Presales involves
- · lead generation
- · follow-ups
- · solution preparation
- · final proposals
- · product demonstrations
- · proof of concepts (POC)
and many other marketing related activities till the customer is acquired.
Bid Management is a vital Presales support service that provides copywriting, administrative and technical resources to ensure the quality of proposal documentation and presentations.
A bid manager’s role is to present a proposal to the client that meets their business and cost objectives while minimizing business risks and maximizing profit margins
Bid Manager is the owner of the proposal making process. Bid Managers study the request for proposal (RFP docs) from the client, which can be very comprehensive and legal in nature. The plans the whole proposal like any other project and are solely responsible for keeping quality, costs and schedule for the whole bidding process.
Pre-sales need to work very closely with sales, technical, delivery and commercial teams to co-ordinate the preparation of a winning proposal. T
The sales, delivery and technical teams can belong to different verticals and might be scattered across the globe, so effective coordination and interpersonal skills are the key here.
A bid manager may not have any direct control over any of the teams, they are working with. For participating executives from different verticals, proposal making may be an extra add to their already tight day-to-day schedules, so getting quality time from them can be one of the biggest challenges in the process.
The term ‘winning proposal’ is very important here; because if we don’t win, the whole exercise will be just a big overhead to the organization and how many such overheads your organization can absorb without significantly affecting the bottom line?
Following are the main functions that can be categorized under presales and bid management.
- · Qualification and prioritization of proposal and tenders.
- · Co-ordination with sales, solutions, delivery and finance departments
- · To ensure the availability of complete and quality information from each source within set timelines.
- · Proposal documentation.
- · Final presentations to the client with a sales team that may involve technical consulting and product demonstrations.
Who Fits?
A good fit here would be a person who has a broad knowledge of Technology and how it is implemented in the real world. The person would also need to be able to pick up new technologies and learn the companies product and service offerings very quickly.
Good communication, coordination, presentation, and interpersonal skills are usually required. It will help if the person for the bid manager post has worked with RFP responses before and can appreciate their commercial as well as technology aspects.
They will be required to do a lot of number crunching say for schedule, cost and scope and quick ‘what-if’ computations to deal with variations in these factors.