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27th
May
2015
Vennu Manhoharr
REPORT: “OPINION SURVEY ON
BID MANAGEMENT
PROFESSION”
This is the brief report prepared on the basis of responses received for “Opinion Survey on Bid Management
Profession” through LinkedIn

Report: “Opinion Survey on Bid Management profession”
Vennu Manhoharr - venu.poludasu@gmail.com P a g e | 2
1. Introduction & Purpose of the Survey:
When observed the roles and responsibilities of Bid & Proposal Management Professionals of
various organizations, it is evident that the definition of Bid Management is quite differently
perceived and practiced depending solely upon the Organizations, Domains/Sectors, or the
Company Policies. To find out similarities & differences in job responsibilities of the
employees who are dealing with Bids/Tenders, a survey was conducted in the month of
January 2015 with the help of a questionnaire. The questionnaire consisting of 26 questions
was designed to collect suitable responses from Bid Management professionals.
The survey was completely online, conducted with the help of a questionnaire created in
Google Forms. The web link was posted in relevant groups of LinkedIn.com, a renowned
online professional networking site. The response was collected through Google Forms and
conducted a Descriptive Analysis on the data received. Following is the web link of
questionnaire.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14QpsIyKF3V-QbOMPYPD9GCI_oamq291QT3ikZ7kE8fM/viewform?c=0&w=1
2. Response to Survey:
There were total 46 Responses received from 17 Countries. All the respondents are well
experienced in the field of Bid & Proposal Management belonging to various industries and
positioned at different levels of designations. The last response received was on 21.04.2015
and this was considered as final for this study.
The results are being presented in the following pages with the help of graphical
representation along with required description.

3. Industry wise Response:
Major part of response received was from IT/ITES industry sector and few from Telecom,
Banking, BPS, Engineering, Health Care, Marketing and Oil & Gas sectors. Architecture,
Finance, Consulting and rest of the remaining are put under the category “Others”.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
52%
28%
7%
2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2%
Industrywise Responses

4. Experience of Respondents:
Majority of participants have 6 to 10 year of experience in the Bids.
5. Designations of Participants:
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
1 to 5 years 6 to 10 Years 11 to 15
Years
16 to 20
Years
21 to 25
Years
More than
25 Years
26%
33%
24%
4% 4%
9%
Experience of Respondents in Bids (Years)
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
20
5
3
4
2
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Designations of Participants

6. Geography wise Participation in the Survey:
The above graph shows the status of participation from all over the world especially from
India, UK, USA, Australia, some of the European Countries and others. My sincere gratitude
to one and all the respondents who spared their valuable time and shared this vital
information that can be utilized by new-comers as well as other experienced professionals
who are looking forward to make their career in Bid Management domain. Their contribution
is highly appreciated and without which this report could not have been completed.
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40% 37%
17%
11%
7%
2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2% 2%
Responses-Geography wise

7. Response to Query-1:
The comments received for this question indicate that
Bid/NoBid decisions are made based on Tender requirement, Capability, Commercial
Competitiveness, Company's Target Market, Client Relationship, Percentage of Winning
Chances and finally the Company Strategy. Such decisions are purely made on the
organization’s competency and prior experience in the domain to deliver or implement the
project.
Bid/No-Bid decisions are supposed to be arrived at the very initial stages of a bid, preferably
within a day or two. In order to do the same, the organization should have a strong repository
of the Organizational capabilities and Bid Managers should be very well educated and aware
of these. Organizations who take a lot of time in this stage ultimately end up having
insufficient time for bid preparation and thus jeopardizing the quality of bid and loop-holes in
the solution.
Some of the organizations often skip this process due to absence of defined process. Due to
less business opportunities and recession conditions, many of the organizations are forced by
the circumstances to bid for unfeasible opportunities. Some of them go for bidding because
they decide not to refuse a prospective client and some do this just to show their presence in
the market/competition.
Yes, 54%No, 46%
Do you make Bid/NoBid decisions?

One of the respondents suggested following factors to be considered before coming to a
conclusion on Bid/NoBid.
Who is the client (i.e. does your company have any existing relationship with the
client?)
What – proposed solution / Technology / Service to buy/sell that will meet all of the
key selection criteria?
When – the due date of the response? This provides a Bid Timeline.
Why – what is your company's value proposition, / compelling reason to bid (i.e.
what differentiates you from the competition)?
Where –indication of required resources from within the business.
How (format) – RFP, RFT, RFQ, RFI, EOI, etc.
Competition – who are the competitors (known or expected if a competitive bid)?
Success Factor – what is the estimated percentage win chance?
Value – what is the estimated overall contract/revenue associated with winning the
business? Should also focus on likely margins both overall and within departmental
verticals to ensure a profitable outcome.
Complexity – how complex will the solution, contract and pricing structure be?
Partnering – Direct Sale, Partner Channel, Consortium (if a consortium bid, will
your company be leading the bid)?
Resourcing – is Bid Management required to participate? If not, why?
Mostly the decision is taken by higher management depending on the analysis done by Sales
and Bid teams. The Sales Heads, Bid Directors and COOs are the people who have the final
authority. There is an observation of the willingness for involvement of Bid Managers in the
process of Bid / No-Bid decision making because 46% of respondents are still not given
chance to get involved in this process. They are involved only upto facilitating management
in making decision by doing detailed analysis of the bid and providing pros & cons of
pursuing the deal.

Response to this question provides us multiple perceptions on need of domain expertise to
become a bid manager. This perception varies with the industry, technology, geography and
product.
The 76% negative response indicates that domain expertise may not be essential to manage
a bid. However it is opined that it greatly helps a Bid Manager to make accurate and quick
decisions and in aligning the objectives of the tender with the value proposition of the
proposal. In general the perception is that they must be in position to understand the
contributors' ideas, thoughts, alternatives and resolve conflicts or make decisions. Bid
management is perceived as commercial understanding and being able to drive a document
development process within a sales governance framework. This style is considered same
across industries. The skills required to be a bid manager are transferrable across domains
and so Bid management can be considered as an industry itself, an aspect of the marketing
profession.
The Bid Manager is considered to be responsible for submitting a winning bid and has to
guard the processes to manage the project. There is no need to be a subject matter expert
though a Bid Manager must be in position to challenge the SMEs to uncover the hidden needs
of the client and assure the quality of the proposal. A Bid Manager should always be in
position to find out whether the proposal is really answering the question or just pushing the
Yes, 24%
No, 76%
Do you think that the Domain Expertise is
required to become a Bid Manager?

company sales brochure; whether the response is solving the clients’ problem or just selling
the solution. Bid Manager is expected to have knowledge of Market, Economics and
Information Generation with required Personality Traits rather than having a Domain
Expertise.
Bid management skills are given priority as the Domain knowledge can be learnt/inculcated
within a short span of time. Bid management skills are transferable across the industries and
hence it is more important to understand the bid process rather than be a technical expert.
The 24% positive response indicates that the Bid managers inevitably have to manage both
SMEs and strategic decisions and this is difficult without domain expertise. The domain
experience is considered a compulsory factor because it is considered to be helpful to
understand the client requirement, understand the competition, understand and identify most
suitable supply chain, rope-in suitable and competitive subcontractors, analyze the cost,
prices and mark-up, apply lessons learnt.
Domain expertise can greatly help a Bid Manager to be an efficient reviewer of the content
being provided. This can also help the Bid Manager to effectively contribute and add value to
a bid in key aspects like Executive Summary, Value Additions, Differentiators,
Understanding of the requirements. This will help him/her move on towards a contributing
role, rather than a coordinating or organizing role, which is need of the hour. Also, it is good
to have these attributes when a Bid Manager wants to take on the next challenge.

Response to this question proves that there are a good number of people (46%) who are not
involved in making Financial/Price Bids or they are not given a chance to get involved
though they are called Bid Managers. The opinions of respondents are described in below
paragraphs.
Ideally a Bid Manager should be involved in the Technical and Commercial aspects as
overall completeness and responsiveness of the proposal is his/her prime responsibility.
However, there should be separate teams owning these pieces. The Commercials should be
handled by experience Finance professionals having good idea of Taxation, Financial
Modeling, Margin and Revenue Calculations. Most of the times, same bid can be presented in
multiple ways based on Financial Modeling and this can play a big role in winning a bid. Bid
Manager should be involved to have a good understanding of such models and providing the
required inputs to the Finance Team.
Similarly, for a Technical Proposal, a Bid Manager should be able to understand the overall
requirements and architecture, in order to be able to identify if the solution proposed by the
Technical team addresses all the aspects of the requirements and there are no slip-offs.
Yes, 54%
No, 46%
Do you deal with all Technical Proposals
as well as Financial Proposals?

In a smaller company, a Bid Manger is likely to perform all functions stated above where as
in a larger company these are performed by separate people in departments specializing in
each discipline (SME).
The other part of response (46%) indicates that there are people confined to only Technical
Proposals or they support the higher management in taking pricing decisions. They depend on
other SMEs such as Commercial, Procurement, Financial, Legal etc. to prepare a price work
sheet upon which the director level people make decisions of pricing. The response indicates
that some people are completely not involved and some are partially involved in preparation
of Price Bids. There are situations where the Bid Managers are not involved in Price Bid due
to company’s confidentiality policy. The higher management themselves prepare Price Bids
because they don’t completely rely on sub-ordinates i.e. Bid Managers.

The response to this query shows a great dependency on SMEs especially to get the
Technical content. The comments received indicate that a Bid Management Professional must
know how to deal with Technical SMEs to get the right content. Technical SMEs are
expected to understand the minutiae of their particular technology and the Bid Manager is
expected to translate that into a customer's business objectives and requirements. Sometimes
Bid Managers deal across a technology or domain where they have a bit less competency, so
it is always better to take advice from SMEs. Sometimes, but generally over a period of time
the knowledge can be built up so there will be less reliance on SMEs.
Technical SMEs are the solution providers and they are the people to execute the project after
winning a deal. SMEs are vital to the success of a bid. They make sure a right solution is
proposed for right requirement. The Project Managers, Estimators and other key domain
personnel are all involved in technical write-ups. Additionally, Safety, Environmental, and
QA/QC departments are relied upon for their portions. According to some of the respondents,
Technical SME's often tend to ignore the big picture and so a Bid Manager required to
translate the technical features/advantages in terms of Business benefits.
Keeping a good bid library can often provide a lot of the required information based on
previous answers and the knowledge gained from previous bids. This is a method of
maintaining repository of documents. This information is crucial to initiate the content
writing and reuse of the available content. Some portion of job can be completed without
Yes, 93%
No,
7%
Do you depend on Technical Subject
Matter Experts to get Technical content?

involvement of SMEs so that they can be least disturbed from their own responsibilities.
Once some of the content is placed, then the SMEs’ help is needed to vet those documents to
get them revised and finalized.
Basic Technical Content has to be provided by a Technical SME. However, a Bid Manager
should try and make it customer and market relevant through inculcating thought leadership
through the understanding gathered via industry research, technology trends, customer pain
points etc.
The response indicates that more Bid Managers are involved in both Domestic as well as
International bids. But still there are people who are confined only to Domestic bids. This
variation can be further linked to kind of Business/Products/Services and Size of
organization.
International, 2%
Domestic, 28%
Both, 70%
Do you deal with Domestic or International or
Both kinds of Tenders?

This is the response showing the majority of respondents interacting with Customers though
some are still not allowed to meet their clients. General perception is that the Bid Manager
should continuously interact with Customers/Clients though it is considered as the job of a
sales team.
Yes, 70%
No, 30%
Do you meet customers as part of Bid
Management or Proposal Preparation?
Yes, 39%
No, 48%
Do you involve in preparation of Bill of Material
(BOM), estimation of manhours of the Project
and Estimation of Prices?

What do you think of the qualities/skills required to become a Bid Manager?
Please list some.
The response for this question provided a big list of skills that a Bid Manager should have or
to acquire. The response is generalized for the sake of simplification and for better
presentation. Following are some of skills/qualities that are required to become a Bid
Manager.
Patience/Perseverance Good Networking with all stakeholders
Understand client requirement concisely
Should Know what a good answer looks
like
Understand the industry (domain knowledge)
and competition
Understand whether the bid is in line with
the company strategy
Excellent understanding of Technical and
Non-Technical content of Tenders
Highly proficient at multi-tasking
Good Risk assessment skills Proven interpersonal skills
Decision making skills Industry experience
Self-motivated Customer Relationship Management skills
Effective communication skills (Verbal and
written)
Eager to learn
Project management skills Strong persuasive skills
People Management Skills Effective bid monitoring skills
Effective Time Management Skills Sound commercial understanding
Negotiation skills Competent enough to handle uncertainties
Conflict management skills Strong knowledge of Pricing concepts
Sales awareness/orientation Basic writing skills
Ability to thrive under pressure Economy and Market Knowledge
Business Understanding Quality Management

15. Conclusive Statements:
Conclusive Statements interpreted from this study
1. Few Bid Managers are given a chance to get involved in making Bid-NoBid
decisions. The Top management should involve the Bid Managers in this process
(fully or partially) for the sake of their career improvement.
2. Domain expertise is not a compulsory requirement for a Bid Manager. But SMEs are
always in advantageous positions when dealing with Bids.
3. There is remarkable number of people still not dealing with Price bids. They are only
confined to Technical Proposals. This trend has to change so that Bid Manager can
handle his/her complete job.
4. It is observed that majority of the Bid Managers depend on Technical Experts (SMEs)
for technical inputs and this dependency is not unusual.
5. Though Customer interaction and Communication are perceived as responsibilities of
Bid Management, many of the Bid professionals are still not involved or not allowed
to get involved due to various reasons.
6. The certifications such as APMP, PMP, Six Sigma etc are not necessary but they can
surely add some value to the profile of a Bid Manager. There is a positive response
observed. And also observed that there is an immediate need to educate employers
about theses certifications so that they can include the key words like APMP
Certifications in Job Descriptions when they post jobs.
7. Most of the bid Managers use MS Office suite, SharePoint, MS Visio, MS Projects
and PDF Pro for documentation and Document Management purposes. However,
some tools listed below are being used by some of the organizations along with
customization.
a. Qvidian
b. SANT
c. TenderEyes
d. Google for business
e. Edraw
f. Bid Tracking engine
g. Bid Compass
h. Zmags
i. OpenText Content Server
j. OpenText Tempo Box
k. Social media tools
l. CRM
m. ERP
n. Internal tools of the organization
There is no interpretable response received for other queries of the survey and hence being
ignored in this report.

APPENDIX
Before ending of this report, I would like to share some comments that were posted in
Linkedin group discussions by industry experts on Bid Management in India. I feel that these
valuable expert comments may be useful for the readers and hence being incorporated here
(see following paragraphs)
“In many Indian IT companies the Bid Manager is expected to be the Solution Architect who
owns the solution and the proposal, while in others he/she is the lone person who is running
around, begging to get content from different practices and verticals, editing the Native
English into an Understandable English, collating the content, formatting it and finally at the
last minute submitting to get the wrath from the sales guys that since the proposal came at
last moment they could not do any value add and hence lost the bid. Ideally in an
organization with established Bid Management practice the Bid Manager is a pivot between
the Sales, Practice, Technology and Delivery teams. If you are looking for a Bid Management
role in IT industry be sure to clarify the role, responsibilities and position within the
organization or you may end up being a Glorified Documentation Assistant with secretarial
responsibilities”
“The demand of Bid/Proposal Management in India is still at its early stages. Companies,
both big and small, have started recognizing the importance of a streamlined presales/bid
management team in the light of increased competition and the need to effectively
communicate with geo stakeholders across the globe”
“Earlier, larger organizations were able to “afford” their own bid management teams in
India, while the others used get this done by assigning multiple responsibilities to a single
person/department. However, off lately, companies are hiring dedicated Bid
Managers/Proposal Writers/Proposal Authors and this is not limited only to big
organizations to develop a more formal, defined, and auditable approach to managing
pursuits. Bottomline – Bid/proposal management is booming in India. You will be surprised
to know that Nokia Siemens has established the APMP (Association of Proposal Management
Professionals) charter in India, which is a great initiative. (Unfortunately, I have not seen a
scope for freelance proposal writers similar to what we have in other countries).”

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Report: Opinion Survey on Bid Management Profession

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Report: Opinion Survey on Bid Management Profession