Just the Words “Win-Lab” process is dynamic, facilitated, and has the single and sole purpose of enabling bid-management teams to prepare winning bids. It is about getting it write.
The Win-Lab process recognises that behind every successful bid lies a series of gateways through which the bid-management team has passed. There will have been a series of commercial decisions made to qualify either in or out; a beauty pageant of competitive dialogue that has been navigated; an iterative process of RFI’s responded to; a series of encoded messages decoded to interpret correctly the buyer’s real drivers; meetings negotiated; communications, misunderstandings, confrontations and judgments, and finally a word bid document submitted that had to be point and pitch perfect. And all this beyond the simple task of submitting the bid…
The truth is that in many organisations the process of tender submission and bid management has to be undertaken by individuals or groups of people from different work streams, in different parts of the supply chain whose job then becomes one of having to present their solutions in one synthesised, coherent and compelling voice, but whose single common point of reference is the bid. It’s a difficult call. But it’s one we help overcome.
How?
Well, our process recognises that those involved in the preparation of a bid are usually too close and too involved to be able to ask client driven questions such as “So what?” “Why you?” and “What’s it doing for me?” and to be able to see the wood for the trees, and that therefore an outside facilitator, us, is able, throughout the bid process to constantly focus and refocus the bid team on the core issues that create success, can play a vital role.
There is no one thing that creates a winning bid, that results in success, but there are a lot of things that together account for it. It’s what Team GB Cycling call “Marginal Gains”… that’s what this process brings.
Target Audience
All bid-management teams and those involved in the submission process. The programme starts when bid submissions are invited.
What We Do
Step One – “Stick or Twist”
To proceed or not to proceed? That is the question pre-bid. Assessing the win-ability and the desirability of winning the bid.
Step Two – “I tell you what they want, what they really, really want.”
Trumps.
Step Three – “Playing our cards write” – Differentiators and Discriminators.
The Authors’ Clinics.
Step Four – On-going evaluative process, structuring, reviewing, evaluating the bid costing and pricing.
Keeping the process on track
Step Five – Project managing the bid writing process – Getting it write.
The Movie Trailer
Step Six – Crafting the Executive Summary, the key paper within the bid document that sets out the business case.
Getting it Write
Step Seven – Proofing reading and Editing
Tone of voice – A continuing element throughout the process. Not just checking for punctuation and grammar but for continuity, meaning and that sense of a single, corporate voice.
The process, or parts of it, works for any size of tender, even when there’s no consortium involved. What’s true is that winning tenders is not just to do with cost it’s to do with the marginal gains that together add up to a binning bid…We’ve worked successfully with companies like Logica and Sir Robert McAlpine, we could work with you,