Forging strong, meaningful and productive relationships across every part of the proposal cycle
A senior manager called me, baffled at losing a bid she expected to win. The solution was excellent, the price competitive, the track record unmatched. “There must have been some jiggery-pokery,” she said.
When we debriefed, the same problems emerged every time. The bid was built in a silo. Sales intelligence never reached the document. SME content was brilliant but unscorable. Senior management rewrote the executive summary at the last minute. Stakeholder management is where most winnable contracts are lost.
Everyone Has a Different Agenda – Our Job Is to Work With Them
The most persistent myth in bidding is that all stakeholders want the same thing. They do not. Sales wants the win. SMEs want to be seen as the expert. Senior management wants the contract with minimum disruption. Legal wants protection. The client’s evaluators just want to find what they need, score it, and go home. Treat them all the same way and you will spend the bid fighting people who should be on your side.
Maximising Stakeholder Contribution – Getting Them to Contribute in the Best Way
Sales: Stop Waiting to Be Invited
Bid professionals are invariably brought in too late. Stop waiting for an invitation and go and find the opportunity. Offer to facilitate the early capture session – not just to attend it, but to run it. You will get early sight of the client’s real issues, the competitive landscape and the win strategy. Over time, the sales team will stop seeing you as the people who ask difficult questions about word limits.
Subject Matter Experts: The People Who Know the Most and Try to Write the Least
SMEs are brilliant and essential – but they disappear the moment you need them to write in plain English. Brief them on the scoring criteria, not just the question. Give them a heading structure before they start. Set the deadline two days ahead of your actual one. Your deeper job is to translate between their expertise and the evaluator’s marking sheet. It is not a comfortable role. Own it anyway.
The bid that is easiest to win is the one you influenced before the questions were written.
Senior Management: Planned Involvement Beats Reactive Intervention
Senior management can be your greatest asset or a serious liability – sometimes both in the same bid. The executive who arrives at the final review and decides the executive summary needs a complete rework is familiar to everyone in the profession. The problem is rarely what they want; it is the timing. Get sign-off on the win strategy at kick-off. Brief them concisely at each key stage. When a late change is proposed, present the consequences calmly, with evidence. Most will back down – unless they think you are just being territorial.
The Client’s Evaluators: Make It Easy to Give You Top Marks
In public sector bidding, the window for direct relationship building closes when the ITT is published. Think about the evaluator’s day: a large, complex document, a scoring sheet, and pages of instructions. They will score what they can easily find and move on. Make it easy for them. Use their language, not yours. Use the words from their questions as your headings. Answer elements in the order they were asked. Do not open a response with your company name or “We” – the moment you do, you have moved from solving their problem to selling your solution. Evaluators notice, even when they cannot articulate why they marked you down.
The Final Word
The difference between a winning bid and a very good second place is rarely the quality of the solution. It is almost always the quality of the relationships with the stakeholders who surrounded it.
Build the relationships before you need them. Manage your stakeholders as carefully as you manage the document. The Bid Manager trusted by sales, respected by SMEs and taken seriously by senior management wins more bids than the one who is simply a good writer. And the moment you stop treating stakeholder management as a discipline – because it is “just common sense” – someone who is doing it properly will take your contract.
