Tales from the pitch

Management educator Mark Horstman says ‘good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement’. Which is a delightful way of saying that we learn mostly from mistakes.

And when it comes to the prosecution of high value bids, there’s an almost infinite variety of mistakes you can make.

Of course, it’s much more fun to learn from someone else’s mistakes than your own. So here’s a sample of stories from personal experience that illustrate some of the more common pitfalls for bid professionals.

Car park capers

We were invited to compete for a new project for a major parking industry player. The buyer shared a detailed brief with tightly specified requirements around the kind of solution they were looking for.

The only problem was the brief didn’t sit right with us. There were gaps and contradictions in the data supplied. And we weren’t convinced it was taking the right approach.

But the customer was definite about what they expected and not willing to engage while the process was under way. So we assumed they knew better than us and got to work.

The proposal development and presentation ran smoothly. But we did not progress.

When we sought feedback, the client advised: ‘Overall your solution was good and addressed the brief as it was provided. But the two shortlisted suppliers challenged our brief and gave a compelling rationale for doing so’.

Indeed. And we should have had the courage of our professional convictions to do that too.

Last minute letdown

We were tendering for a major contract where the submission had to be lodged through an online portal by noon. Foolishly, we let the clock run down, and after three weeks of work we were still finessing the document layout in the final hour.

Just as we were poised to hit submit, a team member called out that they’d found a typo. Not an eye-catching clanger, but an error, nonetheless. The pitch leader made the call. Stop everything and fix this. It’s got to be perfect.

You could smell the terror in the room as the document was amended and the upload recommenced. Eight minutes that felt like an eternity.

And sure enough, with a shriek it became clear that the worst had happened. The deadline had lapsed, the portal had shut, and we’d missed out. We scrambled to contact procurement, making some weak excuse about tech issues, and they relented and let us email a copy.

But we didn’t make the shortlist. Eventually, informal feedback drifted back to us via a third party. ‘If you can’t submit a document on time, how can we trust you with our business?’

Fair enough, too.

Blind man’s budget bluff

The project was bang in our sweet spot. A highly specialised scope of works. We knew there was no one in the market that was a better fit than our team.

But the customer was new to us. We had no relationships or intelligence to draw on, and in particular, no sense of their budget parameters. And these weren’t easy to estimate from the organisation’s financials or industry benchmarks. It was all very bespoke.

There was quite a range to what you could reasonably invest in solving the presenting business problem, depending on multiple hidden variables. So we contacted the client to seek some guidance, even on sorting the must-haves from the nice-to-haves, but they wouldn’t be drawn.

Alright then. Rallying our key alliance partner, we scoped and costed their comprehensive specification down to the last detail. We thought, surely the customer has a good grasp of what this will cost, and a budget allocation to do it properly.

They didn’t. And the post evaluation debrief was doubly painful.

‘You were first pick in every measure. And it was daylight second. But your proposal was double our budget. And procurement advised there was no way we could close that gap. So with a heavy heart, we went with the next ranked supplier, who offered a lot less.’

Stick to the plan

As unpleasant as it is to recall these blunders, there’s comfort in the knowledge that they could all have been avoided with the aid of a strong bid playbook. One with a clear go/no-go decision model and disciplined bid development timeline.

Which is just as well. Because while there are many ways to sink a bid, the fact is, it’s not enough to not lose. You need to win.

And if that sounds like nonsense, you’ll enjoy next week's post.