Blog 17 - Reviewing Bid Submissions
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The blog this week is from Jeremy:
Reviewing Bid Submissions
When it comes to submitting compelling, compliant winning proposals and tenders - reviewing submissions effectively is absolutely critical in that. I've been asked to do some work recently with some clients where they've asked me to specifically look at their approach to reviewing bids and then train some of their people in effective reviewing. It was a really interesting experiment, trying to focus on that nub of things because there's a few things at play here. It's right at the very end game.
There are a few things that need to transpire, that to need have taken place in a logical order and gone well before you review.
First of all, we need good governance and a process around reviews. There are the classic perfectly sensible Shipley and APMP type stuff out there, coloured reviews that we bidding pros tend to subscribe to. I call them by percentages of the way through your bid programme in my training so that I don't get sued! But the classics out there of pink, green and red review are timeless and still correct.
We advocate a pink review at the end of the first 25% of the programme to review your strategy but particularly your solution and storyboards. In our model, we then advocate a red review at the other end at about 85% of the way through the programme. A final quality review. But we also advocate a green review, a first draught review at about 60% of the way through the bid programme. The reason why is that we don't want to store up all of the problems for a red review towards the end. A red review is a bigger meeting perhaps with your sponsor involved and independent review panel members. Depending on the complexity and importance you might have one, three, five, maybe 10 people engaged for a good quality review, who haven't been working on the bid, but that are experts in the subject matter - so that you get a fresh pair of eyes on the tender.
Reviews are a big deal that is up there in the bid manager's life in importance along with the kick-off meeting as being two very important aspects of what happens on a bid. The two most important meetings I guess. But we advocate having a green review where just maybe the bid manager and bid leader sit down and ask for first draughts from everyone and go through them to check that we're going in the right direction of travel for every response, that we've got a response for everything in development, that nobody's gone off sick or we've got problems, or it doesn't work. We want to see that we are executing on our storyboards, that they storyboards planned out well and were correct and that we can see that we're going to have an answer, by red review, that's of a decent standard to review.
What we tend to find is if you don't do that and you leave it for red review, you're just storing up a big problem for later. Whereas if you can catch it at green review, we can support people, we can provide more resource, we can switch people out if they're the wrong athletes, and we can deal with problems with storyboards because one in five storyboards for responses don't pan out. And one in five case studies don't pan out. The project didn’t really transpire that way. The client's actually not that happy with us, so we need to swap it out. And on the storyboards- we've gone down a rabbit hole, we've misunderstood what the client meant, or there's a clarification comes out that changes things.
So, we want to catch all that with 40% of the bid programme left at 60% of the way through, rather than 15, 10 or 5% of the programme left later on, depending on how late you leave that red review.
So, have a process that involves reviews and there's clear roles and responsibilities around those. Pink, green, and red. At least a red. But ideally pink and green too.
Have clear roles and responsibilities and set yourself up for success by briefing people effectively on their way into these reviews, and then use technology effectively. There is a school of thought on reviewing online only, crowdsourcing comments into drafts and then just actioning those. I think that's a bit risky. You might misread it, not take from it what they really meant etc. I still say you should have a meeting and work through those comments by exception. So, the obvious ones that are typos or whatever, that's fine deal that. But there might be meatier stuff that needs to be dealt with and have good behaviour set out in the kick-off meeting what the behaviours are in that type of review. We can't have particularly senior people putting nasty comments into documents because everyone can see it and the people involved may not want to work on bids.
We need to create an environment where people want to be engaged in winning, winning deals, writing bids, and celebrating in the pub. If we tear strips off of people, and particularly put nasty comments about their content into documents where everyone can see it - they will run in the opposite direction next time, and that will affect the trajectory of the business over time.
So, we want the right behaviours around bidding and particularly reviews. Reviews are a real flash point where it can get a bit unpleasant, where people haven't delivered, got the wrong end of the stick, etc. So, let's try and manage out the risks, run a decent process, have good behaviours around it, you'll be much more successful.
Very best of luck.
Other Resources
We’re on a mission to help companies like yours win more work.
Here are some other free resources that should help you too. Feel also free to share them with friends and colleagues:
Free Bid Writing Basics Training Video - Our free exclusive bid writing basics training video will help you understand how to deliver your desired business growth and beat your business plan by winning more tenders. Watch the video here.
Bid Writing Training - Learn to write winning Tenders here
Writing Crown Commercial Services Bids - Learn to tackle the challenges of writing CCS Tenders here.
Our free work winning Podcast, the Red Review, can be found here.
You can also follow Jeremy on LinkedIn for hints, tips and insights here.
100% Typo Guarantee—Our blog posts are free-range. It was hand-crafted with love and sent out unfiltered. There was no review queue, no editorial process, no post-post revisions. Therefore, I can pretty much guarantee that there is some sort of typo or grammatical error or literary snafu. Got a business to run and a three year old to Dad. Sorry.