Research is often the missing link in winning work and growing a business, whether you work in business planning, capture or bidding. Too many teams are blagging it. They pretend they know their competitors and their clients, when really they are only seeing part of the picture.
In this episode of the Red Review, Jeremy Brim is joined by Salia Mogensen, founder of Infrabee, a competitive intelligence consultancy that works with primes, tier ones and SMEs. Salia started in bidding, working with contractors on social impact and regeneration, and now helps businesses use intelligence and analysis to support both their bids and their wider growth strategy.
Why Is Competitive Intelligence the Missing Link in Winning Work?
The Red Review Podcast, brought to you by Growth Ignition and Bidscript
Research is often the missing link in winning work and growing a business, whether you work in business planning, capture or bidding. Too many teams are blagging it. They pretend they know their competitors and their clients, when really they are only seeing part of the picture.
In this episode of the Red Review, Jeremy Brim is joined by Salia Mogensen, founder of Infrabee, a competitive intelligence consultancy that works with primes, tier ones and SMEs. Salia started in bidding, working with contractors on social impact and regeneration, and now helps businesses use intelligence and analysis to support both their bids and their wider growth strategy.
What is competitive intelligence?
Salia is clear that competitive intelligence is its own discipline, with a professional society behind it. It is about understanding your markets, your clients and your competitors, joining the dots, and working out what it means for your business, your strategy and your products.
The key word is system. Competitive intelligence is a process where you are constantly monitoring, understanding, reflecting on what you learn, and applying it to the business. What it is not:
Corporate espionage
Ad hoc research where someone has a quick look at what the competition is doing
A side job for someone to do on top of their day job
It needs to be aligned to your business strategy, and it rarely gets the recognition it deserves.
Why do so many businesses skip research?
Jeremy sees the same pattern in businesses of all sizes, including very big, well known ones. Ask to see the business plan for a push into a new market and you get four numbers in a spreadsheet. Ask where they came from and the answer is last year's numbers plus 10%. This from firms employing more than a thousand people.
Salia sees it too. A few reasons it gets skipped:
Research is treated as a peripheral task you would give to an intern, rather than something that needs thoughtful, engaged senior managers
Many senior people have never been taught how to use market data to shape a business plan
There is a real bias at play. Salia often hears "we know our competitors really well, there's nothing you can tell us" and "we know our clients really well". Some managers avoid research because they do not want anything to destabilise their view, or blow up the entire bid by asking why they are bidding at all
Her framing is that competitive intelligence is a risk management activity. It reduces your risk.
What difference does good research make?
Jeremy shared two stories from his own career. In his first week at Mace, he did some fairly rudimentary research on a client, a project and its stakeholders for a big bid with a large American organisation, and senior people thought it was wonderful. And on the board of a contact centre business that was scaled and sold, professional researchers helped the team understand the pipeline and the clients. That focused their targeting and capture, helped them win a few key deals they felt they did not really deserve to win, and doubled the business while quadrupling its valuation.
His point was that research done properly, rather than at a surface level, is powerful.
Can AI do competitive intelligence?
Salia's view is that AI is brilliant for some parts of the job and not others. She does not suggest using it as a source of research, but it is great at accelerating data gathering, analysing, synthesising and drawing out patterns. Compared to ten years ago, when you spent ages trawling the internet, the workload is much easier.
The part it cannot do is the "so what": what the data means for you and your strategy. That context is human in the loop, with expertise, experience and judgement. Jeremy compared using AI without that skill to asking a graduate to do the research. You can get something that looks impressive, but understanding the right sources, interpreting them and forming proper insight is a skill in itself.
Where is the ethical line in competitive intelligence?
Salia's rule of thumb is simple. If it is in the public domain, it is fair game. If it is secret and you are not meant to have it, you do not get it. And if you would be embarrassed for your client to find out how you got the information, it is not right.
Everything in the public domain is fine
Interviews and conversations on the record are fine
Do not ask for a competitor's bid price, or for trade secrets and confidential information
It is a myth that there is a secret tradecraft involved. There is so much public data you can join together to develop hypotheses and conclusions without crossing a line
How far ahead should you be looking?
The smartest clients are looking up to two years out. If you are the incumbent on a contract that will be rebid, you can start now by asking who the dark horse is that could dethrone you, what competitors have acquired or launched, and who you might need to team up with next time.
For most bids, the runway is shorter but still useful. Pipeline notices on the UK1 platform can come out 18 months in advance. As soon as an opportunity hits your pipeline, you should start capture activity and competitive intelligence in parallel, and every internal bid or no bid gate can have an intelligence project behind it to help you move through it with confidence.
What does competitive intelligence look like in practice?
Salia's team does a lot of competitor battle cards, looking at how strong a competitor's offering is and, as a mirror image, how strong your own is and where you need to improve. That feeds into teaming strategy.
She shared a story from a large bid where the team assessed the skills and offerings of several potential consortium partners. One was a smaller outfit working on something exciting in AI. They were ruled out, then ruled back in, and the team teamed up with them and won the contract. The default was to go for the tried, tested and proven option, but the analysis showed this one offered something different that the incumbent lacked.
Towards the end of the bid, the questions get very specific. Not large scale profiling, but one thing you need to answer, such as how an organisation handles its logistics today and on what terms, to inform pricing. That kind of focused work can take twice as long as a big analysis piece, but it gives real confidence in pricing and decision making.
Why do people lose bids they already knew they would lose?
Jeremy runs autopsies on bids, both lost and won. His recollection is that more than 85% of the reasons people lose bids were known to them before they submitted. He was clear he couldn't remember the exact figure, but the examples are familiar:
No project director with quite the right experience
Not enough financial bond capacity to satisfy the client
No proper price to win work, and they knew it
The wrong technology to support the solution, when the client favoured something else
People lose because they are not honest with themselves, and conscious and unconscious bias plays a part. Research and depth of insight help unplug that.
Where does the return on investment really sit?
Jeremy shared a hypothesis, and said he still needs to do the work on the data. A business paying for bid writing training, or for competitive intelligence at bid stage, may get a return of 10 to 100 times. Go back up the funnel into capture and key account management and add a zero for each stage, so around 1,000 times for capture and 10,000 times further upstream. It makes logical sense. If a business keeps ploughing into a market where there is no money, no amount of good bid writing will fix it.
Salia agreed she would much rather work upstream. She often thinks "if you had called me three months earlier, we could have told you to get a particular supplier into your team". She added that bringing someone in is not enough, you also need your own systems for capturing intelligence, and a dynamic process that people actually use, rather than a repository nobody looks at.
Where is the money going to be?
With budgets under pressure, this is where research matters most. Jeremy and Salia covered:
Defence has plenty of rhetoric but, as Salia hears from the defence community, the investment is not trickling down in the way people hoped
Transport, rail and highways work is largely locked down on existing frameworks
The Department for Education has added a couple of hundred schools to the roughly 240 already in its programme, but its framework is closed for eight years. The same goes for CWAS 3. If you are not on it, how do you build a business?
Whole markets can vanish. Salia described a company heavily involved in home energy renewables whose market disappeared after regulatory changes, with talk of cutting heat pump subsidies, so they were scrambling to work out where their skills could go next
What should businesses do about it?
Jeremy's advice is to stop hobby bidding. Say no to 20% more of the opportunities than you have been, and spend that time and effort on the clients that matter. Work out who the key prospects are, research their world and pipeline, and engage them around it. You can't help but be more successful.
Salia added that competitive intelligence and capture go hand in hand, because if you do capture properly you have to do the research. Jeremy's stat is that only around 5% of B2B and B2G businesses do any capture at all, even though many of the biggest UK firms get by on their frameworks, their brand and their capability. The danger is winning work with strangers by accident, with clients who never wanted you and are less profitable for you.
It does not have to be over engineered. Jeremy described one large builder with over a billion pounds in revenue, whose two owners each have a researcher. They open the door, ask for research on something, and know who to talk to about what a year in advance. Salia pointed to Lockheed Martin, which employs dedicated position to win analysts supporting every capture campaign, working out price targets and non price targets. Salia doesn't see that kind of dedicated approach in large UK companies, but Jeremy's view is that even medium sized firms that do a bit of this get a huge return.
What are the main takeaways?
Competitive intelligence is a system for understanding markets, clients and competitors, not a one off research project and definitely not espionage
Research is risk management. Many lost bids fail for reasons the team already knew about
AI speeds up the gathering and analysis, but the "so what" needs a human
The earlier you start, the better. Run competitive intelligence in parallel with capture, and use it at every bid or no bid gate
If it is public, it is fair game. If you would be embarrassed for the client to see how you got it, don't
Put your effort into fewer, better clients rather than hobby bidding
Quick answers
What is competitive intelligence? A systematic process of understanding your markets, clients and competitors, and applying what you learn to your strategy and bids. It is not corporate espionage or ad hoc research.
Where is the ethical line? Public domain information and on the record conversations are fair game. Confidential information, trade secrets and competitor bid prices are not.
Can AI do competitive intelligence? AI can speed up gathering, analysing and spotting patterns, but the "so what" for your strategy needs human expertise and judgement.
When should you start researching an opportunity? As soon as it hits your pipeline. Pipeline notices can appear around 18 months before a procurement, and the smartest incumbents start looking two years ahead.
Why do businesses lose bids? Often for reasons they already knew before submitting, such as the wrong project director, a lack of financial capacity, no proper price to win work, or the wrong technology.
Find Salia Mogensen
Salia runs Infrabee, a competitive intelligence consultancy that helps with markets, competitors, customers and pulling together bid strategy. Find her on LinkedIn.
Jeremy and Salia plan to catch up again in a few months once Jeremy has done his homework on the return on investment hypothesis.
Transcript
Red Review Podcast Episode (1 of 6 spots filled)-20261022_101044-Meeting Recording
Jeremy Brim 12:55
So hello and welcome to the Red Review with me, Jeremy Brim. Important subject this time and one that I've been meaning to have a conversation about for some time actually. And so research, often the missing link in winning work or growing businesses, whether it's in the cam space, the capture space and definitely in the bidding space.
So often people are blagging it, right? You know, and they pretend they know their competitors, but perhaps don't have the depth. Pretend they really understand the client and their world and really they're only seeing part of the picture. So I've got my friend Sally along. Hi, Salia.
Salia 13:35
Hey guys.
Jeremy Brim 13:36
Hello, great to have you along. So if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself first of all, Sally, so where you've come from, what you get up to these days, and then we'll get into the subject.
Salia 13:49
Okay, yeah, so where I come from, my background is in consulting and I started out working within the bidding space. Nobody ever chooses to go into bidding, you just fall into it, don't you? So I originally, I worked with contractors on the social impact and regen side of
Jeremy Brim 14:01
I.
Salia 14:11
bidding. And that's because I've done a lot in the community and voluntary sector and brought a lot of kind of energy and ideas from how community voluntary sector organisations think into that space. And yeah, so moved into bidding, moved into different bidding roles, have done most of the roles over the last
many few years. And now I work for myself, I have my own firm, Infraby. We're a competitive intelligence consultancy and we work with primes, tier ones, small SMEs and medium tier companies on how we can use Intel
analysis research to support their bidding activity, but also to support their kind of business growth and market strategy. Maybe they're interested in going into a new sector, into a new market, we'll help them understand scope and landscape and understand how they should be positioning. And then we extrapolate that at a bid level as well. So that's kind of
Jeremy Brim 15:13
Yeah.
Salia 15:18
what my story is.
Jeremy Brim 15:20
Yeah, it's so cool because this is a conversation I probably have with senior folk of businesses of all sizes, but even slightly concerningly, the really big, well-known ones, where they say, Jezza, we want to go into this market or we want to grow this bit of the business.
Salia 15:39
Inv.
Jeremy Brim 15:40
help us do that. And I said, well, show me your business plan. And they send me a business plan and it's four numbers in a spreadsheet. I say, well, that's cool, lads, but what is this? Where does that come from? And they say, oh, it's this turnover per sector or per region.
Salia 15:48
Yeah, yeah.
Jeremy Brim 16:00
Awesome. Where did that number? Where did those numbers come from? Oh, were they last year's numbers plus 10%?
Sorry, what? You're employing like more than 1000 people and your business plan is last year's numbers plus 10%. I get that much more than you would like. And so in amongst wider conversations about how you should actually configure business planning, so it's not just about
Salia 16:12
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 16:24
work you currently have and gap to find and the gap to find bits a bit grey. It's about market data coming through the funnel, dream list and targeting off the back of that. So what of all of that data out there is opportunities with clients that suit the business and then what you're going to do about it. But the amount of times I work with really senior people who
Don't do that, don't understand it, never been taught it. Just think that you have a pipeline of stuff that your current clients have told you about. And you know, you're on a framework, so you'll bid most things that come through a framework and win one in four and that will be all right. You know, it's pretty scrappy. So the first thing I tell them is to talk to you.
Salia 17:08
I'm not surprised. I come across that a lot, actually. There are only, yeah, it's a bit of a job trying to convince people that you need to do a bit more on your evidence and data gathering and not just see it as like a peripheral research.
Jeremy Brim 17:09
Often.
Salia 17:25
thing that you'd give to an intern to do, it takes senior managers really thoughtful and kind of engaged in understanding where is my market, where is my, what is the evidence for that? You know, it's almost like a risk management activity actually, reducing your risk.
Jeremy Brim 17:29
Mm.
Yeah.
Salia 17:46
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 17:48
Yeah, no, I agree. So, I mean, what I say to people these days, particularly when I'm pitching, which is absolutely true, sort of, is that there is more publicly available data for public sector stuff in regulated industry out there than there's ever been before.
But the challenge now, I did an episode with Matt Elliott last week, week before last, about his data and insight platform for construction projects and things. You know, he finds, he's got a platform that will find RIBA stage zero and one and two business cases for projects way before there's a public sector kind of notice in find a tender or whatever.
But the challenge is that so many organisations aren't reporting that stuff effectively. And even if they do on a particular project, there's a whole missing piece of sort of vision and understanding of where it fits and who's involved and what's important to them, which is just so important.
in how we write bids to people and how we win deals, how we present to them. And so, yeah, this is an important conversation, this one. So I'm glad you've come along. So I guess from your perspective, what is competitive intelligence, first of all? What's made-up of that?
Salia 19:07
From my perspective, from the discipline, because it's its own discipline, there's a society of professionals in this space.
Jeremy Brim 19:11
Hmm.
Salia 19:18
It's about understanding your markets, your clients and your competitors and taking all of that, joining the dots, understanding what it means for you as your business and your strategy and your products and doing it in a systemized way, not one of activities, about having a system, a process in where you're constantly monitoring, understanding, reflecting
what you're learning and then applying that to your business. And it's having an approach to doing that. And that's really what CIA is. What it isn't is it's corporate espionage. What it isn't is ad hoc research or we'll have a bit of research, we'll have a look at look at what
Jeremy Brim 19:57
Oh.
Salia 20:02
competitors doing, it really truly needs to be aligned to your business. It needs to be at that level, what your business strategy is. So why find is people see it as a function that is just
done by somebody else in addition to their day job. It's just not, we're just not good at understanding what's available out there and how we can use it and inform our plans and strategies and use that as an advantage. And we
Jeremy Brim 20:26
Mm.
Salia 20:41
We just don't give it the Duke and recognition that it needs, I think.
Jeremy Brim 20:46
No, I agree. So it's not, so there's a few things going on that sort of meddle in this, because you're right. So it feels like something that senior people give to a grad or something, you know, go and find me out some stuff. And the thing is, they will come back with some stuff that looks impressive at sort of a surface level.
Salia 21:03
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 21:06
because something's better than nothing.
So I'll always remember, for instance, when I, in my first week with Mace, we were bidding for a big project with a big American organisation for a new HQ in London. And I just went and did some really rudimentary research about the client and the project and the stakeholders and all that sort of stuff.
You know, and there were a couple of board members, very senior owners of the business, who thought it, I was really surprised, they thought it was absolutely wonderful. And I thought, well, isn't this just normal? And that's more often the case than you would think, really. And that was pretty surface stuff, you know, I was just trying to
Salia 21:41
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 21:49
get bundle something together for a meeting with the big dogs. And then, you know, years, so a couple of years before that, so I was part of a team that sold a business, a transaction contact centre type business in my gap between Arcadis and Mace. So I went out of construction for two or three years whilst the construction recession was on.
into something a bit more recession proof and public sector contact transaction stuff. And we were selling the business, or we were going to sell the business. Sorry, someone's shouting outside.
It's not about.
Salia 22:30
Sorry, I'll put in games. You got background music.
Jeremy Brim 22:34
Sorry about this.
I think someone might have lost their dog or something. Sorry about that, listeners. May or may not edit that bit. So, yeah, I was part of a board that scaled and sold a business over a sort of 2 1/2 year span. And we had proper researchers from a company that were helping us, an agency that were helping us sell the business.
Salia 22:43
Yeah.
Okay.
Jeremy Brim 22:57
and their ability to help us really understand the pipeline and really understand the clients and their key. I was lucky enough to work with someone like you on it, basically. And that data helped me really focus in terms of targeting and capture. And we won a few key deals, which we didn't really deserve to win because we'd got such a head start on everybody else through the
research, scaled, doubled the business, quadrupled the valuation of the business and made the owner very rich selling it. And there was, you know, some highs and lows in all of that, but it really brought home to me the sheer power of researching things properly rather than fairly surface stuff. So of course, I guess these days we've got the spectre of AI,
Salia 23:39
Mhm.
Jeremy Brim 23:44
and the pros and cons of that. You know, people can just **** stuff in Copilot or Claude and it will come back with stuff. But it's not dissimilar to just asking a grad to do it. Understanding, comprehending, having access to the right sources of information,
Salia 23:56
Exactly, yeah.
Jeremy Brim 24:03
and how you interpret those and then how you form proper insight reports from that is a real skill in itself, which you're excellent at.
Salia 24:11
Yeah, well, I think, yeah, the AI thing comes up a lot. So, I mean,
Jeremy Brim 24:17
Yeah.
Salia 24:20
I don't use it as a source, like I wouldn't suggest people use it as a source of research, as in, but use it to accelerate your kind of data gathering, your analysing, synthesising, maybe drawing out patterns from data. It's really good at that. But that
Jeremy Brim 24:30
Hmm.
Yeah.
Salia 24:39
piece around the so what and what it means to you and how this affects strategy, that context piece, that is a human in the loop, that's the expertise, that's experience, that's judgement. I wouldn't use it for that now, and it's judging maybe it'll be good at doing that, but there's a lot around
what the data you gather that it can't do. And that's where it's really useful having a human analyst to do that piece rather than getting an AI to do that. I don't use.
bit for that, but I do use it for kind of crunching data and saving time there. So there's definitely more access for people to do that. So if you wanted to do it more, more research in your process, it will, it definitely compared to like 10 years ago when you were spending ages trolling the internet trying to find stuff.
That's been kind of construed down, and that's an easier workload now, but the analyst bit there, so what bit that's that's still definitely a human piece.
Jeremy Brim 25:43
Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned the sort of corporate espionage stuff, which I'm a little bit sad about, because that sounds really cool. So where's the ethical line, I guess, and where do you draw the line?
Salia 25:48
Ha.
If you're not meant to have it.
If it's secret and you're not meant to have it, you're not meant to have it and it's private. If it's their private, if it's in the public domain, it's fair game. If you have to do something that you could not justify, let's say if you're a client, your client finds out how you got that information and you can't
you'd feel embarrassed by them finding out how you got that information, then it's not right. And so it's pretty clear. Everything in the public domain that's out there is fine. Doing interviews, speaking to people, all kind of on the record is fine. You would not be expecting to know your competitors
bid price. And there's issues around trade secrets and what is confidential information. In the US, they have real kind of antitrust laws which are really strict on this and shall we do here too. But so don't ask me to get you anything confidential because it's not going to happen. But also, but there's so much out there that you can use.
Jeremy Brim 26:38
Mm.
Salia 26:58
There's so much kind of public data that you can join together and develop your hypotheses, come up with some conclusions and you...
You don't need to cross any boundaries or any lines to do that. And I think that's kind of what, so it's a bit of a myth that there's a tradecraft involved when not really. Some people, if they promise you that, that's not a good position to be in, I don't think, yeah.
Jeremy Brim 27:12
Mm.
Bing.
No, it's a bit grey. It's a bit grey. So, no, I get that. So how far out, your smartest clients, how far out are they getting you to look at stuff? Is it on pipeline that's a couple of years away? What does good look like?
Salia 27:38
Yeah, so it could be that they're in a rebid situation. They'll be, they're an incumbent and they're going to be rebidding in.
two years time. So the smartest, most enlightened clients are starting now at looking, they're looking at their contract delivery anyway and what they could do to improve their positioning. But it's like now, who are our competitors? Who's going to be the one that comes out the left field and dark horse type?
Jeremy Brim 27:49
Mm.
Salia 28:06
could potentially dethrone us. And what are the other competitors up to? What?
Modifications have they done what technologies, products, services, acquisitions have they made? How might that influence our strategy? Who we might need to pair up with next time round? So the most enlightened ones are doing it to two years. And these are usually for larger programmes and really big complex problems.
Jeremy Brim 28:30
Mm.
Yep.
Salia 28:34
So the worth that investment, like you probably wouldn't do this level of early research for something smaller, but there are kind of principles that you can do. Now with the UK1 pipeline notices that come out 18 months in advance, you've got a fairly good idea and that's a good runway of, okay,
Jeremy Brim 28:39
Of.
I.
Salia 28:53
How do we start? You know, as soon as it hits your pipeline, you should start looking at how you can use what information is out there to help build your understanding of the client customer. And this kind of talks to your capture point, because you'd start your capture activity there, wouldn't you? And in parallel, in parallel, yeah, in parallel, you'd be doing your CIA, you'd be doing your research and analysis work.
Jeremy Brim 29:09
Mm.
Yeah, yeah, at least.
Yeah.
Salia 29:18
And every internal gate that you have around whether we bid or don't bid for this, there'll be an intelligence project that can help you kind of move through that with confidence. So we do a lot of competitor battle cards. And that's really about understanding how strong their offering is, but then the mirror image of that, how strong our offering is.
Jeremy Brim 29:42
Mm.
Salia 29:42
and where we need to improve and that and that would influence who you pair up with as a, if you're a consortium, who your teaming strategy. So I remember on a project, on a bid, quite a large bid, we looked at the landscape and there was one company that
Jeremy Brim 29:44
****.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Salia 30:03
So there were several competitors and several organisations that offered opportunities to join up with as a consortium. And we did a current analysis of the skills and offering of each of them and how they would then align and fit with our client and which would offer the most kind of
Jeremy Brim 30:20
Hmm.
Salia 30:23
good fit or most compelling offering. And one of them was a smaller outfit, but they were working on something quite exciting, AI. And they were ruled out, but then we ruled them back in again and they teamed up with them.
and yeah, won the contract. But the inclination was to go for one that was tried, tested and proven, which is totally understandable. But this one offered something different, something, and that's what that, they were an incumbent, they were lacking. So it's being able to
present all that information, do the analysis, do the groundwork, and then be able to make those decisions. So that's how we're helping with directors kind of.
develop their confidence in the choices they're making or senior senior execs choices they're making around teaming or which bids to go for which ones not to go and how that how they might bid that.
And then we just, then we just, we're just doing that all the way through the bid cycle. So up until bid goes in, there's always an intelligence. And as we get towards the bid stage, towards the end of the bid, there's very specific questions that we end up answering, like,
Jeremy Brim 31:25
That's really interesting.
Salia 31:43
What is the, we're not doing large scale profiling or reports, it's what is this one specific thing that I need to answer that will help me? How is that, what is the logistics space for this organisation and how do they do it at the moment and what kind of terms they're on?
something really specific that will inform their pricing. And that really makes a huge, huge, huge difference. So, and often sometimes something like that could take twice as long as doing a massive analysis piece because you're, but the value it adds and the information and the confidence it gives to your pricing and decision making is
Jeremy Brim 32:10
Mm.
Salia 32:23
you know, valuable to the clients. But not everybody's like that, not everybody wants to, not everybody sees research as kind of critical in that way, but I think that's just because how it's framed, you know, it's the analysis work we do is about risk management, it's about risk mitigation, it's also about solutioning, it's like
Jeremy Brim 32:36
Mm.
Salia 32:42
you know, understanding what's out there. And the thing that we hear a lot is we know our competitors really well. There's nothing you can tell us that we don't really know already. We're just like, oh, okay, fine. Thank you. And we get that with the clients as well. We know our clients really well. There's nothing you can tell us that we don't really know. Great. Okay, well, you know, if you're going to
Jeremy Brim 32:54
Yeah.
Salia 33:02
stay, indulge that, then that fine. So there's like a real bias there. And I think that's partly why some big managers skip the research.
Because you don't want anything to destabilise your view or maybe just blow up this entire bid, as in why are we bidding it anyway? Which...
Jeremy Brim 33:12
Yeah.
Yeah, but across, so Growth Ignition is 8 years old in a month and I get asked to do autopsies on bids that have been lost and sometimes ones that have been won actually, but they didn't score highest on everything. That's actually a much smarter thing to do is to get me to come and look at how you continuously improve, but that's a story.
for another day, but I find, I can't remember the exact stat, where more than 85% of the reasons why people lose bids were actually known to them before they submitted the bid.
Salia 33:53
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 33:54
didn't have a project director with quite the right experience, didn't have the financial bond capacity to satisfy the client is a favourite of mine. It happens more than you would think. Didn't do their proper price to win stuff and they knew it. They were taking a pun. Didn't really have the right technology to underpin the solution. You know, the client favoured a piece of technology.
Salia 33:55
Yeah.
Mhm.
Jeremy Brim 34:19
and they thought their one would be all right or they'd be able to gloss over it and it wasn't. You know, so very honest, very obviously, quite often people lose stuff because they're not honest with themselves. And there's that bias, that conscious and unconscious bias. And research and depth of insight really helps unplug that. But
Salia 34:32
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 34:40
What I find, so I've just got off directly before this, I've just had a call with an MD of a big bit of a very large, very well known big business, a big prime, and who's a mate of mine that I used to work with Donkey's years ago and wants me to help them with some stuff. And we were having a chat about AI in the bidding space and the usual sorts of concerns about slop and stuff.
And I said, well, actually, mate, yeah, my partners, you know, they should just employ my partner's Bidscript, who sponsor this podcast to solve a lot of those problems, because there's a whole transformation approach you should take, particularly in construction and infrastructure, to how you implement AI. It shouldn't, it's not actually about the technology first, it's about the process and the roles and responsibilities, and then how
the technology enables that use cases through the process that are properly thought through. Because people just, you know, freeballing content through Copilot, you know, write me an answer to this question without any context is really bad news. And that's, I'm getting lots of my clients that are coming to me saying that one of their biggest business problems is people in the business doing exactly that.
and saying, oh, let's bid this one because I'll write that tonight. And what they actually mean is they're just going to **** it in co-pilot. And so they're bidding more and losing more and their cost of sales going through the roof as a result. There's no efficiency in doing that at all. And there's brand damage in doing it. So what I said to him, which is interesting, I've got a hypothesis. We should do some research on it, Sally.
Salia 35:53
Yeah.
No.
Jeremy Brim 36:10
So I said to him, loads like 5, 600 people a month, Google bid writing training in just in Google, let alone AI search.
which is cool, because obviously I teach people that. And so I'll teach you how to write bids, or now my AI equivalent course in that, how to use AI, leverage AI to go through that process and develop bid content. But actually, the ROI on spending money on me or anyone to do that is much lower than you would think.
Salia 36:23
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 36:41
A, because you'll probably come to me for a bid writing course because you think it's going to improve your ability to win deals, when the deals were won in capture ages before.
Clients know who they want to deliver something, you know, on those really big things, they know who they want a year in advance. And so if you, fundamentally, I said to, I was at a conference yesterday, and I said to an engineering type bloke at a well-known big engineering business, if you're writing responses to
Salia 36:56
Mmhmm.
Jeremy Brim 37:11
questions and specification that you don't like and didn't see coming, you failed in capture and you're probably going to lose. And so maybe depending on the business and what they do and their profitability, the ROI on me doing some bid writing training is like 10x to 100x depending.
Salia 37:18
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Jeremy Brim 37:31
So that's lovely. So I'll make them loads of money and maybe it's in the 10s or hundreds of thousands or maybe millions, depending on what they do. So everything I do makes people more money and they generally have a better time doing it. So as I cheekily say to some people, you're losing money by not working with me. Every minute you're not working with me, you're losing money.
and having a slightly ******* time. But that's a bit provocative, isn't it? So I shouldn't really say that, but it's funny. But it's actually true. So I can demonstrate it's actually true. So, you know, yes, I'll come and fix your bidding stuff, but in reality, and it'll be the same for you, you obviously on really big bids, there's mega ROI in them employing you.
Salia 37:57
Probably.
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 38:12
even just in the bid phase. So bid comes out, get Sally in, you'll help them understand the competitors and all that stuff, and they are much more likely to win. And that's cool. So the ROI is maybe like 10 to 100x similar to my training, at least probably. But what I say to them is, Kam and capture, if you get me in to develop your process,
Salia 38:21
Yeah.
I understand.
Jeremy Brim 38:32
train your people in this, create an environment where people understand that, that's 1000x at least.
Salia 38:38
Exactly, exactly. And I'd much prefer to live in that space, do that upstream work than getting in that bid stage. I often feel, you know, you'd have just called me three months earlier, we would have been able to say, you need to grab X supplier in your team and yeah.
Jeremy Brim 38:39
And.
Yeah.
Salia 38:57
So it's just trying to make it compelling in a way, then it's creating that environment. But it's not just about bringing somebody in. They need to set up some systems of their own. I mean, like you said about creating the culture environment, you need to set up some of your, some rudimentary systems, tools for capturing Intel.
Jeremy Brim 39:09
Yeah, yeah.
Salia 39:17
and kind of sticking at it, because what often happens is you set something up and nobody looks at it, or it sits on some repository somewhere. So there needs to be a more dynamic process and can help them with that. But, you know, it's looking at what are your key strategy decisions, like you will need to develop a business plan, a growth plan,
you know, what evidence and data are you using for your business strategy, your investment plan, your, you know, how can you use more of what's happening with your customers, with trends in the market, with your competitors to kind of inform that. So your strategy is kind of a bit real and not just
Like you said earlier, for the back of the FAC packet type numbers.
Jeremy Brim 40:01
So, and I would guess if I reckon the ROI in the multiplier, as you go back up through the funnel, I think you can add a zero, but each phase you go backwards. So, you know, 10 to 100x in the bidding phase for either of us, 1000x probably at least in camera and capture.
Salia 40:26
Yep.
Jeremy Brim 40:27
to be a 10,000 X at least. So every pound they spend on you, they're getting 10 grand back and it will spit and it will spit back in millions. Now, I'm slightly guessing that's totally field, that's a hypothesis. I need to go and do my work on data. But it makes sense logically, right? Because if they go and if they carry on ploughing into a market where there's not going to be any money,
Salia 40:29
Yeah.
Or, I think so.
Mhm.
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 40:50
So we were talking off camera before we started recording. Where is the money going to be? With who? The game's changing, right? With Russia and Trump, or Russian Trump, depending how you feel about it, and or Trump being Russia's spokesperson, Iran and all that stuff and volatility.
Salia 40:55
Mm-hmm.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 41:10
And even just, you know, we're still suffering from post-Brexit and pandemic and all that kind of stuff. But again, and then AI is having an impact in terms of employment and how people work and all sorts of things. So there's a lot going on at once, which is driving, you know, as you said, but probably, so this episode will go out
Salia 41:26
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 41:32
Where are we now? So we're 26, so 20, probably go out like 30 or 30, something like end of October. Because I've got a different episode going out this weekend. So by the time this goes out, the budget's going to have happened. Because when's the budget? 26th, yeah. So we don't know what's in Burnham's budget.
Salia 41:46
Yep, next week.
Jeremy Brim 41:54
with John Healy, etc. We know they're reacting to world events. We know in theory there should be more money in defence, although defence people will tell you it's only half of what they need at most. You know, we haven't got the money for an Iron Dome like Israel have got, apparently, which is a bit of a shame with the way the world works these days in that world of drones and
Salia 42:05
Exactly.
Jeremy Brim 42:16
all of that. So, you know, it's a really challenging time. We have got, you know, DFE, I was at the Education Estates Conference this week, so by the time this goes out two weeks ago, and, you know, DFE have apparently announced another couple of 100 school projects to add to the 240 odd they're already working on, although they've been a bit slow to mobilise with their
Salia 42:37
It's pretty good.
Jeremy Brim 42:39
TAs and stuff. So there's pockets of investment, although largely in places where frameworks are already set. So if you're not on the DFE framework, research is even more important, not less important. How, because that's eight-year, I mean, we've got a bit of a challenge, Sally, that DFE is 8 year framework closed.
Salia 42:51
Bidscript, yeah.
Jeremy Brim 43:01
So if you're not in it, you ain't going to be building any many school projects. And CCS CWAS 3 or Gca CWAS 3, the big construction framework is going to be 8 years closed as well. So if you're not in it, how do you build a business using Scape or a Pagabo or whatever if you're a contractor?
Salia 43:03
Exactly.
Exactly.
Jeremy Brim 43:20
Where, how, where is that money going to be, and how are you going to retain it?
Salia 43:23
When is and how it looks and how to get into it. I recently did something for a company that was really heavily involved in renewables and the home energy side of things. And that market's just disappeared overnight. You know, some regulatory changes, some how we
Jeremy Brim 43:37
Mm.
Mm.
Salia 43:43
pay for energy bills has changed. And yeah, there's a whole kind of sector there that's scrambling for what should we be doing next? Where is the money? And even I think recently, there's talks about cutting subsidies for the air heat pump type options that you used to be able to. And again, that's the
Jeremy Brim 44:03
Mm.
Salia 44:04
that's just going to cut a whole swathe of activity out for this market. So we're looking at where could they go with the skills and technologies and experience they've got. So you kind of need to do that. You need to have that trend and overview of where what the market forces are, where it's going to push you, even if you, you know, don't know. So yeah, quite interested to see what happens next week and what it looks like.
for defence in particular, because although there's a lot being said, rhetoric around defence and defence investment, it's really not trickling down in a way that the defence community would like to see. So we'll need a bit more flesh on the bones of the defence investment plan, for example. And
Jeremy Brim 44:29
Mm.
Salia 44:47
If you're in the transport space or in the rail Highways, a lot of that is locked down. So, you know, where are the opportunities? How can you navigate as a small business over the next few years, can be really agile and kind of working through where you might be until those bigger opportunities.
Jeremy Brim 44:56
Mm.
Oh.
Salia 45:06
Are unlocked.
Jeremy Brim 45:07
Yeah. And just focus, I mean, my advice to them would be to engage you or someone like you or do the work if they haven't got the money, to really understand who are the key prospects and focus on them at a client level rather than at a bid level and hobby bidding stuff. So just bid, even if you just bid 20% less,
Salia 45:08
Mm.
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 45:27
Say no to 20% of stuff, more than you have been, and spend that effort, heartbeats, time on focusing on the clients and engaging those clients, understanding what's important to them, doing some research around their world and their pipeline and engaging them around that. You can't help but be more successful.
Salia 45:28
Yeah.
No, this is why I think the Intel piece of research is so linked to capture, like the hand in hand, you know it, yeah, and can get you, yeah, and can you do if you're doing that, you're doing, you're having to do the research in Intel. So, if you make the argument around capture and the importance of that, then
Jeremy Brim 45:47
But so many people don't do that.
And Kam, yeah.
Salia 46:08
I think that's like 80% of the work in terms of understanding and trying to get people around the whole how you can use Intel. So it's, you know, it's just the education around. I don't know, I don't when you say I don't think captures a great term. I don't think it captures quite captures.
Jeremy Brim 46:12
Inn.
No, I mean, well, 5% of B2B, B2G businesses do businesses are doing any capture at all.
Salia 46:28
What is that?
Yeah.
Defence is good at that, and the Americans are good at that, yeah, yeah.
Jeremy Brim 46:37
Yeah, yeah, they are. It's where it was born. And it's the best practises that I've sort of built upon as the bedrock of it. I completely agree. And more people should notice that, but they really don't. Many of the biggest businesses in the UK have got very little capture stuff going on or Kam stuff. They just, because they get on frameworks and largely hobby bid things and
Salia 46:42
Yeah.
Mm.
Jeremy Brim 46:59
Their brand kind of carries them through, or their capability, so, but...
Salia 47:02
Yeah, yeah, I like that hobby *****. That's that sounds good.
Jeremy Brim 47:06
It's really dangerous because they will win work with strangers by accident and it won't be, that client never wanted them, they wanted somebody else. Every single episode of the podcast so far, like six or seven of them, I've talked about the 80-20 thing of, you know, you're making 80% of your profit with 20% of your clients, the ones that are outside that key
Salia 47:08
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 47:27
group you're probably losing money on, they probably never wanted you, your staff are more likely to leave and or be unwell and or have accidents. So it's higher risk all round. So like I say, I mean, this doesn't have to be over-engineered, right? A lot of people try and over-engineer these things. I'm A one-page plan kind of dude.
Salia 47:33
Yeah.
No, it doesn't.
Jeremy Brim 47:50
You know, I'm aware of, and they're not a client of mine, but one of the big builders who have over a billion revenue, for instance, who are just basically turbo aggressive ********. A lot of people think they're successful because they've got really low overhead and they're aggressive. But actually a big part of it is they've got two researchers, because two blokes own the business.
Salia 48:09
Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 48:11
They have a researcher each and they open the door to their office and go, can you do some research on this? And then close the door again. And then the research comes in and they know who to talk to about what a year in advance. And that's the bedrock of the growth of their business. It's not hard. It doesn't have to be that big a deal.
Salia 48:12
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just thinking.
No, it's the thinking work and backed by evidence and data. So doing the thinking piece. I mean, if a really, well, the US is really good at capturing and really good at competitive intel when it comes to bidding. Lockheed Martin, for example, they actually employ position to win analysts.
Jeremy Brim 48:30
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Salia 48:46
And their job is just to do all of that and they support every capture piece, every campaign capture be able with, this is what we think the price target should be. These are the non-price targets. This is what you need to know about the customer. And then they're constantly back and forth on Intel they're getting from the capture teams and business development being feeding it in, churning it out and
driving and informing the bid strategy. And it's just continuous. We don't have that here. I don't expect we don't have that here in large companies. I don't think in that dedicated way. Yeah.
Jeremy Brim 49:11
Yeah, yeah.
Ai.
No, we don't. But even in smaller firms, medium sized stuff, if you just do a bit of this, the ROI is massive. The impact is huge. Absolutely huge. So we've run out of time, Sally. We could talk all day, couldn't we? We'll have to do another one another time.
Salia 49:28
Yeah.
I'm really sorry because I've only just got warmed up.
Jeremy Brim 49:37
No, I know. Well, we'll have another go. Let's see the response and think about it a bit more. And I'll do some homework on that ROI hypothesis and we'll come back together again in three months or something. Do it again. Yeah, go for it. Well, you probably do a better job than me. So yeah, thank you very much. Where people can find you on Linkedin? I'll tag you in the post and all of that stuff, right?
Salia 49:47
Oh yes, good idea. I might do my own as well actually.
No, thank you.
Yeah, find me on Linkedin. My company is infobee.com. And yeah, we can help with market competitors and customers and pulling your bid strategy together.
Jeremy Brim 50:06
Wonderful.
Wonderful. I would advocate people do because it's really powerful stuff. Thank you very much, Sally. Lovely to see you again. See you again soon. Thanks, everyone.
Salia 50:20
Thank you, Jeremy.