Measuring more of what matters in your professional services firm
Too often the “feel good” factors and recency of wins overtake facts when it comes to measuring the success of business development initiatives and financial health of many professional services firms. Properly dimensioning real individual contribution to financial success of any professional services firm requires assessment of more than simply personal fee production. (Measuring personal […]
Continue ReadingClosed or invitation only tenders, bids and proposals
Firstly, what are closed or invitation only tenders, bids and proposals? In addition to the generally well-understood terms ‘tender’, ‘bid’ and ‘proposal’, there are ‘open’ and ‘closed’ processes, and then variations within each that can apply to professional services procurement. Open or public tenders, bids and proposals An open tender is just that, open to […]
Continue ReadingHow to run a kick-off meeting for your tender, bid or proposal
As we have discussed before, the difference between a winning tender, bid or proposal and a loser frequently comes down to what you know before you write a single word … not what you find out after you’ve written the document. An effective way to know more about a client is to gather your team […]
Continue ReadingHow the best Professional Services firms WOW their clients (and the lessons ALL businesses can learn from them).
In a global study on what clients value from professional services, the majority of clients (68%) valued specialised skills and expertise. Professional services firms generally recognise that this is the top value and deliver on this well, however, most almost completely fail to recognise the next two more significant factors that clients wanted: a firms’ […]
Continue ReadingWhy firms keep bidding on losers and what you can do about it
A crap ‘win rate’ or lack of bidding success is usually a direct result of bidding on too many losers, aka inappropriate ‘opportunities’. Too often, professional services firms are tempted by the potential boost in revenue, and go all out pursuing speculative tender and proposal opportunities. Generally these firms have no consistently applied or objective ‘bid-or-no-bid’ […]
Continue ReadingAvoiding buyer’s remorse
Do your clients ever suffer from buyer’s remorse? For many expert professional services – especially legal and accounting – purchase is not optional: it’s mandatory, driven by compliance requirements, or as an essential component of project delivery. Worse still, a fair slice of consumption is a true ‘grudge spend’, mandated by lenders, regulators, and opponents. […]
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The Rise (and rise) of Sales Operations
Sales Operations (or if you like ‘business development’) is moving into a broader, more dynamic and strategic role both within many organisations – and so it should. If there’s one function in the revenue generation engine that sees all and knows all, it’s Sales Operations. Historically, Sales Operations was a blanket covering anything to do […]
Continue ReadingAnd the winner is…Environmental scanning
And the winner is… ‘Sid-an-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ Juan Antonio Samaranch annoucing Sydney’s winning bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics. The exhilaration from winning a tender, bid or proposal is hard to beat and the benefits are many! But what about lost bids, tenders and proposals? An infamous proposal failure was Australia’s lost bid for the 2022 Soccer […]
Continue Reading11 Quick fixes to improve the quality of your tenders, bids and proposals
It’s the night before your tender, bid or proposal hands in and with a sinking feeling you realise it still needs ‘work’. Maybe it needs a lot of work, or just some key finishing touches applied. But without a deadline extension there’s no time to fully recast your responses, alter your document structure, change the […]
Continue ReadingResponding effectively to (unspoken) questions in tenders, bids and proposals
Over the years we’ve read hundreds of requests for tenders and proposals seeking services from professional services firms. Often RFT/Ps can seem cobbled together bastardised versions of older requests that have been edited by committee and end up asking silly, repetitive or irrelevant questions. Most of the time nothing sinister is going on, it is […]
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Feature article
What is a tender ? Answers to tender questions you were too embarrassed to ask
If you’re new to the world of tenders (or were just curious about the meaning of some common ‘tender’ terms) this is the tender definitions blog for you! What is a ‘tender’? Tender has a few meanings of course (it can mean ‘sensitive’ for instance), but in a commercial context ‘tender’ means preparing and submitting […]
