When I grow up I want to be a world class Bid Manager …said nobody ever. But with a procurement market valued globally in the billions it is a serious industry with serious opportunities.
When I grew up I was either going to be a gaucho, riding around the plains looking moody, or an unelected benign dictator of Ireland. Surprisingly neither came off – but there’s time yet.
In the meantime I found myself in the heart of capitalism selling high value products and services to enterprise and government. It was binary. You won or lost, with nothing in between. I liked it.
My win rate at the time was a respectable 50%, but what bothered me was that I didn’t understand why we won or lost. I couldn’t see a pattern of input to outcome. I decided that if I was to increase the odds of a win I had to develop a predictable winning methodology. So later when the one woman band grew into a team of intrepid adventurer-bidders we developed the ShineX Winning Masterplan™ in ShineX. We’ve grown a business on the back of it and we now have a win rate between 78-82% every year. We work on hundreds of bids every year for our clients. We have won over $10bn in competition in 10 years and continue to optimise our process and increase our winning rates.
There is no mystery to winning at this level. It’s part art, more science and involves a disciplined approach to winning. (Ah, discipline, isn’t that the frustrating conclusion to being successful in all areas of life!) That is why I wrote this book. It’s a simple step by step methodology to generating predictable wins for your business, charity, department or agency.