In my spare time I play trombone in an 18-piece swing band. Given the size of the band, communication is vital to play as a team. This requires us to speak a common language, and our Esperanto is musical notation. It keeps us all on the same page and allows us to optimise our performance for the listening audience.
Bidding’s Esperanto
Thirty years in bidding has taught me that, ultimately, buyers most often see bidding through a numbers lens. These numbers are much more than just pricing. They include project ROIs, lifetime gains, net-present values, margins, quantification of value, measurement of risk, company liquidity, capital leverage, cashflows and financial ratios.
From my admittedly quantitative perspective, numbers and financials are the true Esperanto of bidding, irrespective of the form in which they are communicated. If we then want to practice what we preach and be truly client-centric, we need to talk to buyers in a language they understand.
Decision Maker for a Day
If I could wave a magic wand to implement a decision in a day, for me the biggest boost for bidding would be to elevate the financial literacy of our profession.
Too often I see bidding professionals retreat from the numbers, claiming their main job is to massage words. To me that’s like a pianist using just their right hand to play the melody of a tune, without the richness of the left hand’s accompaniment to support the overall musicality.
Yes, it would take training and not everyone would have a natural affinity for it, but improved financial literacy achieves three important things for our profession:
- It helps bidding professionals access the whole story behind a bid, thereby giving them a greater range of persuasive angles.
- It plugs a self-confessed weakness for much of our profession, with the benefit accruing to the individual for the remainder of their career.
- It places our industry in a better position to have more meaningful client conversations at the C-suite level. This helps elevate bidding to the strategic level it deserves to occupy.
From my admittedly quantitative perspective, numbers and financials are the true Esperanto of bidding, irrespective of the form in which they are communicated. If we then want to practice what we preach and be truly client-centric, we need to talk to buyers in a language they understand.
Are the days of our bidding profession numbered?
With technology fast displacing routine drafting and administrative bidding tasks, there are cries that the days of our profession are numbered. I would suggest these advances free us to focus more on the commercial pulse of the projects we pursue. So as our profession matures, there’s never been a better time to get serious about financial literacy.
A sharper understanding of the numbers doesn’t just make our bids smarter; it makes us more persuasive, more influential, and ultimately more relatable to buyers. So the days of our profession aren’t numbered if we focus on what truly counts.
Our thanks to Bid Solutions for inviting Nigel Dennis to contribute this article to the 23rd edition of Bidding Quarterly magazine. You can download the full Issue 23 – Decision Maker For a Day here.
