Failing to Train is Training to Fail: Why Bid Team Training is Essential

In my last blog I looked at how unnecessary late changes to bid drafts will usually reduce the quality of the overall response. The many comments on my related LinkedIn post indicated that these last-minute ‘good ideas’ are a widespread issue. I am grateful to Alex Townsend who shared the concept of a ‘good ideas cutoff line’ he came across when working with the US Air Force. At the cutoff line, the team must stop making changes to the mission plan to allow it to be finalised (no matter how good senior officers deem the new ideas to be). I look forward to working the ‘GICL’ into the Salentis System playbook!

In this blog, I am turning to bid team skill development. If there is nothing you can do to stop a senior exec swooping in with their ‘good ideas’ at the last moment, you can prepare your team with the tools they need to write complete, compliant and compelling drafts in the first place.

Just because your people are skilled at their jobs, it doesn’t automatically follow that they will be good at delivering to a proposal’s (often complex) requirements, whether the role is as proposal manager, writer or project coordinator.

Take writers as an example: many companies assume their people can write effective bid responses based on their skills and knowledge related to the section they’ve been assigned. As intelligent professionals, they will do their very best to do well, but without training in proposal writing, they may miss the mark and are unlikely to produce a high-quality, cohesive draft. Some of the pitfalls include:

• Over-explaining: The temptation to ‘show off’ their ability or your products and services without considering if it’s answering the question posed by the response requirements. So they’ll write about the whole kitchen sink, when all the Authority was interested in was the taps.
• Poor structure: Not answering in the order the questions are asked, making it difficult for evaluators to assess whether they have actually answered them. Evaluators typically have many sections to review, not just from your company, but your competition too, so unless it’s clear, easy to understand and mark, they may skip over it and give it a low score.
• Page count issues: Not appreciating there are page count limits. Unless this is checked, a section will fail, possibly jeopardising the whole bid, because evaluators will stop reading at the page limit (when the good stuff may be on the next page!).
• Jargon overload: Using too much technical jargon or insider language which the evaluator may not understand.
• Poor layout: Writing without structure – no headings, or bullets or leaving white space resulting in dense, hard-to-read copy.
• Lack of evidence: Missing out key evidence and case studies – the stuff that brings a proposal to life.

There is an ‘art’ and method to managing and writing proposals which can be taught and is a key ingredient in the success of a proposal. There are three aspects to bid team training – foundation and task-specific training and running a thorough kick-off event. Foundation and task-specific training are covered below and kick-off events will be covered in a later blog.

Foundation Training

Your people need to be prepared with the basic skills to be part of your bid team and need to understand “this is how we do business around here”. Whether they will be a proposal manager, bid director, ‘capture’ executive, graphic designer, editor or writer, they should all be given the opportunity to learn:

• your corporate bidding process
• who is responsible for what
• internal governance
• quality review standards
• and so on.

They should also be introduced to the terminology and tools that are used by bid teams. Most importantly, writers must be shown how to approach the essential analysis needed to plan a response section before they write a single word of their draft. To support this and set the team up for success, the capture team and bid directors also need to understand the inputs they will need to provide before a tender response starts.

High-performing companies provide bid team training as a routine in-house event. I have seen some really good examples of this amongst Salentis clients, although I have also seen examples where the approved process and ways of working are ignored once the trainee returns to the bid room. In such cases, the training should either be updated to reflect the reality of the bid room or bid leaders should apply the approved process with a little more discipline. I would usually encourage the latter!

A common shortfall of bid team training courses

Some companies use the many outsourced courses available for bid team training. Having reviewed the market for these courses I think many have a significant omission. They are good at explaining the generic language of bids, who does what by stage, etc. This is the ‘what’ of a bid process. They are less good at explaining the ‘how’. Even fewer use the concept of active involvement to help turn theory into skills.

Active involvement

Active involvement is the way leading organisations develop essential skills in their people, both as individuals and teams. The basic theory is that:

• The trainer explains the concept
• They then demonstrate the skill
• The learners imitate the trainer
• The trainers and learners discuss how the skill could be improved
• The learners practice their new skill
• The training has delivered both knowledge and skills

Much of the training that I have seen focuses on the first two of these stages. Some companies, including here at Salentis, cover the imitate, improve and practice aspects on live bids, supported by mentoring. These three stages are so important that it may sometimes be better to have a ‘dry run’ a few weeks beforehand, using ‘dummy’ bid documentation, than learning on an important live tender.

Task-Specific Bid Team Training

Not all bids are the same. There may be different solicitation types, data management and sharing arrangements, collaboration arrangements, upload portals, or writing tools as examples. Therefore, there may be a requirement for task or proposal-specific training to cover any additional skills or knowledge required. Whilst not all members of the bid team need the same task-specific training, our experience is that it benefits writers the most.

This essential training is often incorporated in a kick-off workshop, but our experience shows it is better as a separate event taking place before the kick-off and can typically be covered in half a morning. This means that the kick-off can focus on the aspects of the solicitation, technical solution, competitor analysis and win strategy without the distraction of uncertainty around ways of working.

What Next?

Comprehensive foundation and task-specific training play an essential part in generating winning bids and proposals. Does your organisation provide training as standard, or before the launch of a key solicitation?

At Salentis International our internal training programme incorporates all five stages of active involvement. A number of our clients have asked us to provide this training, and we will launch this service in the next few weeks. If you’d like to find out more, email us at ukinfo@salentis.com and we’d be happy to arrange a chat with you.

If you take action to develop the skills of your team then you are one step closer to being a high-performing organisation that wins more.

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Article published: September 2024