Trackers and stats and charts, oh my!

Confession time - I am an Excel geek.

I love a chart. And formulae. And conditional formatting. Definitely the latter! Any chance I get to conditionally format something, I am in there. Previous colleagues laughed at my holiday planners - not days off, actual daily plans of everywhere I was visiting when I went away, colour coded by area of the city, opening hours etc. I can't help it, I'm a bid manager! Planning and control is in me like the word Blackpool in a stick of rock.

For me, bid trackers are a way of life. A list of bids in progress, deciding on, coming up the tracks - all in date order, and 'filterable' to within an inch of their lives. You want to see all education clients we've bid to in the last year? No problem! All the bids we've decided against because of the small size/value? Give me five seconds. A lovely chart showing the positive and negative feedback from debriefs? Print it onto wallpaper and let me have it all over my lounge. Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.

Yet not everywhere I've worked has had a bid tracker. Even established bidding practices. That honestly blows my mind.

At a granular level, trackers help you see at glance who is working on what. What deadlines the team is facing - are there any clashes? Who has capacity for that bid we're expecting the week after next? Who can pick up x bid while Bid Manager B is on holiday? If we've got a lot on, what's the priority? As the APMP Body of Knowledge says:

"Day-to-day management of the proposal team is the engine at the center of all successful proposals."

Trackers are a key tool for this day-to-day management, leading to successful bids and proposals.

In the bigger picture, as a Bid Manager, my primary role is to manage bids. To me, that doesn't just mean the bid we're currently working on. It's keeping an eye on the ones we've heard about, the retenders we know will be coming up, the ones we've submitted and waiting to see awarded. In current and previous roles, I've managed trackers and reports in Excel, and in Salesforce. However you do it, doesn't matter - it's the content and how you use it that does matter.

If you don't have a systematic way of tracking the activity, how can you effectively manage it? How can you check the last time you bid to x client and what the result was, without looking it all up in your filing or finding the person who worked on it and has a steel trap memory? How can you track your win rates/values, sector success, debrief / feedback trends, no bid reasons and so on - all of which are valuable bid and prospecting tools.

All this information should feed into your bid/no bid decision making process (see my earlier article on this here). It is such critical intelligence, and yet not everyone has this data at their fingertips, and it really is a wasted opportunity.

If you need me, I'll be over here happily finding another factor to conditionally format...