How do you slash the cost of bidding without bringing about a correspondent drop in submission quality?

I’m about to present you with nine suggestions which, when implemented, will not only save you time and resources (read: budget) but will, in fact, streamline the process and produce a superior end product.

Fair warning: Some are counter-intuitive, and some go distinctly against conventional bidding philosophies and practices.

Nine Ways to Slash the Cost of Bidding

1) Deem the research and thinking you do prior to your decision to bid as important as that which you do afterwards.

The starting point in preserving your company’s bidding resources is ensuring against an inadvisable decision to bid.

2) Start with a recap of the debrief associated with the most similar recent bid your company submitted.

Ensuring against the repetition of previous mistakes is an excellent way to avoid their consequences this time around.

3) Make careful advance consideration of the broad topic areas you need to cover in your strategy workshops, and have the right people there (and all of the right people there).

If you don’t have the right knowledge resources at your bid strategy planning sessions, you’ll either end up with an uninformed (or worse, a misinformed) strategy, or you’ll have to run additional sessions (which, in turn, risks others then not being in the room at those sessions).

4) Ditch consultants with their “one size fits all” templates and their expensive fees.

Teach your people all bid-relevant thinking skills, rather than creating their reliance on consultants’ “trademarked” templates . . . the same templates they then use with your competitors.

If you want to read more on this, I unashamedly recommend my book, ‘THINK & WIN BIDS: Winning High-Value, High-Stakes Bids through Superior Questioning, Listening and Thinking Skills’. 

5)  Run a tight ship at planning sessions.

Want to make as much progress as possible at each session (thus reducing the overall number of planning sessions needed)?

Mobiles off and out of sight. Laptops not necessary (documentation is the strategist’s job). Unrelated side conversations actively discouraged.

6)  Save time in the writing phase by producing a well-researched, well-considered, documented-in-detail strategy blueprint at the outset.

Curtail the production of waffly, essentially meaningless, content-unco-ordinated written contributions. Provide writing team members with a comprehensive, user-friendly strategy document to shape their input.

7) Ditch the “war room” concept.

With “collaboratively produced” responses the buzzword in corporate circles, this advice won’t be popular with the larger bidders.

However, it’s totally unrealistic to expect anyone (particularly anyone who’s not a writer for a living) to maintain the degree of focus and concentration required to produce quality copy whilst sitting in the cross-flow of a variety of different conversations, mobile phone calls, and constant miscellaneous interruptions.

8) Ensure the developing bid documentation is regularly reviewed by the individuals whom have had peak responsibility for the production of strategy.

If you don’t want to be summoning all hands to deck to re-write the bid documentation at the 11th hour (i.e. when senior management sees it and questions its poorly reflected strategy), have those with whom the “strategy” buck rests involved throughout the process.

9) Whether or not you were successful with this bid, prepare thoughtfully and comprehensively for your de-brief with the client organisation.

Here we come full circle: any bid that you go for and don’t win is expensive.

The No. 1 way to strike a consistently high win rate is to make it a top priority to understand why you won, or why you lost, all those that came before the one you’re currently working on.