Winning the bid
John Weiland, bid manager at Freedom, gives an insight into some of the keys to successful bid management.
Bids can be a hit and miss business. On embarking on our bid management strategy we used to win around one in 10 bids we submitted; now, on average, we win one in three tenders, saving manpower and delivering customers onto our bottom-line, more quickly.
How do we do it? Firstly, we network extensively with the consultant community. Consultants advise organisations on determining exact requirements before specifying systems, drawing up shortlists of potential suppliers for clients and even project managing system implementations. They write white papers which help companies with their planning. Consultants act as gatekeepers for many large contracts, so resellers should ignore them at their peril. Our bid management team keeps in touch with this community, attends their conferences and meets up with them at regular industry events.
Our team also regularly scans the on-line Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), which publishes local and central government contracts for the installation of IT, voice systems and equipment worth over €200,000 from all over the European Union. At Freedom we spot three to four genuine opportunities a week using OJEU, maybe more in a good week.
Some local government opportunities are harder to find – channel partners should start by scanning notices in the local government trade media or regional media. Councils are also coming together to form buying consortiums. You can pre-register with these should any opportunity come up – some advanced on-line systems also send out email alerts.
There are also several general tender sites for both public and private sector tenders which are proving a good source of opportunities.
The bidding process for public sector work typically revolves around four key stages:
• Registering an ‘Expression of Interest’: a brief email with an expression of interest in bidding for an opportunity.
• Pre-qualification Questionnaire: establishing your credentials and suitability to do the work. Freedom now has a 65 per cent hit rate for getting through this stage but it is more normal to have half this success rate.
• Request for Information or Request for Quote: at this stage, you will receive all the information you need to understand the requirements, allowing you to cost the work. You need to explain how you will deliver the required products and the support and service you will provide.
• Invitation to Tender (ITT): typically only a handful of suppliers are invited to the final stage - the ITT, requiring very specific project plans to be drawn up, timelines set and all the commercial arrangements laid out.
In summary, good communications with the influential consultant community combined with building sound business processes around each stage of the bid are the building blocks of successful bid management.