Free Webinar - What High Performing Modern Bid Teams Do Differently

Thank you to everyone that registered and attended our webinar this week on what high performing work winning and bid functions do in the modern era. 

Jeremy would be very happy to grab a call with any of you and your stakeholders as appropriate to talk through any of the content of the webinar, what we find in the market that drives performance and the concept of maturity benchmarking. You can book one to suit any time using this link here.  You can view details of our maturity benchmarking approach here. 

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Transcript

[00:00.1]

Right, we will get underway. Good afternoon everybody. Let's get into things. I'll try and let people in that coming in a bit later as I go to leave it every now and again and press the admit all but.

[00:15.2]

And it's my first time using teams for a webinar rather than zoom. I realised I could do this via teams, as effectively hopefully. So, we'll see how it goes. So, good afternoon everybody. I'll talk about myself for a bit while people join in and then get on to the important stuff.

[00:33.5]

So if we've not met before, I'm Jeremy Brim. I own a business called Growth Ignition. We're a transformation, consulting, largely training, capability, development, business, all in the work winning space. And so we also own a platform called the Bid Toolkit, under the Growth Ignition umbrella.

[00:57.3]

That is an online bid process and guide with the same training we offer in the bidding and capture stage baked into its process pages. And so do go and have a look if you're an individual or particularly if you're in a smaller business. You may well find that useful.

[01:14.6]

We will send an email out, after this session with a link to the video, this slide deck and to some useful tools and content like the Bid Toolkit, our podcast, etc. Etc. But there's a bit of an overview in terms of what we do in Growth Ignition in the transformation space.

[01:34.8]

We do maturity benchmarking workshops with clients which we'll get onto a bit later on. Leverage some of that content to help you understand what good looks like in this conversation. But we largely help organisations understand what their work winning target, operating model should look like through benchmarking, understanding what their optimum model would look like, role descriptions, competencies, behaviours, all of that kind of stuff.

[02:02.3]

Largely working with hr, learning and development functions and leadership teams. We do consulting stuff across the life cycle, helping people with their market research and business planning, with development of their client development programmes, key account management programmes, capture of their key pursuits.

[02:23.1]

I tend to outsource, actual bid writing consulting services to our partners, bid solutions and to some other friends from time to time. I work on two or three hands on bids a year here in the consulting space to stay sharp working for my friends.

[02:40.4]

But you know, there's a lot to get on with so I can't help everybody with their bids. And we have a whole experience programme that my wife's marketing agency run, around client experience too, which people might find useful. We do accountability, part of the stuff where people can bring us in, to hold them to account against the plans that we've developed with them and the strategies that we've helped them work through.

[03:05.4]

I do lots of talks like this, public speaking, so, both in public events and conferences, but also particularly for corporates. I speak at leadership events, graduate events, leadership development programmes about how to grow B2B, B2G businesses as well as other stuff that I do in the financial freedom, financial literacy space, particularly teaching kids and young people about money and debt, in our other business destination freedom.

[03:37.5]

And then obviously the real engine room of the business is in capability development. We train people in all of those aspects and provide digital online tools, in all of that space. Two. So enough selling I guess or positioning.

[03:53.5]

So the context then. So this talk is about what we find high performing work, winning functions and bid teams, are doing these days, in this ever changing environment. Obviously it's been a bit of a bumpy couple of years with it doesn't really matter which way you vote politically, it's not a political point, but there has been some more instability in the world than we've had for some time and certain, you know, tariffs and all of that kind of stuff as well as the impact of Brexit, and then government spending, rightly or wrongly through the pandemic and where that's left us from a UK perspective.

[04:34.0]

Some of you are from abroad and some of those countries have similar sorts of challenges. But here in the UK we particularly have a larger public sector debt than we've had in generations since the Second World War probably. And worse, the confidence of the funders of those bonds, in the government's ability to pay it back, is at an all time low.

[04:57.6]

And so the interest rates on the debt that we're paying as a country is extremely high, and gets worse with the more instability that we face. And so that's the real pressure that Rachel Reeves is under. We're all very Busy talking about 37,000 migrants or asylum seekers when we should be focused on, you know, that's important.

[05:18.3]

But in the grand scheme of things we've got a mountain of public debt, failing services, 4 million people struggling to feed themselves consistently. We've probably got bigger fish to fry. So. But public spending wise, we will see we've got a budget towards the end of this month.

[05:33.9]

We've already had a budget and a spending review from this Labour government in the uk, that wasn't necessarily fun, but the budget that's to come probably won't be much fun either. There's rumours of public sector spending on infrastructure being pared back or spun out over a longer period of time.

[05:53.1]

We will see. The positives are though that it doesn't matter which way you vote. This Labour government might not be very good at politics and might be quite unpopular, but they are a bunch of geeks that are doing a bunch of stuff which is quite helpful for us in how we scale businesses that sell to the public sector, business to government, B2G and even private sector business to business.

[06:18.6]

So perhaps the stuff on NI and things might not have been helpful but the stuff they've been doing, around the 10 year infrastructure strategy and defence strategy for instance, unplugging, the forward look of pipeline of opportunity from the political cycle is quite helpful.

[06:38.1]

And there is a data set for instance in construction infrastructure you can download, basically a big spreadsheet that tells you where all of the money is going to be with who over a 10 year span in theory and then also bottom up with the advent of the new Procurement act.

[06:54.0]

All public bodies are meant to be publishing notices of everything they're going to procure on an 18 month horizon. And so someone's got an AI read. I'm just checking the Q and A. Etc. Good afternoon. Good afternoon Robin.

[07:10.0]

So I forgot to say that do feel free to use the Q and A function or the chat function to ask me stuff as we go. I' check in now and again. It shouldn't just be me doing all of the, the talking. Hopefully you'll have some questions and insights and things to say as we go.

[07:26.4]

So yes, so hopefully Labour might not be great at politics but they are pretty good at the geeky stuff. So as well as implementing some things that were already in flight like the new Procurement Act. So B to B, B to G wise we should have a greater treasure trove than we've ever had.

[07:42.0]

So it's not all bad news. There's a bit of instability. It just means we've got to focus more as we'll come into in a second. I guess for us, for the bidding people on the call, we do in theory have a professional body or a membership association, I should say the APMP, the Association of Proposal Management Professionals, that are 30 years old in the US and 25 years old perhaps in the UK.

[08:10.2]

Is the UK chapter it's actually the UK conference at the moment, today and tomorrow. I'm going to the dinner tonight in Newport, actually. But it's, it's interesting, for instance, that we've had such a huge, demand and volume for this webinar and we've got quite a big number of people that have logged in for it when the conference is ongoing.

[08:31.0]

So the challenge we've had with the AP is that it's not taken that seriously by business leaders or it's not known or heard of. It's had some challenges in recent, years. The last five or six years, I guess it's only got about 7% market penetration.

[08:47.4]

So there's about 250,000 people around the world who have a job title connected to just bids and proposals, let alone capture key account management, etc, and they've got about 14 or 15,000 members. So my, if my math serves me correct, that's about 7% market penetration.

[09:07.7]

The US leadership of the association would say that's fantastic. The rest of us in the rest of the world would wonder a bit. And it continues to grow, but how big and how helpful could it be is the question. It's had a failed RE brand that was quite damaging at the time and then it's had the failed implementation of PAS360, which was meant to be a new BSI standard for how you operate a bids and proposals function.

[09:34.8]

That wasn't very good and was panned widely, by a number of people on this call, actually, and very senior people in the worlds of bids and proposals, because it was generated by one small bidding consultancy without much consultation with anyone else, and used as a bit of a funnel for, for their business, which was a very clever marketing tactic, but just from my perspective, not particularly seen as a positive thing by leaders in the industry.

[10:00.3]

Should have been something that APMP should have done themselves. Perhaps so, but the positive is actually, since then things have really begun to improve in the UK chapter, at least we've got. Now the. The chapter board is dominated by employed people rather than vendors like me, which I think is better.

[10:18.4]

I think they should have a separate, an appropriate forum for vendors to be able to contribute. U.S. vendors, U.S. training companies should be able to layer in our best practises and provide insights, for the industry the same as any other members.

[10:35.0]

But it just feels better to me that there's people without perhaps a commercial agenda leading the thing, but open to conversation on that. And so. And we've now got a new Chief Executive in the States, who hopefully may take things in a more stable direction.

[10:52.4]

But I guess the key message here is it's all we've got, the apmp. So we should support it particularly in its work in bringing young people early in their career into the discipline. There's probably no one at university or college today who's thinking about becoming a bid writer and potentially particularly because of AI etc.

[11:14.0]

Whereas it's still actually a very rewarding and fantastic career choice for many. And so you know, we'll see what the uncertainties of AI etc brings. But you know, we should support the apmp. We should. And particularly the senior people on the call should look to see how we should give back and contribute.

[11:34.7]

I tend to do it in my own way these days through mentoring people, through doing calls and things like this, speaking events etc in our own World. Because in some ways it's helpful to us that APMP doesn't fly because we can commercially do our own thing.

[11:50.2]

But hopefully actually with hand on heart, the best thing for the discipline would be if we support it and particularly in its development of young people, the pathway in through modern apprenticeships in this sport, and perhaps even degree level qualifications.

[12:06.5]

So watch this space. Hopefully it gathers some new momentum. But at the moment the problem we have in terms of the development of our functions and high performing work winning is that there isn't a chief exec around who's ever heard of APMP or cares.

[12:21.6]

And so we need to get it on the agenda. We should get them doing more work in challenging the Cabinet Office and Crown Commercial Services and the government commercial function in their approach to procurement, things like that. I'd love to see more of that. Rather than being on receive, playing victim, let's get on the front foot, get out in front of things.

[12:39.7]

So go and play your part clearly. Last bit of context is AI I guess, and how it's really changing the world, and particularly the world of bids and proposals. We'll talk later about the different use cases of AI.

[12:56.0]

But the thing is exploding and it is moving on at a speed. It's getting better and better in its applications and its quality, in those applications. And so we just need to be aware as high performing bid functions of where we stand, how we develop innovation in this space.

[13:13.3]

And so we'll come back to that in a bit. So a first point of principle that we're finding is pretty super important actually. And so I'm on my 22nd client in 21 months, I think it is, ranging from a 200 person business to a 5,000 global superpower, you know, big brand where 80% of their margin, their profit is coming from 20% of their clients.

[13:43.0]

If you just take a moment to think about that, that's insane, isn't it? And so none of them have been more than 3 percentage points out of that in any, in either direction. And none of the chief execs or board members that I broke that news to knew, because their companies work with lots of friends and lots of people they've worked with for years and all of that kind of stuff.

[14:06.1]

And they're not just, they're not looking at that good profit and profitability through the right lens. And this, this Pareto principle, and it's interesting, the Pareto principle that you get 80 of the outcomes for 20 of the efforts springs up all over the place in business.

[14:21.9]

It's really fascinating, in the work that we do with clients, but this is a big one. And it's kind of what we hang a lot of this, this talk off of today and our work. And so they're making a big bunch of profits over here with 20 of their clients.

[14:37.0]

They're making a bit more money with some rising stars and falling. And then they tend to have a very long tail of smaller clients. When we've then dug in, in the last six months into the DNA of which clients are these ones and why, and which clients are these ones and why, it's been really quite interesting.

[14:55.0]

So these clients, tend to be clients that have got either mega projects that go on for a long time or particularly have programmes of projects or contracts that go off into the distance. So you've got an opportunity at repeat business.

[15:11.4]

We've done an article actually this week that goes out, by email on Friday and LinkedIn newsletter on Saturday about the Pareto principle. That's got some stats in it. I did a video on it that went out this morning. What, does it say Tuesday? Yes, this morning.

[15:28.0]

And so it's, it's quite interesting when you unpack this stuff that, because it costs you, you should bear in mind it costs you between five and seven times more to secure a pie of business with a new client than it does with an existing client.

[15:44.1]

You are 60 to 70% more likely to secure a piece of business with that current client. Your probability, sorry, of securing a piece of business with a current client is 60 to 70%. Your probability of securing a piece of business with a new client is 5 to 20% max from a cold standing start.

[16:04.1]

And so what we tend to find here, these clients have those repeat programmes of work. They have engaged you early, perhaps you've deployed captcha. These companies tend to have more captcha going on or some form of capture has taken place ahead of an opportunity landing.

[16:24.0]

And these have largely been won on quality, not price. The quality of engagement has been better. You've been able to price your proposals at a lower risk, higher margin, through better collaboration with those clients.

[16:39.2]

But critically, what we find is that your people like their people and you are not stretching or stressing your people too far in the delivery of that service with them, which is quite fascinating. And so what we tend to find is, bear in mind, we are already in a fight for talent like never before.

[17:02.5]

So just in the construction industry, there's a load of you in construction, we are going to lose half a million people in the next five to eight years through retirement out of the 2.5 million in construction and they will not be replaced irrespective of the government's skills agenda, etc.

[17:19.8]

The skills funding that they announced a few months ago is just to tackle the 1.5 million homes. So what we do in terms of skill shortages for power distribution, which is 46 billion in the pipeline, for schools, 15 billion prisons, there's eight of those, 800 million pounds each national hospital programme, 251 billion pound hospitals.

[17:41.2]

Where are the humans going to come from to service that need is a big question. And so, you know, we are, we're going to have to work more and more with clients that are great to work with, that have work in locations that don't stress our people too much and in environments where it's good to work.

[18:01.7]

Or your people will leave and get a job somewhere else for more money. Money. So we should reflect on that and how we position ourselves as the work winning function, the growth function in your business. Bear this in mind in, in how you look at it. So my top tip, if you take anything else away from today is go to finance, your FD, finance manager, etc, and ask them where does 80% of your margin come from?

[18:26.4]

I bet you it's around 20% of your clients. I had a client where the chief exec was absolutely adamant. They've got 5,000 people around the world who's absolutely adamant. They had 132 strategic clients. Jeremy got the accountants to do the maths, they've got 14.

[18:42.8]

If you just add one or two clients to that list each year, you'll smash your numbers to bits. What we find in the tail down here, it's quite interesting. These clients tend to be more, on average clients where they're new clients more often. You've won the projects or contracts on price rather than quality.

[19:01.1]

Perhaps you've underbid it, there's higher risk. Your people are travelling further in the supply chain are more stretched. Perhaps if you're a contractor, you're working with a strange supply chain you've not worked with as often before, the consultants that are upstream to you are strangers, etc.

[19:19.0]

Etc. And so let's just bear that in mind in our thinking. You're quite right, Michelle. It's amazing how many clients don't put their efforts into client retention. So now we know what we know. Pareto Principle 80, 20. Just imagine, rather than bidding everything, if we just added a client or two to that list each year, you know what that would look like.

[19:41.6]

So I was in the board meeting of a 1.2 billion turnover, building contractor, three months ago, playing back to them the results of a series of maturity benchmarking workshops that I carried out with each of their businesses that are around 250 million each, across the country, different regions.

[20:01.4]

And I realised as I was presenting this slide to them that they'd never seen anything like this before. So it's quite interesting. So the grey bit in the background I drew in the boardroom of E.C. harris. In 2008, as the banking crisis was unfolding outside.

[20:20.2]

We had a business of a thousand odd people around the world, 216 partners, equity partners, and they did not have a single pipeline, believe it or not. They didn't have a CRM platform, they didn't have a single pipeline of opportunities, and the world was going to hell in a handcart.

[20:36.8]

They thought they had a whole series of work here in delivery, but they didn't. They had a. For much of that work, they had a letter saying they were a preferred bidder, but they did not have a signed contract or a first invoice paid. And so they had nothing. And what happened was, for any of those old enough to remember, a lot of that work suddenly stopped overnight, right?

[20:57.7]

And for the first time in a generation, really, we hadn't had a big crash or disaster like that for 20 years or something, really. A couple of bumps in a row, but nothing that drastic. And so actually, a lot of Their work was here what should have been deal close and factored as much. And so they ended up making 80 people of their 500 people in London redundant in a couple of weeks.

[21:17.3]

It was a terrible time and many businesses had a similar experience. And so what I did, I worked with the business to help them understand that we needed to tag get one data source for every opportunity in the world world. And we did it just as a simple SharePoint site at the time but it could have been a big spreadsheet to be honest.

[21:36.1]

Whoops. And just let Julian in and so I got them to put all of their opportunities, get all the partners all around the world in a couple of days to put all their opportunities into one new database. You guys may well have a CRM platform wherever.

[21:51.5]

I don't really care what the data sources. It can be a spreadsheet as long as you've got one version version of the truth, a pipeline. And so we put all the opportunities in and we got them to tag every opportunity as to whether it was identify. So that's where we knew it existed but we hadn't engaged the client on it yet position.

[22:10.2]

So we are engaging the client positioning with them to ideally turn it into a negotiated piece of business. But worst case it's a competitive tender that we've shaped with the client and then so in that tender phase and then deal close negotiation, you know going through preferred bidder for building contractors that can be a very long second stage.

[22:32.6]

Now in a two stage deal that could be a couple of years in that world for consultants it etc perhaps less so and then into delivery so and notice the timeline across the bottom that was based on UK public sector at the time but we tend to find that still rings true and so for most markets actually regulated industry, bigger stuff in private sector etc.

[22:56.2]

Etc. So what I've noticed in years since is this overlay of the arrows that I've put over the top. And so what we tend to find first of all is that high performing organisations with or without us as a bid function tend to have a business plan.

[23:14.1]

So it's incredible to me the amount of times that I work with boards of businesses and ask them for a copy of their business plan and they do not have one or they have a spreadsheet that's got some numbers in it but nothing particularly concrete.

[23:30.0]

And so that's actually game changing as we'll see in a minute. Having a North Star, a property market research business Plan that tells you where the money's going to be with who and, and what we do with that, is particularly if we communicate that effectively to our people so they know their part in it.

[23:47.7]

That is game changing and what most businesses are really missing. So 500 people a month search for bid writing is a term on Google. 600, sorry, now we've had an update. 600 people a month search for bid writing in the UK alone for bid writing training. And that's cool because I've got a bid writing training business, but I do need to break it to the 1,000 people we train a year in B writing around the world that actually their ability to write compelling compliant bids is only 20% of the problem.

[24:18.4]

The real opportunity is in getting ahead of opportunities, particularly with their key clients and driving growth through this funnel. And so a business plan is the first stop. Let's know where we're going. The other two key planks are, then key account plans for those top clients that will deliver, most of your margin, particularly in two to three years time.

[24:39.9]

So don't write key account plans for your current biggest clients, write them for the ones that will be by margin, not revenue. Notice I say that and emphasise that because it's about profit, good profits, where your people enjoy themselves, clients are happy and you make money.

[24:56.5]

That's kind of my definition of good profit. Not just, you know, profiteering, taking people for a ride, and then capture of your key pursuits. So I did a turnaround project for a business unit of Morgan Sindel, the contractor, seven years ago now, where we took them from 23 million turnover, to 120 in just under three years.

[25:20.0]

I did a 18 month spell at the start and then they went off and executed on it. And all we did was some market research, developed a decent business plan, five key account plans for the top top clients and prospects that would deliver the majority of their margin on a two year horizon and then five capture plans for their top five deals.

[25:39.8]

And lo and behold, still today, those top five clients are their clients today, their platform clients that deliver their revenue and growth. They just caught another three clients to add one to the list as one drops off every year or two as their programmes come to an end or whatever, and they won all five of those key pursuits.

[25:59.1]

So there's a case study for that on our website that we'll share you a link to. So that, that's our funnel and our thinking and it's just as I Say nobody teaches your leaders that, it's quite important that we go on a bit of a journey as the bids and proposals community and capture community to enlighten our leaders so that we get out of this death spiral of endlessly bidding stuff and get ahead of our funnel.

[26:24.7]

So that by the time you get to a bid down here, if it is a competitive bid, if you've not managed to negotiate it, it or award through competition these days in the public sector, you've got a damn good chance of winning it, you've shaped it with the client. So a little bit of nuts and bolts in how we do that then.

[26:41.3]

So this is that business plan arrow unpacked. It's a mirror, a bit of a mirror board that I use with my clients. So we advise them to do some market research, understand where the money is going to be, with who. So if you're public sector facing, you can use that, that infrastructure, spend 10 year plan data plus the notices that are coming through from the public sector out the back of the new Procurement act to see what's coming.

[27:06.8]

And then we say create a dream list from that props of top, top 100 clients and opportunities. So how do you do that? So first of all look back at your workload from the last five years and understand where you've made money and not and why.

[27:23.0]

Try and define the DNA of what your perfect client looks like. So what you'll tend to find is on average over a five year span you've made your best profits, sustainable profits over time from those clients where you've had good relationships, where they've got programmes of work, there was the least friction in terms of procurement.

[27:44.1]

They were the easiest to service, their projects and contracts straight stretched the business least and your people were happy, your supply chain were happy. So just try and find the DNA of what those clients look like and where they came from. Try and understand also what is your contract or project sweet spot.

[28:02.6]

So how big, what type, where duration, complexity, enablers, you know, what is, what's your sweet spot of stuff look like? So run the market research data through that perfect client lens lens and through that contract sweet spot lens that will bring out a shorter list and then also think it through in terms of your capacity or future capacity and capability.

[28:24.4]

So what of that list could you reasonably service and what would be the positive consequences of winning a good proportion of that work? How many people would you need to recruit of what type, where to deliver that type of work? And that will inform a much better Business plan and targeting that you can then sequence through into what you go after.

[28:44.3]

So we tend to find that high performing businesses, as we say, if you look at it a different way, their owners have some objectives for the board that defines a bit of a vision. We're going over there, the business is going to look like this, doing these things, creating this kind of outcome for our clients and communities that informs that business plan with that targeting from the market research and then everything.

[29:07.1]

So that strategy that should be reviewed annually on a three to five year horizon, in terms of tactically then what we do about that, the tactics we should take to execute, we should have an aligned marketing plan and we'll get into what that looks like in a bit, in some maturity stuff.

[29:26.4]

But fundamentally all of our marketing efforts should be absolutely focused on the audience for those target opportunities that are in the pipeline. So we're not selling iPhones or Cocoa Cola. You don't need to market to the world. You need extremely precise propositions and engagement with your total addressable audience.

[29:46.9]

So if you're going to submit a hundred bids next year, every one of those bids is going to be read by five people on average. Who are they? That is your addressable audience for your marketing. You can figure out where they hang out, what publications they read, what conferences they go to or indeed do a bit of guerrilla marketing and event stuff.

[30:05.2]

Create your own roundtable breakfast events. Invite those people or good a proportion of those as you can, you know, have a theme as someone giving a talk or a site visit. But sit that prospect in between a happy client and the number one CV that will be in your bid.

[30:21.7]

A key delivery person. And you'll smash your numbers to bits if you do that three times around a breakfast table three times a year. Happy days. So account based marketing, that's called real precision, marketing, not topping out ceremonies or lots of social media posts.

[30:40.1]

It's much more precise than that. You should have as we'll come on to account plan sector plans and particularly account plans for those top clients that will derive most of your margin in a couple of years time. Zippered plans. Who do we need to know? What do they care about, who's going to interface with them, how regularly and what's the messaging we need to land with them if you nail that that you'll be wildly more successful than on average.

[31:04.6]

And then obviously we need to look at our pipeline often at least once a month and agree that actions, the next steps don't just talk about Them and lie to each other about, you know, the, the conversations you've had with clients. What's the next step, the next action that's going to drive closeness of relationship.

[31:22.4]

And what are our top five capture plans? At least three to five. Do them, you know, simple plans on a one page, add some level of complexity in another two or three next year and do that cycle on and on. Happy days, away you go. And then so review those plans.

[31:38.4]

You know, your marketing account plans quarterly at least your pipeline and your capture plans monthly. Just a teams call, half an hour. What's the next step? Make sure they're focused on action and adoption over flare and detail. We don't want files and files of PDFs have got stuff you found on the Internet.

[31:56.2]

We need to go and talk to people, make stuff happen, build relationships and trust. So away you go. And then operationally, day to day we want to be obviously submitting wonderful bids and mobilising service farming contracts, etc. Etc. So what's the, the vibe, the environment that drives great performance around what we've just talked about then if you have that backbone of tactics in particular, what do we need to drive through that?

[32:23.3]

So we find that high performing businesses first of all have great sponsorship. These are the things that we know to be true. The biggest defining factor in the growth of any B2B B2G business we find is good sponsorship of work winning end to end.

[32:39.2]

We in fact all of those aspects through the funnel that we just looked through, but particularly bidding, we've all worked on a bid probably that didn't go very well and it was because we didn't really have great sponsorship so nobody cared. And we've all worked on bids that have gone fantastically well.

[32:55.1]

We've knocked it out the park and it's because we had somebody on the board or the level below that was a 5 percenter as I call it, a really small proportion of their time. But they had, they had their shoulder behind us. Because what we tend to find if you've got good sponsorship, you get top down and bottom up, energy top down.

[33:14.3]

If they're aware the opportunity is coming, they've supported the capture or it's their key client in the cam phase, you'll magically find that the right resources are released for the bid and capture. Ideally, the right budget is applied, the right support is given and there's a buzz around the opportunity in the boardroom that cannot be underplayed in terms of the value of that.

[33:36.7]

But also Bottom up. If the kids, the young people early in their careers in the business know that somebody senior is going to be turning up to the odd meeting in the war room or on your team's calls, reviews, etc, many people will consciously or subconsciously see, notice that limelight is there to be had and will gravitate towards supporting you.

[33:57.8]

They'll go the extra mile, they'll go and research some stuff, they'll go and do that site visit etc. Etc. There's a real energy in the business that comes from this which is quite interesting. But that's, that's the biggest factor sponsorship. A new factor that we've begun to focus on in growth ignition in the last month is the concept of agency or high agency.

[34:20.5]

Our research at the moment, we're going to be doing more work on this. We did a blog post and a video on it last week. We tend to find that the businesses that grow, particularly the fast growing businesses, the noticeably fast scaling businesses have have a higher proportion of high agency people in them and or their processes, their approach and their leaders have baked into their DNA high agency thinking.

[34:50.3]

So what's high agency about? So first of all high agency, when people think of this concept they tend to think of sales people, business development people who have great energy, love to get out in front of people, love to talk to people, etc. Etc. And that is part of the dynamic, it's part of the DNA.

[35:09.2]

But actually as you'll see and I'll put a link to the article that we did on this last week, there's also for that side of the coin, the other side of the coin is actually that those people are open and feed on feedback.

[35:24.3]

They are looking to improve. They are relentless in their pursuit of creating greater value for clients which we'll come on to. And so yes they have talent and energy, they're game changers. Perhaps there's a higher proportion of those types of go getters in the business but not everybody needs to be like that.

[35:44.3]

But they also, they're not just bold big mouth people who are just driving like red in the insights profile, just driving things. They are also thoughtful, they have good emotional intelligence and empathy. They are interested in learning how to improve continually.

[36:01.6]

And so there's two sides to that coin that are quite interesting. So ideally we want some high agency people. They might be a bit of a pain in the butt sometimes but they will drive your business on. But if, even if we don't have that, we want to Synthesise processes, gateways without creating loads of red tape.

[36:21.3]

But we want to create a work winning environment that has high agency in its DNA. So we are constantly looking for feedback, insight, research to improve. We're constantly driving, engaging clients, understanding them with empathy and emotional intelligence.

[36:37.8]

If you can bake that into how you develop your strategy. So don't just have a kickoff meeting where you talk about, oh, what could our win themes be? Let's nail it in captcha. A year before ideally, but at least three months before a tender comes out. Hold your strategy meeting, then perhaps you do.

[36:54.3]

We did an article recently on the concept of pre mortems. Perhaps you do that. Ask yourself months before the bid comes out, how would we lose this deal if it came out today and what are we going to do about it? What's the gaps? How are we going to close those gaps? High agency thinking. So have a look at that.

[37:12.1]

It's quite interesting. We also tend to find that these businesses have a real focus on creating the greatest value for their clients, that those clients value things that are important to them. I'm going to be doing some work this week actually off the back of some stuff by Rory Sutherland, who's from the marketing B2C brand world.

[37:32.1]

Quite a fun guy in that space who's come up with the idea of reverse engineering value that client's value because it might not be big money savings. I've had a client recently that have lost a bid because they put in a proposition where they deliver a product project three months early for a client and the client said, but I can't move till that moving date so it's meaningless.

[37:53.8]

It's value that people value. So keep an eye out for our work in reverse engineering. True value that's valuable to that audience. But winners more often than not focus on creating the greatest value for the clients and then it's a human sport for all that's going on with AI etc.

[38:10.6]

We're already finding that, that clients in the public sector and private sector are asking for more FaceTime, real time with our people. All the way to the extreme of actually using the new competitive flexible procurement approach to create little mini competitive dialogues.

[38:29.0]

So they get more facetime with your people post submission. They're asking for more meetings, pre bid, more mid bid meetings outside of construction for the first time really clarification meetings post tender vendor interviews because they want to meet your people. And so in capture, in particular pre bid.

[38:46.2]

Let's get out in front of this, let's get those top three CVs that are going to be in your proposal or bid in front of that client, co solutioning with them, building trust, shaping that procurement. Let's get your delivery people to own accounts and relationships.

[39:01.9]

Some of my highest most profitable clients bonus their project directors on winning the next job with a client. Not just closing out their current project. Project that client level thinking programme thinking, and building trust with clients over time is a real driver of success.

[39:21.7]

And then lastly data, high performers tend to have a real grip on data. And also you know, through building those client relationships, deeper relationships over time, working with fewer, more, they can't help but tell you about their pipelines and how they feel about your, your performance and score you more effectively in your performance.

[39:41.9]

And so but data is the lifeblood of these businesses. If your board have greater clarity of data, of pipeline data in particular over a longer horizon and they have greater confidence in your ability to convert that, that will inform their investments in innovation and people, technology etc.

[40:00.9]

Which in turn will create more value for clients that you can sell to other clients events and the business becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And so data underpins all of this. I forgot to mention again because we've had a few people join, please do feel free to use the Q A or the chat function as we go.

[40:18.3]

I'll, I will have a little bit of time at the end so we've only got 18 minutes left. So we'll have five minutes for questions at the end. So we've all probably been in this room or party to it bidders conference where the client talks about their procurement.

[40:34.7]

You know they spend 20 minutes talking about themselves and how tough their job is etc and then 10 minutes talking about stuff we actually care about the procurement, how it's going to work, etc. In reality if you don't know what they're going to say before they say it, somebody else in that room. Absolutely, absolutely does.

[40:51.4]

I spend most of my life training people or executing capture programmes that do exactly that. Where we have shaped the procurement for that client. And this was our plan B. Our plan A was to negotiate the piece of business. The plan B is that we run a procurement that we're always going to win and that's why you get tender documents and when you look at the spec you think oh that really suits one of our competitors.

[41:14.4]

It's because the client shaped it that way probably. And so how do we get ahead of that? So we run maturity Benchmarking workshops with our clients audience. Two and a half hour session. I've put a link to it in the chat actually you can have a look at. I guess it's what I would promote out the back of.

[41:32.2]

This is something to consider. This is where we work through, through that funnel. So for each of those arrows across the funnel from earlier on, what basically bad, average and high performance looks like, this is the high level approach. There's, there's more detailed versions we can do with clients for this, this is our first two and a half hour version.

[41:52.3]

And so, but just notice if we can to through these that business planning wise there's a real vision direction training given to people in how to deliver these templates and the plans are based on real market data, you know, not just your current own pipeline.

[42:10.9]

You know and critically these measures are baked into the scorecards of their leaders and people. So I did one of these sessions this year with the highest performing business I've ever come across or business unit, massive repeat business, highly profitable, very happy people, very happy clients.

[42:29.1]

And their business plan is a one page distilled down into one page which everybody is communicated to on and everybody's metrics in their scorecard for their appraisal at the end of the year is part of it. So basically everybody's objective should be a subset of their line manager's objectives all the way back up to the chief exec.

[42:48.5]

The business becomes a pyramid scheme. Everybody pulling together in unity. We need carrot as well and that's why the vision is important. We're going over there. It's really exciting, come with me. But you need the stick of measures that people are hard measured against and that happens a lot less than you would think in business.

[43:06.0]

But it makes quite a big difference marketing wise. We touched on the concept of account based marketing earlier on on. So they're doing strategic thought leadership based on a real plan that sets the business apart. But it's hardwired to their pipeline and that addressable audience.

[43:22.2]

They're only talking to people that will be decision makers on their proposals and bids and their, their key clients. So there's a real hardwired pipeline, aspect to this, there's real insight behind this. You know there's thinking that really sets them apart.

[43:39.3]

And they run in terms of their events, thought leadership events. They're partnering, they've got alliances and they've got a sort of famous annual events cycle that's much more than just corporate hospitality. There's real thought and education in how they engage their clients, even in the public sector.

[43:55.2]

I'll hear some of you screaming at our public sector won't turn up to these things they do if you put on some education. So think about how we do that. We get into sectors and accounts and so so you know, basically you need your leaders of particular sectors to have their fingers on the pulse to really understand their markets, what's important to those clients, what they value, what's keeping them up at night so we can shape our thinking propositions and get ahead of key opportunities.

[44:22.4]

So your leaders are seen as industry leading light. So if you Google Mark Farmer at Cast, he developed a paper for government on how to build residential housing, his business or a bunch of quantity surveyors, project managers that are famous in that space off the back of it, it's called the Pharma Report.

[44:38.9]

He literally wrote the bible. How are you setting yourself apart in your markets that way doesn't have to be big money could just be really thoughtful blog posts with a reasonable rhythm inserted to the right audiences, email campaigns direct to the right audiences, etc.

[44:56.1]

Etc. But you know, and if we go got client wise, you might do performance tables of your key accounts, some key KPIs on when did you last do an annual report to them? When did you last do a net promoter scored feedback interview with them?

[45:11.6]

You know, proper decent relationship mapping, etc. Etc. Clearly to be a high performer you need a pipeline that ideally is integrated into a CRM platform, but not for the sake of it. That CRM platform is being used effectively to drive action, with detailed insight drawn from that in terms of data, leads, impressions from clients, etc.

[45:35.8]

And there's real sponsorship of this. It's not seen as a cursory data exercise. Your board are very interested. Perhaps they have power BI dashboards telling them about trends in slippage in key account activity, mapping back bid no bid decisions to win losses, etc.

[45:53.0]

Etc. So data is everything. It's what the business should thrive off of. So think about if you're a fairly immature business, at least tracking your wins, losses back against your bid no bid decisions. Can you see themes in what you're bidding and why you're losing, client feedback, etc.

[46:11.2]

Etc. Obviously there's a whole world of capture in the UK here. We're very immature in this space, but you really should be looking to get ahead of your top three deals, ideally 18 months ahead of tender, getting your people in a room, co solutioning with the clients people shaping their thinking.

[46:30.3]

So there's a bunch of work to do. The APMP approach to this isn't bad, but it was largely developed by bid writers as an aid memoir to what they wished had happened before the bid came out. There's lots of competitor analysis and all that sort of stuff. Our view of stress structure capture is you don't have any competitors because you negotiate the piece of business and nobody ever finds out about it.

[46:50.4]

Is the optimum or the first they do is in the press when it's announced. And so we need to look to procurement shape towards direct award negotiation with the fallback being tender. You're always going to win and so we do that through research initially in month one, building out of relationship plans, plans to co solutions, and then dealing with competition, Ghosting trade offs etc.

[47:14.7]

Etc. But there's a key aspect of this in zippering relationships over time, really understanding what they care about, what they value and building solutions back to that that they can't resist. Last couple of bits obviously bid no bids and everybody should be doing this.

[47:30.5]

Still an incredible amount of businesses don't. But it's the first thing is as any part of any review businesses, when someone has a profits warning, they bring a big management consultant in to review, do a review of their business. What's gone wrong if they have to ultimately submit proposals or bids, they will absolutely have one of their top three to five recommendations will be better qualification.

[47:52.5]

We've recently done a blog post on the Scotsman model for that and Alora, who I gave this talk in person for in London a few weeks ago, have a useful free tool for that. So again I'll send you a link to that and then in the bidding space, last five minutes.

[48:09.5]

Whoops, sorry, got that out of the way. In the bidding space the high performers are actively shaping opportunities. They're trying to move up the value chain. They're focused on disrupt disruptive value propositions that clients value and they're able to derive unique value for the client through innovations and solutions that really win them deals because it's your solution that will really win you the deals.

[48:35.0]

And their business leadership are engaged throughout, actively sponsoring, shaping deals. You're not on your own, you're not left holding the baby. Your leaders are involved from the start, really driving, sponsoring this activity, leading from the front, your contributors, playing their part.

[48:53.6]

There's a DNA in the business. We do a, a lot of work these days in upskilling businesses through webinars, modules of Leadership development programmes and graduate schemes in building a groundswell of people who understand why winning work is important and what's important in it and their role in it to sort of engender some real energy, team spirit.

[49:13.6]

So your SMEs, your subject matter experts, your technical contributors should be really engaged in the bid because they should be people that are going to engage up, working on the piece of business and be excited about it if we get the upstream stuff right. So we're working for clients that are great to work with on projects and contracts that people are excited about.

[49:33.2]

This should become a self fulfilling prophecy. So if you're a bidding person, there's some skin in the game for you to fix that upstream. You'll have a much better time in this bidding stream, if we're focused on those key clients more. So your people, they will go the extra mile if we can synthesise that environment.

[49:52.1]

But us bid team, we should be the trusted, trusted advisors to our leadership. Bid leaders and SMEs should be creating value on transmit. Ultimately I'd put it to you, the highest performing businesses have their bid team at the heart of all winning work.

[50:08.9]

The bid team manages their capture programmes and their key accounts. They get upstream influence. You tend to find that the leaders of those functions end up becoming chief chief of staff to the chief exec, that kind of stuff. And so it's quite important on bids we make a good impression, we upwardly mentor, and engage our leaders, about what good work winning looks like and use data to support our arguments.

[50:36.8]

Never get into an argument with them without your homework in place. But we should be able to put our argument forward that bidding these kinds of deals with these kind of clients, we're more, more successful and build from there, but gets engender some trust. We should be the hub of the growth of the business and ultimately the business.

[50:55.7]

Last couple of bits we should have do ask any questions or use the chat function. We should have very clear roles and responsibilities in all of this. In the bid toolkit we have these roles. You can click through and see the attributes and responsibilities of each of these roles. Certainly in the bid bid space, but some capture too.

[51:13.4]

But ultimately whatever your bid process looks like and its roles and responsibilities we should have a bid is a project the same as any other project. It's absolutely critical that you have clear roles and responsibilities baked into your processes. Everyone knows what they're accountable for by when, successful businesses are very, very clear on that and they have a balanced Flow of activity through the bid life cycle.

[51:36.5]

So in our bid training we talk about the theory of 25, 50, 25, 25 plan, decision, strategy, kickoff, solution, storyboard, 50, execute, write and price the thing. 25 reviews of reviews, finalise, sign off, safely submit.

[51:55.9]

That's utopia won't work for everyone. Some of your solutions will be too deep and have to ebb into things. But if you've got a four week bid and you try and do a week of plan, two weeks of create, one week of review, safely submit and get people into the idea of that being a sensible.

[52:13.1]

Lower stress, lower risk, better way of life when it comes to growing your business, you'll be more successful is what we tend to find. So we kind of talked about high agency as a newer version of this but you tend to find that the more successful businesses have an entrepreneurial spirit in the right way.

[52:32.2]

So some leaders use the word entrepreneurial to cover up the cracks of poor behaviour and lack of strategy. They're just all over the place, thrusting, doing things, talking to people, busy fools. And so we as the bid team need to engender entrepreneurial spirit and we need to be the entrepreneurial hub of the business.

[52:52.2]

Coming up with ideas, driving action, thinking, of more valuable things we can do for clients. But it needs to be in the right way that's aligned with the business plan and strategy. It's not just, you know, being salesy, that's not the same thing. And then clearly as we said, we need to harness AI in the right way.

[53:11.5]

There's far more use cases than just writing. So lots of people just think you should use chat GTP for getting your word count down or whatever. That's a fairly lo fi thing to do these days. People, you know, really look into it, watch what APMP are doing, what the PI community are doing in this space and what some of the providers are doing, particularly Daryl Woodward is good to follow on LinkedIn.

[53:34.1]

You know there's, there's much more going on here in how you can use these tools for research, how you can use them for data and analytics on feedback, all of those kinds of things. And so just, just think through, how you can use it. Nigel, I can see you're saying Jeremy, do fire in your questions.

[53:52.2]

So there is also, it's perhaps not for today, we're running out of time but the concept of high performing teams, both you as a bid function, if that's you, or how you work as a team with your stakeholders and storm and form to high performance. So there's a bunch of stuff you'll get it in the slide deck, that I'd hoped to cover but we're, we're out of time.

[54:13.9]

So in summary, I hope you, you've found that useful. Do feel free to put any Q A in. And so. Oh, Nigel's got a question here actually. Have you found your 8020 rule applies to organisations with project opportunities or ongoing contracts?

[54:31.8]

Yeah, that's quite interesting. Nigel. So it is both. But even the longer term contracts businesses that I've dealt with tend to have management consultants, reporting practises, all that kind of stuff and so it's tended to be a mixture companies that have bigger ongoing contracts but they also have shorter form stuff.

[55:01.3]

So we've not played this out so much with FM businesses. So much it's largely been projects or shorter contracts, consulting firms, IT firms, etc. Oh but you've, you've checked your last organisation which was long term contracts and it was 80 20.

[55:18.9]

So yeah, I, I need to do more work on that to clarify but it looks like it rings through. But I would say of the 22 firms that we've done that diagnostic with, 20 would definitely sort of form projects businesses.

[55:34.7]

Two would have had mega projects that go on a long time, or your maintenance contracts, that sort of stuff. But good question. We'll do some more work on that. Jill, I can see. Can we have, can we, can you add the links referenced in the chat please? I'll email those out to you guys.

[55:50.2]

So you've got some of that as well. Robin Re Win loss and lessons learned Public sector better at providing than other than other schools. Any tips for private sector win lose data score. So if your private sector clients aren't providing you with feedback you have to ask if they were the right clients in the first place.

[56:13.2]

So there is a procurement lawyer out there for instance, who's telling clients not to provide feedback or to give as little feedback as possible so they don't get challenged in the public sector. And my response to that was well that's great because I'm telling my high performing clients to not bid with rubbish clients that don't give you feedback because they're not going to be great to work with are they if they're not bought into you improving.

[56:36.7]

And so ideally you should be if you get back up that funnel and figure out who the key clients are with the right DNA for you, both public sector and private sector, and focus on those clients that engage you, collaborate, work better together, you'll probably be more successful.

[56:53.0]

You'll get the odd one that proves me wrong. An absolute massive of feast of profit with some awful buggers to work with. But your people won't like it and probably leave so swings around abouts, but you know, there you go. So Michelle's saying public sector always have to give detailed feedback or you would think, if you're not getting any feedback from the private sector, they would never.

[57:15.3]

Yeah, that's right. They're never into you, Michelle. You're right. The public sector are meant to give you detailed feedback and the New Procurement act was meant to compel more of that. That in reality they're quite scared of it because they're scared of challenge. And so we don't get great quality of feedback as often as we should, I'm afraid.

[57:31.6]

And we should again, let's try and work with the clients that do. So final thing, I've got to go but in terms of wrap up then I'll send you some links to the Bid Toolkit, our podcast. You'll get put into our email list for invites to further webinars, our drop in calls, you'll get access to our free LinkedIn group and you'll get those email updates.

[57:53.9]

And so thank you very much for joining. If you wouldn't mind, I'd really appreciate it if you do me a nice LinkedIn post, if you do us a nice LinkedIn post about this webinar, I'll send you a free zip file of our templates for bid plans, etc, and you'll get put into the drawer for a 500 quid Amazon voucher.

[58:13.3]

And if you refer me to a client where we, we secure some training, I'll give you 200 quid. Or if you're a bit uncomfortable with blatant bribes, we can donate the money to charity. So hopefully there's some impetus there for you to promote us to others. Hope you found this session useful.

[58:28.6]

Thank you very much and I'll see you on the next one. Thank you everybody. Have a good rest of the day.