Jay Tarimala

Research Methods &Bid Management Jay Tarimala

Proposal writers and the larger bid management community have many concurrent proposals to work on and a part of the effort is oriented towards researching online to find latest trends, technology changes, competitor positioning, upcoming disruptive models etc. They only need to get inspiration from the recruiters who look to find the needle in the haystack every day to find the right candidate to fulfill the hiring manager mandate. The search strings, productivity tricks and their ways of thinking they implement can be utilized by bid management teams to emulate them. These are the times the upper management is asking for more productivity from the bid management community. The days of proposal editing, compiling information from multiple sources and packaging the bid maybe coming to an end. The bid managers (no hands on or very little hands on skills) who are functioning as bid coordinators would be the ones who would feel the heat the most. Employers may want to see more value added output like solution architecture, qualitative research, and more robust pricing estimates. As margins come under pressure, the top management may introduce proposal automation software to improve productivity bottlenecks, so expect more workloads. This exercise is an attempt to equip the bid management community with the various ways and methods to optimize their time and find the relevant information (budgets, trends, movers and shakers etc.) to be better prepared to deliver a more effective proposal.