Bid management teams are often seen as administrative support, tirelessly working to meet deadlines and submit proposals on time. What a missed opportunity! Fortunately, you can address this by reshaping the skillset of your bid management team.
A modern bid management team needs 6 key skills to evolve from an administrative role to a strategic one:
1. Strategy
A modern bid management team focuses primarily on strategic work. With AI automating project management tasks, they have more capacity to think strategically, leading to more impactful proposal wins.
- Proposition and win strategy: Bid management is the backbone of presales. Teams analyse client needs and develop unique propositions for winning proposals.
- Client-centric mindset: Understand customer needs and expectations while considering strategic decisions. Always ask the question behind the question.
- Competitor analysis: Research and analyse competitors. Where can you gain a strategic advantage?
2. Bid automation
Automation is already widely used in marketing and sales engineering, so why not in bid management?
- Workflow automation: Use tools to automate processes and reduce manual work.
- Process optimisation: Continuously analyse and improve workflows to boost productivity and efficiency.
3. Data analysis
Bid management relies heavily on data. There are 18 different ways a bid can provide valuable insights to an organisation. Modern bid managers should always have dashboards open to monitor win/loss rates or conduct impact analyses across verticals.
- Data collection: Systematically gather relevant data for in-depth analysis. Log all bid/no-bid decisions in a CRM for future insights.
- Generating insights: Turn data into actionable insights that support strategic decisions, such as in bid/no-bid discussions.
- Predictive analysis: Identify patterns in historical data using statistical algorithms and machine learning. Altura’s software can assist with this. The past is key to understanding the present.
- Data visualisation: Present data insights in a way that allows clients to instantly grasp the benefits of working with you.
4. Project management
The modern bid manager is no longer a project manager. Many project management tasks are now automated by AI.
- Automation: Set up an automated project management system to plan tasks and make to-do lists for every bid. Automated reminders and deadlines ensure nothing is overlooked.
- Time management: Meet every deadline well in advance by planning and prioritising efficiently.
- Oversight management: The bid manager shifts from project manager to strategic coordinator. They anticipate organisational challenges, assess risks, and suggest process adjustments to maximise impact.
5. Stakeholder management
The skills above transform bid management teams into strategic coordinators and sparring partners for stakeholders (sales, management, account management, operations).
- Expectation management: Clearly communicate goals, expectations, and progress to all involved parties.
- Decision-making support: Facilitate decisions that balance the interests of all stakeholders. Use tools to create qualification reports for presentations.
- Strategic revenue insights: Develop the ability to effectively communicate data insights to the organisation. Convince stakeholders with detailed analyses that highlight your impact.
6. Proposal writing
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, every bid management team must excel at writing persuasive proposals. Thanks to AI (LLMs), the writing process has changed significantly.
- Gathering input: Strong prompts require relevant information and insights to share with LLMs.
- AI prompting: Provide clear and targeted instructions to AI systems to produce persuasive and well-structured proposals faster.
- Editing: Always carefully edit AI-generated proposals to correct errors and personalise them to client needs.
- Adaptability: Quickly tailor proposals to specific client requirements for maximum impact.
The landscape of bid management is evolving, and it’s time to embrace this change and make the most of it. Train your team to adopt these skills and shift from administrative support to strategic leadership.
Altura not only offers a full-cycle system to support all of the above but also provides tailored guidance for system integration and optimisation.
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