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What problems does Bid Compass solve?
Bid Compass will help any of these problems:
- A difficulty qualifying Bid / No Bid decision
- Don’t have an integrated view of your bid pipeline and plans
- Struggle to track and audit the progress of a tenders
If you recognise any of these, take a look at Bid Compass.
Bid Compass is a bid management tool to manage and organise your pipeline of bids & proposals. This saves time and improves decision making, particularly Bid / No Bid decisions. Imagine you are in a tense meeting, you’re trying to decide whether to continue spending precious bid costs to continue a pursuit. Bid Compass gives you a way to objectively measure the status of the bid. You can then compare that to your past wins and make a more informed view of the likely success. This is how Bid Compass enables data driven decisions and enables Capture Managers to better manage their stakeholders.
How does Bid Compass work?
Bid Compass is proposal management software that supports a consistent methodology to bid review & approval. Bid Compass asks a customisable series of questions to qualify your bid. You then record the actions the bid team & capture manager will do to improve your positioning. This happens within an integrated system helping you to benchmark against past performance. Bid Compass can integrate with you Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for reduced manual administration.
Qualify the bid status: Bid Compass comes with 21 default questions that prompt an objective bid review of your win probability. The questions are aligned to best practice methodologies like the Association for Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) and Shipley. They can also be adapted to integrate with your company Quality Management System (QMS). The questions come with advice prompts and comments to create an audit trail of your key decisions.
Below: Bid Compass supports and objective review of the positioning of the bid and likely success
Answering the questions gives you a PDF report of the status. You’ll set thresholds and receive alerts when the scores fall below them. In the picture below we can see a bid that fits within our organisational capabilities, but we are not positioned well against competitors. The capture manager now makes a decision whether there is enough time to improve the positioning or whether they should qualify out.
Below: Record the status of the bid to identify where corrective actions are needed
Once we have identified strengths and weaknesses, we add corrective actions to our bid planning. Bid Compass provides an integrated view to plan the stages, spend and reviews. This helps evidence the opportunity cost of continuing with the bid. These data-driven decisions remove emotion and subjectivity from the bid qualification process.
Below: Evaluate the opportunity cost of continuing with the tender based on the previous scoring
The nature of Bids & Proposals is a high-stress, fast paced environment. This is makes it difficult to be objective and impartial about continuing with a bid. Within a few weeks, a lot of emotional investment has gone into the bid. It can be hard to objectify the real probability of winning. A Shipley survey showed that companies spend an average of 2-5% of the contract value on bid costs. That means that bids are just too expensive to pursue without a good probability of winning. Bid Compass will provide hard evidence of what your win ratio really is.
Below: Evidence the types of bids your organisation actually wins based on qualification data and past experience
How can I try Bid Compass?
Bid Compass is available on your server or with a hosted cloud subscription. Pleasecontact us or view a web demo. Bid Compass will save time managing your bid pipeline. It helps make better, data driven decisions. You'll see how Bid Compass enables you to:
- Implement a standard approach to qualifying bids & proposals
- Objectively score and qualify you probability of winning the bid
- Put in place corrective actions to improve the win probability
- Compare historical data and qualify out bids that yield low returns