Are you really being selective enough on which bids to pursue or are you fooling yourself?

Part 2 of 3

Selectivity tools such as a Bid / No Bid Matrices inform the thinking of the senior team, but also allow flexibility so that strategic bids can be pursued at the very earliest stages allowing for a rapport to develop with the client, influencers and decision-makers. By giving consistency across an organisation, the process encourages ownership and accountability and allows bid teams to demonstrate reasoning and professionalism in pursuit decisions. If properly designed it should only take your business leadership team or bid team members a few minutes to assess and evaluate an individual opportunity.

Whilst Selectivity Matrices will bring immediate benefits, you should consider  the option of a fully bespoke version through an independent diagnostic of your bid data, which means that you can apply your historical performance to the weightings in the selectivity matrix from the outset. You can then continue to update your statistics and annually review the selectivity weightings. 

Collecting, analysing and applying bid data contributes towards the following:

• Development of better targeting of bid spend, and of competitive advantage and differentiation, based on your capability
• Greater transparency of the relative cost of bids and the investment in work won and lost (which may also influence bid selection)
• Findings will input significantly into your strategic pursuit and tactical planning
• Enables annual review and updating of selectivity weightings based on your performance 
• Improved connection of tactical pursuit through better understanding of outcomes

As many organisations don’t have sufficient expertise or resource in-house to undertake this analysis, MarketingWorks delivers this service to organisations, providing formats for clients to capture the data required, analysing their outputs, giving an  independent interpretation of patterns, providing tables and graphs of the results and developing selectivity weightings for clients to pilot.

By continuingly monitoring the dynamics of winning work and the reasons for successes you can ensure key metrics are being captured which can be exploited by all bid teams.

The combined cost of analysing one data set and producing one bespoke selectivity matrix is £3,320. Costs for further regional or office sets of data analysed, with selectivity matrix start at £520 each.

Given the construction industry is estimated to spend over £2 billion on bidding every year and around 4% of turnover on work winning activities there is a significant opportunity to make dramatic and significant savings. The internal cost of responding to a bid starts at around £1.5k for consultants and £10k for contractors and can quickly escalate up to £30k for D&B bids and we have regularly seen £0.5m and above for the big boys. The cost of £3K for such a powerful tool should be seen as a relatively minor cost.

It will also provide an immediate return on investment by stopping you wasting your bid teams limited time and resources by bidding for bids you simply cannot win.

If you wish to seek more information, see our case study of a top 5 major contractor who has experienced significant improvements in their work winning capability by using our bespoke selectivity matrices here or alternatively view our PDF on Selectivity Matrices.

See part one 1 of 3 here
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