One of the dangers for incumbents is they focus too much on their existing solution in their rebid.
Too often feedback from the customer to a losing incumbent is that their rebid submission didn’t contain enough that was new or innovative, and just rehashed what they were already delivering.
Ideally as you approach your rebid (during what we call the Recapture process) you’ll take a completely fresh view of your potential solution for the new contract.
You’ll build it from the ground up (creating a Green Field solution as we encourage our customers to do) based on what your intelligence from the customer, and latest best practice tells you they need for the next contract. Without being held back by the ‘inertia’ of your existing solution, no matter how well it might be delivering now.
Then, when you come to write your rebid submission you’ll have a fresh, future oriented and focused solution to write about that’s focussed on the customer’s future needs as expressed in their specification and rebid questions.
That’s the ideal.
But as a bidder, bid writer or reviewer working on a rebid you often, unfortunately, won’t find yourself in that position.
Instead you’ll find yourself with a solution that at its core is still based on the existing contract and solution, but with some new or changed elements that to a greater or lesser extent reflect changes in the customer’s expressed requirements.
How customers evaluate your submission
When you find yourself in this situation you need to be aware that the customer won’t thank you for this type of submission.
Look at the evaluation criteria for how your submission will be marked. Increasingly customers’ evaluations will only give the highest score for those solutions they see as offering real and significant added value.
We recently reviewed around 100 evaluation matrices from customers. Below is a summary of what we found to be the most common criteria that customers scored submission answers against, and what they expected in order to achieve the highest scores;
Obviously this will vary from customer to customer. But in general these should be familiar types of marking options many bidders face. In most cases the higher scores you can obtain will usually require you to deliver over and above what the customer has specified.
For an incumbent, being able to give the customer confidence in your ability to deliver the contract should be easier for you than it will be for the competition.
As should demonstrating your understanding of the customer and their needs and providing evidence to support your proposals (although you shouldn’t just assume you’ve done all that adequately).
It’s usually the area of added value that causes incumbents the biggest problem in getting top marks in evaluations.
Your existing solution is not added value
Unfortunately for incumbents, repeating your existing solution is unlikely to get you the higher end marks in customer evaluations.
Some in your organisation might think demonstrating the clear competence you (hopefully) have from your experience of the existing contract should obtain top marks from the customer vs competitors who ‘obviously’ don’t know the details.
Too often they’re wrong.
Your existing delivery will usually be achieving the customer’s specification, meeting the KPIs and SLAs set. It is compliant.
Even if the customer’s new specification is (and it rarely is) a repeat of the existing requirements, simply demonstrating that you can deliver it will only get you the middle, or ‘acceptable’ score in the above marking scheme.
If you add more detail, you’ll simply be more robustly acceptable. Competence in delivering the basic specification, even clearly demonstrated, is not the same as added value for most customers.
Even if you’ve exceeded the customer’s KPIs and SLAs in the previous contract, it most likely means you’ve simply set a new baseline to the customer’s expectations of what any supplier should be delivering. The customer will probably have included these higher performance levels as now being the required standard in the new specification.
Showing in your rebid that you have and can deliver these higher levels of performance is a necessary part of getting a higher score, but alone it’s not sufficient.
To get the highest marks and win you need to show that you’ve reacted to the customer’s changing needs and used your experience to identify new and innovative methods to meet these needs. Methods that add significant value to the customer’s area of work being contracted out, and ideally to the customer’s organisation as a whole.
The earlier you start, the more value you can add into your solution
As we mentioned in the introduction, if you start your rebid preparations early and don’t get pulled back by the inertia your existing delivery methods and processes create, you have a real chance to put together a new, fresh solution.
A solution based on the customer’s future needs and objectives, not what has been asked for in the past and to date.
A solution incorporating all you’ve learned about the customer, their stakeholders and the contract environment during the existing contract. But freshened by looking at new innovations, best practice from the market and your own business, and enabled by you not being afraid to challenge and overturn how you’re delivering the contract now in favour of something better for the future.
Bid teams who come ‘late’ to the process
Unfortunately the reality for many rebid teams, bid writers, or those reviewing rebids is that they’ve not been able to start early enough to have time to go through this process properly before the ITT / RFP is out.
Too often they only get involved once the focus has moved from solution development to submission writing.
Perhaps the inertia of the existing delivery methods drags real thinking about innovation out of the solution. Or the voices in the business insisting that the customer loves our solution and doesn’t want to change. Or just a lack of communication or traction between the bid team and the team operating the contract.
Any of these can mean the solution being put forward is essentially the same as that being delivered in the existing contract. Maybe with some small areas of change, improvement or innovation.
How, when you find yourself in this situation, do you make the most of what you have and put in answers to the customer’s ITT questions that will get marked as highly as possible?
Our experience is there are four methods you can use to mitigate the problem and get the most out of your position:
- Highlight the new
- Identify added value in your existing contract
- Use your experience as incumbent to clarify the benefits of your offering
- Focus on the future in your writing
Highlight the new
Reading through a draft answer that’s mainly focused on the existing delivery processes and assumptions, it can be easy to assume the whole solution is the same as the existing contract.
That can make it easy to miss any new or improved areas of the solution. Especially if they’re not highlighted. That’s certainly the impression the evaluator can get.
One simple way to mitigate this, when you’ve no opportunity to change the actual solution, is to make sure you highlight the elements that are actually new or improved.
Pull out all the new elements of the solution and put them in the introduction to your answer, and / or cover them first in your answer, putting more emphasis on them and making sure you explicitly highlight them as new or improved.
The reader will then start with the impression of a new and improved solution even if the rest of your answer is then focused on your existing delivery model.
As a minimum, any new elements of your solution won’t be missed by the evaluator as they read through your answer.
Identify added value in your existing contract
Even given that your existing performance against SLAs or KPIs might have become the norm, and not seen as added value by the customer, there may be other aspects of your existing solution or how you deliver it that do add value.
We often find rebid teams haven’t really understood in detail the existing delivery and history of the contract. Even if they talk to the operations team, that team can sometimes overlook an added value aspect of delivery, seeing it just as ‘what we do’.
Ask the team (again)
Even if you’re in the bid writing or even reviewing stage it’s still worth talking again to your operations team, and reviewing your data from contract performance, with a focus on added value delivered.
Ask the team specifically about where they have added value on the contract. For example, where the customer may have had a problem, and they helped resolve it.
Or where there were unexpected variations in demand, and they found a way to cope.
Ask how the customer’s needs changed during the contract and how your team adapted to meet these. You might unearth some gems you can use which the operations team forgot or didn’t see as important.
Check the data
Relook at the data you’ve got to see if there’s anything you’ve missed.
For example, the team might have hit delivery targets throughout the period of the previous contract, – but have you compared this with the volume data? Have these targets been met in an environment of significant growth in demand, or variation in demand? Could that show a flexibility or robustness to your solution that adds value?
Look for impact and outcomes – not actions
Ask about what impact your performance has had on different customer stakeholders. For instance end users, or the wider customer organisation. What has your delivery enabled them to do or achieve? This is where the real value to your contract and performance is – in the outcomes you help the customer achieve.
Too often incumbents get caught up in a focus on what they are doing or have done. Being able to translate this into benefits to customer outcomes will make a significant difference to how your submission reads for the evaluator regarding added value.
What about underlying processes?
Sometimes it’s not the actions or initiatives you took which you can show as being added value – it’s the process you used to find them and put them in place. If you have added value on th eexisting contract, improved performance, reacted to issues – how did you do that?
The initiatives from your current contract are in the past. But if you’ve got a clear process or system that enables you to deliver added value, you could use the process in the new contract. And use the evidence of past initiatives as evidence it will deliver more added value in the new contract.
So, when writing your rebid, emphasise the process you’ll use in the new contract, not just (except as evidence it works) the past results of that process in the existing one.
Use your experience as incumbent to clarify the benefits of your offering
As we’ve said above, as the incumbent you should be in the best position to give the customer real confidence in your solution. This should include being clear on why you’ve made changes to your existing solution. And where you’re retaining elements of the existing solution, justifying this rather than just stating it as a fact.
As you write or review your submission, look at the different elements of your solution and ensure you’re giving clear and persuasive justification for why each is either the same as before, improved, or new. For a summary of general reasons why, and justifications for each approach, see the table below:
As you review your submission, or write or storyboard it, pick out each element and put it into your own version of the table below, completing your own version of why it’s the best solution. This will help you clarify your writing. And test if you have a convincing argument for each:
Focus on the future in your writing
A final point sometimes missed by incumbents in their writing is ensuring their description of their solution is focused on the future, not on the past, or present of their existing contract.
We often see submissions where the incumbent writes too much about what they are doing, in the present tense in their answer.
The customer isn’t looking for this. They want to know what you’ll do in the future, in the next contract.
Seeing a description of your solution that’s present or past oriented will not only create potential doubts you’re committing to deliver this in the next contract. It will give evaluators the impression you’ve not thought through the needs of the new contract and are simply proposing ‘more of the same’.
If you want the customer to believe you’re thinking about their next contract, and are only proposing something that’s the same as you’re presently delivering because it’s appropriate for that next contract, make sure your writing shows that intent.
Even if you’re describing an element of your new solution that’s a continuation of what you’re presently delivering, always ensure you’re writing in the future tense – ‘we will’, rather than ‘we are’.
Your evidence about why this is a benefit to the customer and how you’ll be able to effectively deliver it can be present or past tense oriented. But ensure as you write or review that, you’re being clear and consistent in which tense you’re writing and why.
Summary
To overcome the danger of being seen as simply offering more of the same in the rebid, incumbents need to be clearly focused on the future. And what changes, improvements and innovations they’ll bring into their bid to be sure they’re delivering the best possible solution for the customer’s, probably changed future needs.
Ideally this will start well before the rebid, with a new solution being developed ahead of time.
But even if you’re in the writing or reviewing stage of your rebid submission there are still several techniques you can use to show your customer you’re focused on offering a fresh, new solution.
All the ideas we refer to in this article are more fully described in the Rebid Guide, together with step by step guidance of how to put them into action on your contract and rebid.
You’ll also find free advice on all aspects of how to prepare for and run your rebid on our website.
Or if you want direct help, we support teams and organisations preparing for rebids – call us for a chat to see how we can help you.
