The Proposal Management profession is alive and well in ANZ. Red Team was impressed with the calibre, experience and enthusiasm of the professionals we met during a highly relevant and future looking APMP conference. The sophistication of the profession continues to evolve in response to increasing competitiveness, complexity and value expectations of buyers.
Alisha Camplin’s keynote story was powerful, inspirational on many levels and relevant. Her ability to strategise and create an inspiring personal and professional vision is matched by her undoubted bravery, dedication, openness to change and mental strength to shape and execute on her vision. A rare combination that is highly relevant for our profession.
The evidence bank available on Buyer behaviour during the pursuit and procurement process continues to grow. rogenSI’s presentation on their 2015 global research findings into “What It Takes to Win Business” is a good example. The findings indicated that how organisations approach bids and pitches to win more business requires a cultural shift to helping buyers to make a stronger emotional and rational connection with your brand and your solution. The takeaways to make this happen included possessing the business knowledge and ability to communicate value; customers desire for insights to influence their thinking and make sense of a sea of information and placing a premium on salesperson credibility. The proposal profession has a critical role to play in this cultural shift by supporting sales professionals both in terms of education and providing innovative and credible evidence and analysis.
The “Innovation in Proposals” presentation was particularly engaging. The increasing proposal budget allocation to “Show! Don’t Tell” innovations like infographics, interactive PDF’s, micro-sites etc provide highly effective mediums to: breakout complex information, target and personalise for specific decision makers and bring to life the purchasers brand.
The procurement panel discussion was robust with many humorous moments but for Red Team the “them and us” mentality was a theme. As proposal management professionals we need to have strong and enduring relationships with our procurement counterparts and even though it may be painful and challenging the reward generally outweighs the downside. It was interesting to hear varying perspectives from procurement professionals on what constitutes value. Price was identified as the primary indicator of value by some of the panel. A continued focus towards capability, requirements fit and needs understanding was also noted. This is relevant in light of a consistent theme delivered in many of the conference presentations, i.e. the importance of value propositions in the bid process. A deeper understanding of how value is gauged by the procurement profession, and emerging trends in how value is assessed, should continue to be pursued as decisive in the development of effective value propositions.
“Bid Management IS a Profession” again highlighted the panel format as engaging and entertaining. Input during the session showed there is ample knowledge and expertise in the industry to support Bid Management as a genuine profession. The panel tabled some real-world advice on what constitutes leading practice bid process and bid team capability. It was encouraging that these insights were aligned with other presentation guidance. For example, the power of having a great design resource on your bid team and the criticality of capture management in the bid process was acknowledged by the panel. Red Team observed powerful related material in: “Making Design a Discriminator”; “Images and Emotion”; and “The Art of Successful Capture Management”.
The management and mechanics of our BAU was extensively covered and Red Team particularly liked some of the metrics and techniques covered to assist with addressing the “curse of incumbency”.
Red Team encourages corporates and members alike to actively engage with the APMP to help make the profession highly relevant and indeed the benchmark for proposal management in ANZ. The APMP was formed in 1989 and is the worldwide authority for proposal professionals. The APMP is headquartered in the USA and has over 26 chapters throughout the world. The APMP ANZ Chapter (http://apmpanz.org) was formed in late 2008 and is the fourth largest chapter in the world. It is dedicated in particular to increasing recognition in this region of the value of professional proposal development.