A collaborative behavioural assessment is a procurement test of whether a bidder's people can walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Assessors score how each team member behaves in interviews, presentations and scenarios against criteria such as integrity and behaviour under pressure. You prepare by putting the team that will actually deliver the work through realistic dress rehearsals that are tougher than the real thing, so they trust each other and behave consistently with what the bid promised.
This week's Red Review guest is Sally Calverley, director of Milestone, which she runs with her business partner Mick Underhill. Milestone helps clients win and build better projects using programme discipline and behavioural insight. Sally is a former litigator who now prepares teams for these assessments. I wanted her on because we are seeing more and more clients ask for engagement pre-bid and mid-bid, and more competitive dialogues and behavioural assessments.
By Jeremy Brim, Managing Director, Growth Ignition
How did a litigator end up in behavioural assessments?
Almost by happenstance, in Sally's words. She was a litigation partner at a law firm in the City of London, where she grew her practice from nothing to two or three million pounds a year, and you cannot do that without understanding people and how to make things happen. She moved sideways into people development, and then a friend asked if she knew anyone who could help with collaborative behavioural assessments.
Her litigation skills turned out to be exactly what was needed: marshalling resources, making sure people say things at the right time, and working to a hard deadline. She compares preparing for an assessment to preparing for a piece of litigation.
What is a collaborative behavioural assessment?
It is used by procurement teams around the world to get underneath the skin of a bid document. Construction and infrastructure companies employ people who are very good at writing stories about what they are going to do. An assessment tests whether that is true, and whether the people in the organisation can behave in line with what has been promised.
Underneath that, you can test value-based behaviours such as integrity, which matters under the Procurement Act, and how people behave under pressure. Everyone in the team has to be scoreable by assessors on every criterion, in every exercise, whether that is an interview, a presentation or a scenario. They have to be behaving in a way the assessor can see, not just thinking it.
Why are clients using behavioural assessments now?
AI is raising the tide. Even if you freeball a bid in Copilot, you will probably do a better job than you would have done, so quality submissions are becoming more and more homogenous. Sally hears anecdotally that bids are pretty much word for word in some situations, because everybody is using the same tools.
At the same time, the government has published guidance on the use of AI in procurement, and I am hearing of frameworks where AI will take part in scoring. One I have been told about, verbally and not yet in the published documents, plans three scorers per response, two human and one AI, averaging the scores. When the written word is harder to tell apart, clients want to see the people. That is why dialogue sessions, presentations and behavioural assessments matter more.
Why does collaboration matter commercially?
Because it is not just about whether people are nice to each other. Sally says that where collaboration has been costed in, there is a price tag of about an 8 to 10 percent saving for a successful collaboration. If the collaboration does not work, that saving is not made. That was her figure on the episode, and I have not verified it independently.
Collaboration is also different from teamwork. It is people working across organisational boundaries, which these days can mean across cultures and geographies, with different reward and recognition structures. On large projects, nobody knows exactly how the work will be done in ten or twelve years, so collaboration brings the innovation and creativity, and also honesty, integrity and the foundations of trust. Trust brings earlier, better conversations, with fewer design iterations and fewer transactional conversations. As an extreme example, an alliance writes litigation out of the contract altogether.
How do you get clients to collaborate earlier?
Get the right partners involved as early as possible, ideally at the design stage when you are asking what you actually want to achieve. Sally has worked with public sector clients throughout her career, and she sees the same gap again and again. If the public sector thinks the only motivation of the private sector is making money, it holds the public purse tightly at every stage. If it understood that letting go earlier could make the total cost of the project lower, there would be benefits for everyone.
For those of us in work winning, this is where key account management and capture help. If you can get ahead of a client's projects and programmes, and help them see the benefits of bringing them together, you can unlock this thinking. The heart of my capture training is working with clients to deliver the greatest possible value for them or their communities, and then asking for a share of that value in return. There is also published research on early contractor involvement, linked below, that makes the case for engaging contractors earlier.
Can an ambitious vision bring a team together?
Sally gave the example of Alto, the Canadian high speed rail programme between Toronto and Quebec City. The original market document set ambitious aims, including helping to heal the relationship with First Nations and supporting a drive towards net zero. Sally prepared the successful partner for its collaborative behavioural assessment. She is clear that she is not saying her intervention made the difference. Her point is that the ambition in the room, and the desire to be part of something that matters, is powerful. Engineers love that, because they want to leave a legacy.
What happens to behaviour under pressure?
People change. Milestone uses a behavioural insight tool that shows teams what happens to an individual when something that matters to them is under threat, whether that is a relationship, a goal they are going to miss, a process someone is messing about with, or a deadline. A leader who is outgoing and relaxed can suddenly become a micromanager who wants a ton of spreadsheets and will not make a decision.
So Sally prepares people for those moments. They learn the triggers, learn what happens to each other, and learn how to support each other when conflict arrives. Good discipline around governance, meetings and roles gives the team tram lines. Her aim is a team that collaborates even when its members do not like each other very much, perhaps even better than when everything is nice and easy.
Why do bids and assessments get lost?
Very often it comes down to the basics. On a recent government construction bid I helped with, most of the gap in points came from storyboarding the responses better and answering the added value question properly. Added value has to be above and beyond what the client already specified, and many bidders simply turned the volume up on something they had been asked to do.
Sally's world is the same. If you want maximum points, every person has to score on every criterion in every exercise, and it is surprising how often people do not realise that.
The other big reason, particularly on large bids, is poor sponsorship by business leaders. They hand responsibility to managers and do not give them support, so opportunities are not properly captured and the people on the bid conclude that nobody senior cares. Then a director turns up at the last minute and says they would not have written it that way. My golden rule is that if you want to be involved at the end, you have to have been involved at the start, at least in strategy and ideally the bid or no bid decision. It does not need much time, perhaps 2% of theirs: a WhatsApp, a coffee, a chat with the bid leader.
Who should you put in front of the client?
The people who will deliver the work. Sally sees the same pattern in assessments, where a director or equity member turns up for the final piece and it is their first involvement in the bid. I see it in presentations. The people who fall apart in Q&A are often the A-team who were not available for the bid, or the polished presenters who will never work on the project, because they do not know the detail and are not close to it.
Clients, particularly on mega projects where the client may be a single purpose vehicle, want to know who their point of contact will be, whether you will care about them, and whether you will help them achieve an ambitious goal they are accountable for to central government. They know a consortium could mobilise tens of thousands of people, so they want to see what it will be like to work with you. Sally also sees professional assessment teams who keep turning up to try to game the system. Her view is that a team prepared to deliver is fundamentally different in energy, behaviour and attitude from a team that did an assessment yesterday.
My top tip is to think at the start of a capture campaign about who will be involved in delivery, and therefore who should be involved in the presentation.
How do you build trust quickly?
The big thing that erodes trust is not doing what you say you are going to do. Sally pointed out, referencing The Traitors, that it is hard to tell whether someone is lying, but we can tell when people are not being authentic. She also says you can build trust fast by saying what you will do, doing it, and then telling people you have done it. It is a slightly artificial process, but it works in business and in other relationships.
She also noted that people often want to be trusted but do not themselves trust. Milestone puts teams of high performing executives, who may never have met, through an intense programme, often over five days. They work in mock work environments, which are as live as possible, so they can imagine how colleagues will behave in a real situation.
I would add that trust takes a long time to build and can be lost in an instant. I teach key account management and capture on that basis, and I distrust what I call Fisher-Price influencers. Genuine influence needs authenticity and real interest in the client's success.
How do you prepare without sounding over-rehearsed?
Rehearse harder than the real thing. Sally always runs a dress rehearsal designed to be much tougher than the actual assessment. Having seen many different assessments and ways of assessing them, her team makes sure all of the things that could happen do happen, not just some of them. The team becomes proud of its paces, trusts each other, and is confident it can collaborate whatever is thrown at it.
There is a point during the five days where she can tell the team has got it, and from there it is refinement. The sooner a team reaches that point, the better it will perform. One limit she is clear on: she cannot coach people who are not in the room.
Where does AI fit in?
My top tip is that it is all about context. If you drop a question and a bit of spec into an AI tool and ask it to answer, it will not understand what matters to the client, why they call things what they call them, or what the people involved really care about. Even with only Copilot, you still need a bid process and some upfront capture or research and positioning work, so each step builds on the last.
One more point worth knowing: if a person leaves and their AI account is closed, the context from everything they worked on can go with it. Company-level platforms, such as Bidscript, hold context at company level rather than individual level.
Where is procurement heading?
Under the Procurement Act, the competitive flexible procedure lets clients shape what the sequence looks like and what the task and challenge are. Sally is most excited about this, because putting behaviours at the end of the process is, to her, the wrong place for them. We both think behaviours belong at the start of a dialogue, where they help shape the specification, rather than being bolted on as a final test.
The government's innovation playbook also points towards setting a challenge, such as how do we move freight and people from X to Y, rather than defining a specification and asking suppliers to bid against it. With AI raising the tide, the best teams and businesses should win because they have the best solutions and the best people aligned to deliver them.
What is the one thing to take away?
Clients increasingly buy teams and behaviours, not just answers, and that can be prepared for. Start early, involve the people who will deliver, get senior sponsors engaged from the beginning, and rehearse harder than the real thing.
What are the main takeaways?
A collaborative behavioural assessment tests whether bidders behave in line with what they promised
Everyone in the team has to be scoreable on every criterion in every exercise, so behaviour must be visible
Collaboration is different from teamwork. It works across organisational, cultural and geographic boundaries
Prepare people for how they behave under pressure, and how to support each other when conflict arrives
Put the people who will deliver in front of the client, not just the best presenters
Senior sponsors need to be involved at the start if they want to be involved at the end
Rehearse harder than the real thing, and run the whole scenario, not part of it
Behaviours belong at the start of a procurement dialogue, not only at the end
Quick answers
What is a collaborative behavioural assessment? A procurement exercise that tests whether a bidder's people behave in line with what the bid promised, using interviews, presentations and scenarios scored against criteria such as integrity and behaviour under pressure.
How do you prepare for one? Put the team that will deliver the work through a dress rehearsal that is tougher than the real thing, cover every scenario that could happen, and build trust so the team collaborates whatever is thrown at it.
Who should take part? The people who will deliver the project, and senior sponsors who have been involved from the start of the bid.
Why are clients using them? AI is making written bids more alike, so clients want to see how the people behave.
What is the difference between teamwork and collaboration? Collaboration is people working across organisational boundaries, cultures and geographies, often with different reward structures, and letting go of transactional behaviours.
About the guest
Sally Calverley is a director of Milestone, which she runs with Mick Underhill. She is a former litigation partner at a City of London law firm, and Milestone helps clients win and build better projects using programme discipline and behavioural insight. Find Sally on LinkedIn, and at milestonegroup.uk.
About the author
Jeremy Brim is Managing Director of Growth Ignition, which helps B2B and B2G businesses win more work. He does non-executive and board advisory work for businesses from SMEs to multi-billion turnover contractors and consultants. He was previously a board member of a business that was scaled and sold over two and a half years, and led a large bid team at Mace. He hosts the Red Review podcast in partnership with Bidscript.
Sources and further reading
PPN 017: Improving transparency of AI use in procurement, GOV.UK
The Procurement Act 2023: a short guide for suppliers, GOV.UK
Module 4: Competitive flexible procedure, Procurement Act 2023 e-learning, GOV.UK
Early contractor involvement cuts project cost overruns, study finds, PBC Today
Related posts from Growth Ignition
Transcript
Jeremy Brim [0:00] So hello and welcome to the Red Review with me, Jeremy Brim. An ever more important subject in this week's episode. We're going to be in amongst a few things talking about behavioural assessments at the heart of things. And so I thought I should get a grown up to talk about that because frankly, I would be blagging it. So, but the context is we are in the world of AI and that crashing into in the bidding space, the new procurement act, we are already seeing more and more clients wanting engagement pre-bid, mid-bid, certainly big presentations. but we're beginning to see more and more competitive dialogues and fairly serious human stuff, including behavioural assessments. So I wanted to bring my friend Sally in to have a bit of a conversation with us about that aspect of things as we're seeing more of it. So hello, Sally.
Sally Calverley [0:55] Hello. Very, very nice to be here, Jeremy.
Jeremy Brim [0:58] Yeah, great to have you aboard. Thank you. And so Sally and I, when did we meet Sally? Probably 3, four months ago or something. We're sort of Linkedin. And then we've had a bit of a night out and we've done some stuff together. We have the odd chat. Been to the rugby. Yes, thank you for that. It's rather wonderful. In Bath.
Sally Calverley [1:06] Yeah, about that, yeah. What's correcting?
Jeremy Brim [1:19] But this is going to be an important space. So not only have I found a fantastic friend who's really good in this game, but also just generally, this is a really specific subject that you're an expert in, Sally. So we should start off with who you are, where you work, and what you get up to these days. If that's alright.
Sally Calverley [1:39] Yeah, that's fine. So my name is Sally Calverley and I am director with my business partner, Mick Underhill, of a business called Milestone. And what we do is we help our clients to win and build better projects by using programme discipline and behavioural insight. And through all of that is the collaboration piece, because we passionately believe that the way to build better projects is through collaboration.
Jeremy Brim [2:15] Fantastic. So how did you find yourself in this space? Because I think you've got a bit of a story. Now, Sally did prompt me before we started recording. You could go off on one and go down a bit of a wormhole because it's... So let's give you a time. Let's try and do it in under a couple of minutes. How did you find yourself?
Sally Calverley [2:28] Very easily, yes.
Jeremy Brim [2:35] in this human behavioral collaboration space.
Sally Calverley [2:39] Yeah, so almost by happenstance, which I think when you get to my age is often the answer. The first part of my career, I was a litigator working up in the City of London. I was partner in a law firm and I grew my practice from nothing. two, 3 million pounds a year. And you can't do that without understanding people and how to make things happen. And I gradually got more and more interested in that and moved sideways into people development. And I was, that's about 10 years then, Well, I did that. And then there was a friend of mine, we were having a cup of tea and he said, do you know anybody who could help with collaborative behavioural assessments? And I was like, well, what are they? He told me and I said, yes, I could definitely do that. And we were just talking, weren't we just now, which is A lot of the skills that I developed as a litigator around marshalling resources, making sure people said things at the right time, those are exactly relevant to collaborative behavioural assessments and preparing clients for them.
Jeremy Brim [3:53] So, I guess we should start with a bit of a definition. What is a collaboration behavioural assessment?
Sally Calverley [4:00] Yeah, so it's used by, well, all over the world now, but it's used by procurement to get underneath the skin of a bid document. You know, construction infrastructure companies employ people who are really good at writing stories and saying, and we're going to do this and we're going to do that. And what a collaborative behavioural assessment does is to test whether that's true, whether the people in the organisation can walk the walk, not just talk the talk. And so, I mean, that's a sort of top line. And then underneath that, you can test pretty good value based behaviors, like for instance, integrity, which is important under the procurement act, for example. You can really get into how do people behave under pressure and Are they consistent with what has been promised?
Jeremy Brim [5:08] It's fascinating, isn't it? Because we are, there's a new PPN procurement policy notice about use of AI in bidding, both, and well, procurement actually, is AI and procurement. So it's got some governance stuff and some content about how clients should use AI to score procurements. And we have got our first two, as far as I'm aware, or might not have seen others, but there's two instances, one that's out and one that's coming, where framework providers are going to procure frameworks. One of them, which is out, is going to go, Humans read it all, AI scores it all. Humans check that. of a rolling approach. But another one that's going to be out next year told me verbally, and we'll see what they put in their actual documents, because they've not talked about this in their bidders conferences so far at all, that they are going to have 3 scorers of each tender and each response in a tender. Two Humans, one AI. And so, and they're going to take just the average of the three scores in effect for every response and every tender. So different models of getting there. But fundamentally, you know, with the onset of AI, we're seeing the tide is rising because even if you just freeball stuff in Copilot, you'll do a better job than you would have done. And so quality submissions are becoming more and more homogenous. We're not, I did a Linkedin post this week. My friend Michelle B had done a bit of a post about what this all means for bid consultants and things. And a lot of them are a bit worried.
Sally Calverley [6:37] But there's a Jeremy, there's a real bottom line issue here as well, not just the procurement thing. So when the clients are looking at how much it's going to cost and they're getting the prices in, if procurement has been costed in, collaboration, sorry, not procurement, collaboration, if collaboration has been costed in, there is a price tag of about 8 to 10 percent saving. for a successful collaboration. Now, if that doesn't happen... Obviously, that saving won't be made. So it's not purely just the sort of, are people going to be nice to each other? There's a real bottom line benefit for getting collaboration that properly works and a real risk if it doesn't.
Jeremy Brim [7:39] Because I guess that that 8% odd comes from the fact that they work better together, there's less friction, greater efficiency, etc.
Sally Calverley [7:47] Yeah, yeah. So, because it's not just teamwork, right? It's collaboration. It's people working across organisational boundaries, which these days can also mean across cultures, across geographic boundaries. And there's sort of
Jeremy Brim [7:50] Is not. This.
Sally Calverley [8:07] more boundaries there than they used to be. It's also around different cultures, different reward and recognition structures, all sorts of things. So people are working on this project together with all of these competing things happening in the background and they're trying to put more in. So it's but it's not just about how people are nice to each other. It really isn't that. about how do we work together to build something often on mega projects. We don't actually know how we're going to do it. You know, it's going to be built in 10, 12 years time. We don't actually know how that's going to happen. There's going to be innovation. And collaboration brings with it the innovation, the creativity, the people skills about how we're going to communicate together, but it also brings with it honesty, it brings integrity, it brings the foundation stones for trust, and that trust brings with it an ability to have earlier, better conversations. So you're not having so many design iterations, for example, you're not having transactional conversations. So if you're looking at an alliance as an extreme example of a collaboration, litigation within an alliance is written out within the contract. So that's, you know, that's one far extreme. but you're going into a collaboration and letting go of transactional behaviours. And that can be quite challenging, even in the UK where collaborative projects have been, I mean, you know, the UK, I think is, because I'm from the UK, is one of the very best places where collaboration has been tried and innovated. But even in very transactional, areas such as Canada, such as North America, collaboration is now coming through those programs with, for instance, progressive design build being a particular contractual form. that enables and drives that collaboration. Sorry, I did warn you I was going to rant.
Jeremy Brim [10:34] No, no, no, but that's fascinating and it's so important. It's also important that you get the right partners involved at the right points, ideally as early as possible. I get on my soapbox, there's a, my friend Mike Reader, the MP leads the APPG for
Sally Calverley [10:37] Yeah, yeah, I never mind, yeah.
Jeremy Brim [10:55] infrastructure and they've got some, I think it's him leading it. I need to go and check it. I need to write a response to it. But there's a call for papers at the moment or responses around procurement and how mega projects are run. And I do get on my soapbox a bit about things like National Hospital Programme and other programs that have delivery partners. that come in very early, but they tend to not bring the contractors in early enough, isn't everything. And so, you know, true collaboration should have all parties engaged as early as you could possibly, I think.
Sally Calverley [11:23] At the, using the term broadly design stage, when you're actually thinking about what is it that we want to do, not even we think there's a thing, how are we going to do that, but what is it we want to do? And I think there's, so one of the law, both of the law firms I worked with were public sector based. So throughout my whole career, I've been helping private organisations to engage with the public sector, whoever that is. And there's that sort of real boundary there where the perception from the public sector is often, they don't necessarily see the private sector in a real way. And for instance, I was doing a collaboration this week, or collaborative intervention this week, where the private and the public sector just didn't understand what each other's motivation was. And unpicking that is an important part of helping people to understand where we're going together. Because, for instance, I'm not saying this was necessarily the case, but if the public sector thinks that the only motivation for the private sector is making money, then they will be holding tightly onto the public purse at all stages. Whereas if they could understand that letting go at an earlier stage would actually make the total cost of the project perhaps less, there will be benefits to that.
Jeremy Brim [13:15] Yeah, yeah. Oh, we see that all the time, don't we? I mean, there was a really interesting paper published by Procure Partnerships recently, the procurement organisation, framework organisation, which Mike wrote the forward for, I think, actually, which was about outturn cost and or value by which RIBA stage the contractor was engaged at. And it showed across, I think it was 600 odd projects or something, they did the analysis. And the savings by getting the contractor involved earlier and collaborating with them more effectively through design and into delivery are absolutely wild. And so the public's, you're right,
Sally Calverley [13:39] If.
Jeremy Brim [13:57] The public sector and for us in work winning, by the way, this is where key account management and particularly capture can help clients unlock this thinking. Because if we can get way ahead of where they've got projects and programmes and help them understand the benefits of, you know, bringing projects together into a programme to make efficiency savings. And maybe it's not that you selfishly pick up all of those projects yourself. Maybe it is an alliance of two or three contractors that then work with the client on standard design and MMC and all that kind of stuff to drive much greater value. So I say to my clients at the heart of my capture training stuff and the tools that we build for people and process and stuff, It's fundamentally about working with clients to deliver the greatest possible value for them or their communities. And then you're just asking for a share of that value in return. And so, yeah, this is interesting, the collaboration and how you engage those clients to go on that journey with them is absolutely critical in being successful really overall and having a much safer, lower risk business.
Sally Calverley [15:08] And to my mind, the public sector can afford to be more ambitious than it currently is. And I'm going to give an example of where the government in Canada was incredibly ambitious, actually. And in doing so, raise the bar for those who are bidding for the project. And that's the Alto project in Canada, which is 12,000 kilometres of track, 17 new stations. It was intended to be a high frequency rail project. It's now a high speed rail project. the original document that went to the market, the government said that it wanted this procurement, this project, to help to heal the relationship with the First Nations.
Jeremy Brim [15:48] Two. Wow.
Sally Calverley [16:03] Right. And I can't now remember the percentage, but the ambition towards getting Canada to net zero. Yes. So I was talking about the ambition of the, because if you can raise the bar like that, if you can talk about, Things that perhaps wouldn't be expected to be delivered. Building a thing. That enables everybody to coalesce around a common purpose. And I did the collaborative behavioural assessment for the successful partner that was selected. And I'm not at all saying that it was my intervention that made all the difference. But the ambition that was in the room and the desire to win because of these amazing objectives that people wanted to be part of. I think that is something that that sort of level of inspiration. to be part of something that matters. Engineers love that. They want to have a legacy.
Jeremy Brim [17:19] That's the question. Yeah, so it's that. carrot and stick point to a point, is it that you're creating a vision everyone's excited about and we're driving together. So collaboration ties them together. And like I say, it's not just about being nice, it's understanding what people's objectives and kind of motives are along that journey. And then you can also measure that, the stick bit you can measure.
Sally Calverley [17:30] Oh yeah, for sure.
Jeremy Brim [17:45] along the way, right?
Sally Calverley [17:47] There's some real hard edges to it, and then what I'd say is... We prepare teams so that they collaborate even when they actually don't like each other very much. You know, that's going to happen. Every project, there's going to be some sort of friction, some sort of drama. There'll be points when people just aren't getting on very well. You've got to be able to collaborate then. Perhaps even better than when everything's nice and easy and everybody's having a nice time and going out for bits.
Jeremy Brim [18:18] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When it's rough and smooth. So what tends to happen to people's behaviour under pressure then? When it is that tough time where the tough questions are being asked, what's collaboration about in that space?
Sally Calverley [18:19] That's, yeah. So, well, those are two slightly different questions. So I'm going to answer the first one first and we can come back to that. So what usually happens is that people will change behaviour. We use a tool called STI 2.0, which is a crucial learning tool. And that enables us to show teams what happens to an individual when something that matters to them is under threat, whether that's a relationship, whether it's a goal that they're going to miss, whether it's a process that's being messed about with by somebody, whatever it is, let's say the deadline, at that point, people start behaving in ways that they don't normally behave. And we see that, you know, I just like to be able to show people silence because then they can relate to it, especially when we're working with engineers. And when people start behaving differently, you might, for example, have a leader who is very outgoing, very relaxed, suddenly turn into somebody who's a micromanager who wants a ton of spreadsheets and detail and data and won't make a decision for Toffee. That's entirely possible. So what we're doing there is to always prepare people for those moments so that they understand the triggers that happen and what happens to each other and how they can support each other when they get into conflict. That's the term that we use for it. We always want to make sure that there's good discipline around governance and meetings and who's doing what. And everybody knows what their role is. Because if you've got those tram lines and everybody's conscious of behaviour, they can support each other through it. Does that answer your question?
Jeremy Brim [20:30] It does actually. And for us bidding folks, so the audience of this podcast is generally work winning people, few marketeers, few BD sales people, few commercial fee people, but the lion's share is bid managers, bid writers, maybe capture people. And we bidding folk would really recognise that in terms of a bid team. that comes together to work on. Obviously a mega project bid team might be on it for a couple of years or something, or a big outsourcing deal, big competitive dialogues. But for most people, the bidding experience is a month to two months in a team, fairly rapid fire stuff. But bids, there's a few reasons why people lose bids. You know, I do inquests into why bids were lost fairly often. People can view it. And yeah, there's a few really, very often it comes down to Billy basics. So, you know, I've just helped a client win a massive government construction project.
Sally Calverley [21:15] Well, that's interesting, yeah.
Jeremy Brim [21:28] and we absolutely destroyed the competition, smashed them to bits on all fronts in the end through a dialogue. But to be absolutely honest with you, most of the gap in points was quite interesting. I think we would have won anyway by a smidge, but most of the gulf between us and everybody else was because we storyboarded the responses better.
Sally Calverley [21:41] What?
Jeremy Brim [21:49] like proper basic bid writing stuff. I was really surprised by that because there were certain scoring criteria around added value, for instance, and it had to be added value. You couldn't just turn the volume up on something they'd already asked for. And that's classically when I reviewed the bid of, because that's classically what my class.
Sally Calverley [21:51] It has to be. I did. I did.
Jeremy Brim [22:08] Yeah, exactly. There's got to be value above and beyond what they've already specified. And so a lot of people lost points on that because their added value wasn't added. It was just stuff they've already been asked to do. So I did a, I did a, I think you commented on actually, I did a Linkedin post in my Friday video last week about, you know, the The basics, even in this world of AI, are absolutely crucial. But and then generally speaking, so people lose bids because they haven't storyboarded them effectively and answered all of the question and met all of the criteria. That happens a lot, they lose quality score.
Sally Calverley [22:28] Yeah, so it. So in my world, it's very similar in the sense that if you want to score maximum points in the collaborative behavioural assessment, All the people in the team have to be able to be scored by assessors on every criteria in every part of the. whatever the exercises are you're being put through, whether that's an interview, a presentation or a scenario. It's, you know, it's that basic thing. Everybody has to score and they have to be therefore behaving in a way that can be seen by the assessor. not just thinking it, but behaving in a way that can be seen across all of the all the criteria in all of the exercises. And it's surprising how often people
Jeremy Brim [23:27] I.
Sally Calverley [23:41] Don't realize that, so yeah.
Jeremy Brim [23:43] Yeah, yeah. There's loads of firms that win stuff in their markets by being the least [bleep], frankly. You know, they're just scoring points. So they're not actually doing anything that majestic. They're not wonderful salespeople or capture people, particularly. There are a number of firms in certain markets that They just have a bid writer and a couple of people who get it and just storyboard stuff effectively, review it effectively and just submit good bids. And that's great. I think AI is, the tide is rising on that. You know, I've got a client actually that used to smash their markets to bits on quality to the point where they could charge a premium. but the tide has now risen. So they're not able to charge as much money because their competitors are now only 10% less good on quality score rather than 30. So that sort of there is a there's an interesting change happening. But the other way that people lose bids fairly often, and particularly big ones, is
Sally Calverley [24:24] How interesting, yeah.
Jeremy Brim [24:45] poor behaviour and poor sponsorship by their business leaders. They've abdicated responsibility for winning deals to managers, people who work for them, and they don't give them the sponsorship. So the opportunities aren't properly captured. They don't have the right alignment of the right people at the right place at the right time.
Sally Calverley [24:49] Yes, say that a lot.
Jeremy Brim [25:06] And critically, the people on the bid don't see it as important because nobody senior appears to care about it. And that happens.
Sally Calverley [25:14] And they don't really want them to turn up at the last minute, which I have seen happen when I'm preparing people for interviews. They'll turn up for the interview and go, well, I wouldn't have written this like this. And it's like, well, you weren't around. So they've done a good job.
Jeremy Brim [25:21] Oh no, we've got a golden rule in our processes. If you want to be involved at the end, you've got to have been involved at the start. You've got to have at least been involved in strategy and well ideally bid no bid decision and then a bit of strategy stuff. You can come in towards the end if you like. You need to have done that and been briefed on the journey because there's a big chance they make themselves look stupid because they're not up to speed with the clarifications or your proposition stuff or the
Sally Calverley [25:36] Yeah, basic.
Jeremy Brim [25:56] dialogue meetings you've had or whatever it is. So, you know, senior people, that sponsorship of this activity, even what I call a 2%, it's a tiny amount of their time, but they just need a bit of a WhatsApp and a bit of a coffee or a chat with the Bid leader. How's that going? Show a bit of support through the life cycle of client stuff. particularly capture into bidding, that'd be much more successful. So what...
Sally Calverley [26:17] And we see that in, sorry, I was going to just quickly say we see that in collaborative behavioral assessments because they come in at the, you know, the last piece. And very often it will be a director or even an equity member who has to turn up and be part of. And that's the first time they've been involved in the bid.
Jeremy Brim [26:22] I call.
Sally Calverley [26:40] you know, some pushy, interesting, fruity discussions that happened during the first couple of days. So, yeah.
Jeremy Brim [26:42] Yeah, behind closed doors often I have to challenge people like that quite hard. And sometimes they like it and understand it, because ultimately I'm just trying to make them millions of pounds in more profit. The thing is turning up late to that key interview, that fairly often is the kind of, oh, I'm very busy.
Sally Calverley [27:00] Exactly that, yeah.
Jeremy Brim [27:08] I'll turn up later on for a deal that will be 20% of their revenue or 20% of profit moving forwards. And you kind of think, well, what did you have to do that was more important? There's a bit of prioritization. And like I said, it doesn't have to be big amounts of time. It's just put the inputs at the right time to give the right sponsorship to get them.
Sally Calverley [27:13] Exactly. And from our perspective, I can only, sorry, they keep talking over you. I do apologize.
Jeremy Brim [27:30] A lot of people suggest. No, you're right. I was just going to say a lot of people don't get that. And there's a big problem, Sally, that we both see symptoms of, which is nobody is taught how to actually grow a B2B, B2G business and what the funnel looks like for that or the client journey at any point in their careers. The amount of very senior people I talk to who've never heard the term capture, So they don't understand their mid-game at all. They just think you bid loads of stuff, get on some frameworks and it will be all right, gov. But it's not these days. Well, certainly you're building a higher risk and significantly less optimized business than you could be. And the ones that do get it, will smash them to bits. So we see symptoms at the time.
Sally Calverley [28:21] It's interesting, isn't it? If AI became the only way that bids were assessed, that might work. Actually, but...
Jeremy Brim [28:30] Well-ish, but the thing is, AI is only as good as its context that's given.
Sally Calverley [28:32] I got shaping the beard, I.
Jeremy Brim [28:39] So, you know, I've got loads and loads of clients where they're just free-balling stuff into Copilot and bidding more. And they think that's really clever. But actually, you've got to, even if it's just Copilot, you still need a bid process and you still need the upfront capture or at least research positioning stuff. have a bit of a chat with Copilot about that in a co-work in a project, and then move to a new chat about qualification that takes into account that context, and then have another chat about your strategy, etc. So you get a waterfall effect that's informed with context. If you just bung a question in and maybe a bit of spec and ask it to answer the question, it won't understand what's important to the client, why they call things certain things. Humans involved in particular your game, how they...
Sally Calverley [29:23] But I know anecdotally that that's exactly what's happening with the result that because everybody's using, everybody's using Copilot, The bids are pretty much word for word in some situations. So it's like, OK guys, don't do that.
Jeremy Brim [29:42] Yeah, it's slightly word for word in a slightly sickening, slightly American, not very, very ultra positive way, but that doesn't really answer the question in the way the client was hoping and doesn't really reflect what they really meant in the spec, not just what's written on the page. So it's all, my top tip is it's all about context. An interesting anecdote though, Sally, one of my AI friends was telling me, or reminded me of this week, is that if a human leaves your business, and you close their Copilot account, all of the context of everything they've ever worked on with Copilot goes.
Sally Calverley [30:25] Who?
Jeremy Brim [30:25] So you might you might have the output documents, the bids they worked on, but you'll have no idea how they got there. And so that's quite interesting. Obviously, you can do company level stuff and things, but most organisations, if people leave, they take their context, their approach, their all of the sort of softer element of how they got there out. So I thought that's quite interesting. So it's why company platforms like Bidscript, they take a context at a company level, not individual level, so that people can't take it with them or
Sally Calverley [30:48] That is really interesting. Interesting.
Jeremy Brim [31:00] So it's quite interesting. So trust is a big thing for us, right? You mentioned trust. So what is it that humans do that erodes trust, I guess, as part of collaboration or just generally in life?
Sally Calverley [31:02] Well, the big thing is not doing what they say they're going to do.
Jeremy Brim [31:17] The.
Sally Calverley [31:21] Not. And that goes down to how we communicate as well, because if... I mean, we've just all watched the traitors, right? So we know it's actually quite difficult to tell if somebody's lying. But we can tell when people aren't being authentic. That's a slightly different thing. And we can build trust by saying what we're going to do, doing it, and then... telling people we've done it. It's an artificial process, but it's a very quick way to build trust in a relationship, business relationship or other relationship. And we use that as a tool actually during our building of these collaborative behavioural sessions. So because we need everybody in this team, this high performing team, to trust each other. And there's lots of tools that we use for that. This high performing team are often a group of high performing executives from multinational organisations who might have met before, but equally they might not ever have met before. And we often have five days. So it's a quite intense, accelerated process that we put people through. Being able to build trust with other people, i.e. people trust you, also depends on you understanding how to trust. It's very often the case that people want to be trusted, but don't themselves trust. And that's, you talked about challenge earlier on, a lot of the work that we're doing is challenging people and getting them to think, do what you've just done, which is go, I haven't thought about that. And putting themselves in such, we don't do things like, you know, dropping people, those sorts of things. But we do put people in mock. work environments, which are the equivalent of that, and get them to work with each other in. as live situations so that they can imagine what it would be like in a real situation and how their colleague will behave.
Jeremy Brim [33:52] Yeah, this is a, oh, we could do a whole podcast on this one, Sally. We're going to be out of time in 10 minutes, but this one's really important to me. So it's important in what I teach in cam and capture, key account management and capture stuff, because it takes you a long time to build trust with other humans, but you can lose it in an instant.
Sally Calverley [33:53] Like that.
Jeremy Brim [34:13] Yeah, but what it's crashing into, it's quite, in bigger firms, it's quite easy to get fairly senior quite quickly by either saying yes to everything or being overly positive about everything and worse, just like barefaced lying. And so, you know, I've fired a really significant client this year because two of their fairly senior people lied to me and or tried to stab me in the back. And I, my wife and I have a golden rule. We have a [bleep] free business. We do not, apart from me, but we do not tolerate it. Because I can go and win, I'm awesome at winning work, obviously, because it's what I teach people to do. So we only work with people that we want to help be successful, but critically, they need to want to play along with us and do the right things.
Sally Calverley [34:51] That's a good thing. Sacrament. OK. Good.
Jeremy Brim [35:13] with critically integrity. So if people, I'm very upfront with people about it this time these days. I said it at the start of a full day training course the other day. I'll be your best mate. I'll help you along, introduce you to people. I'll remember things that were important to you and send you a little WhatsApp, you know, like I've just done, I've just had an interaction with a client. opportunity came out on Find Attendee yesterday and I sent it to him straight away because I knew their systems wouldn't pick it up for a day and they'd lose a day on the Bid Programme. And so I said, look, I've picked this one up by accident, just by chance instantaneously. I know this one's important to you and they really appreciate it. I love you back. But, you know, I said to people at the start of a big training thing this week, if you lie to me, you're out. And so, because that whole, and I get people a lot, you must get this, Sally, people want you to train them in influencing skills. And I get a lot in business of what I call Fisher-Price influencers. where it's not, it's sell me this pen, Wolf of Wall Street [bleep]. It's not genuine influence with authenticity. So if you haven't got the client's best interests at heart and you're just looking to create value for them and take a share of that in return, Something's wrong, yeah.
Sally Calverley [36:32] Yeah, so we have an equivalent to that, which is...
Jeremy Brim [36:34] The.
Sally Calverley [36:36] We will win people top marks on the collaborative behavioural assessment because we're good at it. And we really commit to it. If we take you on as a project, we go all in. And we will be good at that. But what we can't do ever is coach people who aren't in the room. Yeah, so if people don't turn up or they're in the room and, as has happened, are applying for jobs whilst I'm trying to help them collaborate. That's not ideal. So yeah, we tend to work with selected clients. Clients like working with us, they'll take us into their next project. That's usually how our work works. We're not a massive business. We choose who we work with. We don't have a no [bleep] rule, but we do have a working with clients that we enjoy working with rule because life's too short not to do that. You know, it's.
Jeremy Brim [37:42] Sorry, do you find when you're helping clients going into a big presentation or set of dialogue meetings? I've got one at the moment, actually, big infrastructure thing, where they've fallen at the first hurdle. So the first question I ask is, are the people you're going to put in front of the client, were they involved in writing the bid, or at least in solution and storyboarding? No, they were not. Disaster. Oh, it's much harder. So generally speaking, where people are asking me to coach people in presentation skills, The ones who actually turned out to be a bit rubbish or don't perform are the A-team who weren't available to work on the bid, so the bid team wrote the bid, or the ones who were better natural presenters, but are never actually going to work on the project and weren't involved in the bid. Because they fall apart in Q&A for a starter, because they don't understand the The project.
Sally Calverley [38:43] And they're not close to it, and they don't have the detail, and yeah.
Jeremy Brim [38:46] It's the confidence, isn't it? It's the confidence factor. So I'm guessing you must see that a bit as well. But it's my top tip for anyone listening. Think through at the start of a capture campaign who is going to be involved in delivery and therefore should be involved in the presentation. Even
Sally Calverley [38:49] Fact. Yeah, that. That's the hope of Graham.
Jeremy Brim [39:06] Yeah, that's the holy grail, isn't it? Because we're on people.
Sally Calverley [39:06] Yeah, yeah, that's what pilots want.
Jeremy Brim [39:11] Yeah, because they will see what they will be working with.
Sally Calverley [39:11] And really, that's not. Yes, they want to know what it's going to be like to work with you. I mean, often, it's not always the case, but often the client organization, certainly in the mega projects, client organization is a single purpose vehicle. is not going to be 10s of thousands of people across the world. And they know that the consortium that they select can, if it chooses to do so, mobilise 10s of thousands of people. So what they want to know is who is it going to be our point of contact? And are you going to care about us? And are you going to look after and help us achieve? our ambitious goal that we are accountable to central government for. That's what they want to know. And there's a lot of trying to game the system by having professionals who keep turning up to these things. If I am coaching a team, I know I will be able to beat those other teams. I just, because our process is different and we are preparing the team that is going to deliver. And that is fundamentally different in energy, in behaviours, in approach, in attitude than somebody who's just turning up to do a collaborative behavioural assessment. They did one yesterday.
Jeremy Brim [40:38] Yeah, yeah, we're good at that, but not necessarily the same. So what's the, I guess, the golden question? How do we set people up to be authentic and not sound like they're over-rehearsed once they get in that room?
Sally Calverley [40:39] Because it's back to the confidence that we were talking about earlier on. So we always have a dress rehearsal. And the intent is that the dress rehearsal is always going to be much harder than the one that they actually do. So, yeah, so I've seen over the last 10 years, I can't pull a number out of my head, but I've seen so many different collaborative behavioural assessments in different ways of assessing collaborative behavioural assessments. So there's all sorts of things that happen, could happen. So we make sure they all happen. Not just some, but all of them. So they're really proud with their paces and they know that whatever's thrown at them, they'll be fine. But they've also become a strong high performing team. So they trust each other. And Have that real sense of... confidence that they can collaborate come what may, whatever's thrown at them, they're going to be fine. And that's, you know, there's a point during the five days that we spend with people that we can tell that they've got it. And from that point onwards, we're just refining. The sooner we get to that point, the better they're going to be.
Jeremy Brim [42:19] Very good. Well, that's a great place to finish. I'm afraid we've run out of time. We could talk all day, couldn't we? Yeah, exactly. Well, we do have a good chat, don't we? But there's so much, there's so much synergy, so much ground to cover, and it's such an exciting time in this space. Is that the best for what's the great thing is?
Sally Calverley [42:25] It's always the same when we talk Jeremy.
Jeremy Brim [42:37] with AI raising the tide, if not quite levelling the field. The ones that figure out their bid process that's best enabled with AI will still score the best. But what's great about more emphasis on human contact all the way up to behavioural assessments and competitive dialogue is the best teams, the best businesses should win because they've got the best solutions and the best people aligned to go and deliver the thing. So I think it will actually bring us around to the right answer. If the only thing is you've got the fact that, you know, under the new procurement act, you've got the new flexible competitive procedure, which means that clients can shape what the sequence looks like or what the task and the challenge is. Yep.
Sally Calverley [43:23] That's what I'm most excited about, because for me, putting behaviours at the end of the process is the wrong place for it to be.
Jeremy Brim [43:30] Interesting. Yeah, I get that. Yeah, we should be doing this stuff at the start of a dialogue and shaping their specification and then responding to that. Not the other way around. And then the government's new innovation playbook and enabling clients to be client number one for a new thing. So setting a challenge. rather than defining a specification and getting you to bid against that. That's really interesting. So I think we'll see that manifest in ITT and other markets first, but I think that will come to us. How do you build a railway from X to Y or A to B? I think that's probably the right sort of answer in time. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out, but it's a really exciting time. So, thank you.
Sally Calverley [44:12] or even a different question, which is how do we move freight and people from X to Y?
Jeremy Brim [44:19] Yeah, because it could be a Hyperloop or whatever. Yeah, it could be that autonomous, well, the actual, if you take HS2, for example, a lot of people won't like me saying this, but the answer was just wait for autonomous vehicles to transport all that stuff at night when we're asleep down the motorway, obviously. So we never, by the time it's built, we won't need it.
Sally Calverley [44:20] To answer, yeah.
Jeremy Brim [44:41] But you know, such as for anyone driving around London, you see Waymo's driving around London now, you know, autonomous taxis. So it's coming a lot faster than perhaps we'd hoped. But anyway, story for another time, we should probably do a podcast. Thank you for coming on, Sally. It's lovely to see you as always. Where can people find you? Just search for Linkedin.
Sally Calverley [45:04] Yeah, Linkedin, Sally Calverley. That's the easiest one. Also our website, which is www..milestonegroup.uk.
Jeremy Brim [45:14] Wonderful. Thank you very much, Sally. See you next time.