The deal was a $100m project with the defence department of a Southeast Asian country which had the potential of expanding into a much larger and even more lucrative programme.
After three years of engagement with discussions up to ministerial level, the customer wanted a proposal they could use to validate their thinking and gain funding for the project. Defence was only one of several competing departments that needed funding. Education, health, and national infrastructure were all competing priorities. The bid team had been working hard on the proposal for weeks, but after several iterations it was still far from hitting the mark. Time was running out.
Bid Consult were brought in to rewrite the core proposal and take ownership of the high-level executive overview.
It was intended as a standalone document providing decision makers with the rationale for the project, an understanding of the technology, and ultimately persuade them to buy. But when we first looked at it, we found several pages of disjointed text, emphasizing the solution and its features, while struggling to articulate the true value it would bring in enhancing peace and security in the region. It offered no rationale explaining why this country should spend millions of dollars on an IT project instead of building a new hospital or school.
To help us understand the strategic context, the solution, and the story behind it, we led discovery sessions with key stakeholders, distilling what success might look like for this particular customer. These took place in open forums with the whole bid team, but also one-to-one sessions. We then conducted a deep dive into security strategy in the region. The proposal needed to show clearly that we understood the customer’s goals and strategic imperatives, and had compelling recommendations for achieving their desired outcomes.
To fully develop the proposal, we first mapped out a framework for the core structure of the proposal. This helped us to get a better understanding of the potential flow of the document and work with the bid team to ensure that our vision for the proposal was heading in the right direction.
We then produced a series of iterations based on the output from the discovery sessions and deep dive research, reviewing progressively with the team to refine and develop the main ideas and narrative. we were not just ‘tidying up’ the original proposal, we were taking it in a new direction. It was important that we were able to ground the proposal in a story. You can always make something ‘read well’, but if it’s not grounded in an idea or a narrative then it will fall flat during the assessment.
By developing a coherent story, supporters in the buying organization were armed with what they needed to sell the idea internally, and cohrently argue a case for funding.
A specialist SAP cloud hosting company had developed a new service hosting complex SAP systems on a hyperscale cloud. They had pitched to several customers, however, months after launch still hadn’t found anyone willing to take the risk to be the first to move onto the new platform. SAP systems typically run mission critical workloads, so risk will always be a major cause for hesitancy.
A potential customer of theirs was planning to issue an RFP to identify a supplier that could help them safely build and manage a new SAP environment on Google. This was a good fit for our client. They had the expertise in SAP hosting and a fully developed solution on the hyperscale cloud and it looked like this had the potential of being our first contract globally for their new service, but there was an upcoming RFP process in the way.
Bid Consult suggest they try to derail the RFP to avoid entering a competitive scenario. However, as a large European firm operating in a regulated industry, it had strict procurement rules to follow so this would not be an easy task. Our first attempt was to write a ‘A guide to writing a request for proposal for cloud services’, a 16-page whitepaper providing steer for procurement professionals buying hyperscale services for mission critical workloads like SAP. The paper exposed commercial traps and hidden costs some of our competitors had been using, provided guidance on the type of questions to ask, and emphasized areas where we had a good chance of outperforming our competitors. It also suggested other ways besides the RFP process of identifying the right partner for this type of project. We got this to the potential customer, but the RFP process was set to continue.
Bid Consult then helped write an unsolicited proposal that covered all the areas we were expecting in the RFP. The hope was that a proposal with sufficient detail to support a decision in our client's favour would derail the process and push them towards direct award.
On the surface, none of these attempts to derail the RFP had worked, so we had to progress diligently through each stage of the process, from RFI to RFP to presentation.
Finally, we were notified that the customer would begin contract negotiations with our client. Our diaries were filled with extended meetings covering all the contractual elements of the solution, from SLAs to information security. The negotiations were difficult to navigate, and we reached deadlock before Christmas when the negotiations broke down and the customer removed all the remaining meetings from our diaries.
After the Christmas break, I emailed the procurement lead to see if they were willing to open the dialogue again. They were, and we resumed. We finally made a breakthrough and the first contract for this type of service was signed. Beneath the surface, the prework we did before the RFP through our partner had been influencing the customer and presented our client as the right partner for them, a notion which persisted even through the very difficult and often hostile contract negotiations.
A proposal was being prepared for a major Indian telecommunications company that would be a new logo for our client.
Our client had held several workshops with the customer, showcasing a new SaaS platform that had released only six months earlier. The new solution was designed to enable companies in the telecommunications sector offer a full set of cloud services to their customers under their own branding. After this initial engagement, the customer wanted a formal, fully priced proposal that described the offering in detail. The bid team had made some progress, but Bid Consult were brought in to rewrite the main document.
They wanted our storytelling approach but we had only four days for this rewrite. I met the bid team a few times to understand the customer, the context and get a picture of what was required. The strategic account director who was leading this pursuit wanted the proposal to highlight the huge investment India was making in the digitization of its economy which had the potential to create huge growth for this customer. We needed to drive home that our client would be the right partner to enable them to capitalize on this opportunity. This was the story that we landed on as the vehicle for a compelling argument to persuade the customer to buy.
With the core messaging agreed, we rewrote the narrative. This was now a story that projected the company’s future against a backdrop of India’s burgeoning digital economy. The Indian government’s flagship Digital India programme had its eyes on driving India towards a $5 trillion economy, with India emerging as one of the world’s leading nations using technology to transform the lives of its citizens. The proposal showed how the customer could be at the forefront of this growth. We demonstrated clearly that our client had the relevant industry experience, domain expertise, the right technical solution and cultural fit to ensure they could meet their end goal of becoming one of India’s leading providers of end-to-end industry cloud solutions.
This was not just a simple edit of the draft proposal, but a recasting into a story that positioned the telecoms customer well placed to ride a wave of growth, with our client as the ideal partner to help them capture it.
