A colleague of mine once described the arrival of an Invitation to Tender (ITT) as a ‘meatfest’, summoning up the image of a hoard of people desperate to get hold of a haunch of venison to satiate their hunger. The document would arrive, everyone would grab a copy, then a flurry of emails and conversations would start up between anyone and everyone about what should happen next.
I say: ‘Whoa, steady on. That’s not the way to do it.’ Discipline and control should kick in when an ITT arrives so that sensible business decisions are encouraged, and resources are used effectively and efficiently. Early preparation and planning are critical to ensure reduced stress later on.
In your proposal management process, there should be a step called ‘kick-off’. Contrary to popular belief, this should not happen on the day the ITT arrives, but between 10% and 20% through the response timeline. Let’s explore why this is so important.
Start as you mean to go on
When the ITT arrives, it should be received and assessed by the proposal manager and only the proposal manager. The first action is to make an inventory of the documents that have arrived. Store them in a central folder in whatever electronic system your company operates. In parallel, resources should be allocated to work on the proposal under the leadership of the proposal manager. These resources should comprise a core team plus writers, graphic designers, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), reviewers and approvers. Each member of the core team will lead a different ‘strand’ of the work – for example, the technical solution, the delivery approach, and the commercial deal. Some people may well double up in different roles, but they must all be identified and allocated their responsibilities.
To bid or not to bid
Only at this stage should the proposal manager begin to share the ITT, but even then only with the core team and management. The proposal manager will distribute the relevant documents to the relevant people with a request for them to review and qualify that they contain what was expected (if you have been nurturing the opportunity) or (for new opportunities ) they represent something winnable, deliverable and profitable. For smaller ITTs, this may just involve one or two people. The main purpose of the step is to inform a bid/no-bid checkpoint before expensive time and effort is spent. Once the core team and management have agreed to proceed, the proposal manager can begin to prepare for the kick-off meeting.
Ready, steady…
Prior to a kick-off meeting, the following important tasks must be completed either by, or under the direction of, the proposal manager:
- Checkpoint the win strategy: Assuming that the ITT was expected and that your customer-facing staff have done their jobs properly, there should already be a win strategy in place. This will include a good understanding of the customer’s key business drivers – what really matters to them in doing this project – as well as a detailed competitor analysis and a clear vision of the solution and commercial deal. A win strategy review meeting should check all these elements and enable the proposal manager to understand your own and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. All this information can be used by the proposal team to build a compelling story that confirms why the customer can be confident to buy from you and why they should not buy from your competitors.
- Identify compliance requirements: Every document within the ITT must be ‘stripped’ or ‘shredded’ to identify all the requirements to ensure compliance with the customer’s instructions and requirements. These may be captured in a ‘compliance matrix’. Some customers include a compliance matrix in the ITT with instructions for you to complete it. Even if you are provided with one, you should still check through the whole ITT and create new compliance matrices to cover any additional requirements you may find – there are bound to be some! Consider not only technical requirements but also commercial and administrative requirements. Even a simple instruction like “the supplier will submit their response in Times New Roman font size 12” is a compliance instruction you should confirm you have followed. Compliance matrices are working documents.
