“The most successful organisations in any market or selling environment innovate and improve framework processes based upon fundamental principles.”
“Business development managers who permit ad hoc processes and rely on heroes for success are consistently less successful.”– The Shipley Business Development Lifecycle Guide
Most businesses struggle to create and imbed a work winning process and culture that aligns with best practice. Too much responsibility falls on proposals contributors to work miracles at the eleventh hour. Quite often, this literally means working past 11:00pm the day before the tender is due.
We know, through comprehensive benchmarking by the Business Winning Institute (formally the BD Institute), businesses that adopt better process and culture achieve the following benefits:
- Reduced cost and risk of capturing business
- Increase productivity and staff morale
- Improved sale forecasting
- Increased management visibility and control
- More competitive solutions and proposals
How do we shift a business away from an immature reliance on heroics to a mature model based on well-established principles?
Any exceptional organisation starts with people who are well educated. McKinsey takes the top MBAs from the best Universities. Google snaps up the promising Computer Scientists from MIT.
These people bring comprehension and competency to an organisation. They are the foundation of excellence. As they gain experience working in the business, they develop capability. Highly capable people working together create organisations or departments with the framework for good culture.
BD and Proposal functions need to follow the same four steps to build a successful organisation. However, the key challenge is the absence of a defined career path for professionals working in this space. The lack of a uniform understanding around what “good” BD and Proposals look like, makes it very difficult to build the foundations and structure for a strong work-winning culture.
| Phase | Activities | Outcomes |
| Comprehension | Training.
|
An awareness of best practice.
The ability to identify best practice in process and documents. Tools and techniques to support better BD and proposals. |
| Competency | One on one and group BD and proposal coaching.
Support on opportunities.
Accreditation* |
The ability to apply tools and techniques effectively.
Understanding of how to apply best-practice within specific environments. Documented measurements of improvement through accreditation metrics. Improvements in other metrics, including: o Win Rate o Capture Ratio o Profitability o Staff morale |
| Capability | One on one and group BD and proposal coaching.
Accreditation* |
Consistent application of best practice.
Documented measurements of improvement through accreditation metrics. Likely improvement in other metrics, including: o Win Rate o Capture Ratio o Profitability o Staff morale |
| Culture | Leadership coaching.
Accreditation* |
Alignment of BD and Proposal best practice with team attitude and behaviours towards work winning.
Industry-leading BD and Proposal functions. |
Figure 1: Building sustainable cultural change by developing individual capability. A customised, role-based accreditation framework tracks individual growth. Accreditation is the missing measurement that supplements the organisational metrics such as win rate.
In the coming weeks and months, you will start to hear more from Shipley Asia Pacific about our response to this challenge. We are building a framework that enables a clearer path for organisations to develop people, and for BD and Proposal Professionals to validate their skills.
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