and intelligent discussion. If you are part of the Surrey Club, I look forward to meeting you there.

Posted By Anne Perret At 12:55 • Comments (1)

20 April 2009

Welcome to the new Calyx Communications blog

Spring is a time of renewal – so what better time to revamp our website and launch a new blog?

Our passion is helping our clients do what it takes to win profitable business in competitive tenders. As you can see from the rest of this site, we use a variety of skills – drawn from Marketing, Communications, Psychology, Neuro Linguistic Programming, Classics and Linguistics. We ensure that our clients get inside their clients’ heads, produce outstanding proposals and presentations, go into every client interaction in their most calm and resourceful state and make the very best impression at every stage of the bid.

Over the coming months, we’ll be blogging regularly on just about every aspect of bidding. We have ideas and observations that we want to share about this growing – and often little understood – area of business. If there is anything you would like us to cover – let us know. We are looking forward to lively and vigorous discussion.

Posted By Anne Perret At 16:24 • Comments (2)