#bid library

Tagging and maintaining your bid library

In the first of these pieces we saw why it’s a good thing to put tags on bid content and not rely on files and folders and we saw a couple of ways of adding tags to documents and storing them without needing much investment in software or technology.  This time I’m going to look what to tag and what tags to use.

Tagging schemes -you’ll always have more than one

Any tagging scheme is a way of classifying items in the library and, to work properly, a classification scheme (a “taxonomy” in the jargon) must be exhaustive and exclusive –that is to say each scheme must leave nothing unclassified and have no classes that overlap.  Any practical repository will have more than one tagging scheme because there will always be more than one way of classifying anything in the library; this is the reason for using tags and not folders.  For example, at the very least we are going to classify each item according to which of our products and services it describes and according to the format in which it exists.  It’s easy to see that for a catalogue of products we can have a tag for each item, corresponding to part or catalogue numbers.  Other classifications could include: the relevant target customer industries, whether the item is a specification, a case study, a set of relevant contract terms, geographic availability or delivery skill-sets and groups.  Finally, all items should carry ownership and expiry tags so that we can make sure a piece is in date, know who to contact if it is not and have a basis for regular review and update of the material in the library.  

What actual words are we going to use to tag our material? We could just make them up as we go along, picking terms to suit each document as we add it to the repository, and this is the way many tagging schemes are created: every time someone notices a useful term, it’s added to the collection and used for tagging documents. But there are problems with this. If new tags are constantly being invented, then newer documents will be classified using a set of tags that were not present when earlier items were added to the library and there is a risk that those older documents will be “lost”, not because they are missing, but because they are tagged with labels nobody looks for.  There is also the risk that different contributors will use different tags to refer to the same thing and again anyone searching the library may miss finding useful documents because they were tagged using a term that the searcher doesn’t think of or doesn’t use.  

From this you can see that it is a serious and sizable piece of work to develop the tagging schemes for a content library.  You can set up tags on the fly, and for small organisations with limited resource and smaller content libraries, that may be practical, but for most organisations it will be worth setting up a project to do it: you will have to live with the results for a long time, and it will be unique to your business, so invest in getting it right from the beginning.  Set up that team, hire some consultancy if it seems appropriate, and put some resource into adopting and implementing the result. You will be glad you did.

Where does library content come from?

When you’re building a content library, one of the hardest bullets to bite is the realisation that most of the content must be written specially for it.  It’s tempting to think that there will be lots of useful collateral already to hand, and there may well be some things you can repurpose, but the material in the bid library must be ready for use and fit for purpose from the word go and there is no real way to achieve this without putting in the hours on it.  The bid library must cover as much of your offering as possible; it must be as accurate and up to date as possible; it must be customer neutral; it must be written with the right messaging and “tone”. It must also be written in such a way that you can later adapt it to the right differentiators for each particular bid. This is so important that differentiation is worth considering as part of your tagging scheme.  Everything written for the bid library must be reviewed for correctness (what it says must be right) and for quality (it must be written, spelled and punctuated correctly).  Set up a review process for content approval and have a gatekeeper who makes sure that anything in the library has been through that review. The same review process is also the ideal point to determine the tags that should be on the item, which helps to keep the tagging consistent and means that the items will be retrievable later.

Strangely, the template and formatting of the content is less important: content is king.  The template you use for an eventual bid may be dictated by the customer, making your standard irrelevant, and your own branding standards may change over time, so it’s not worth the effort to force everything to a current template (with one exception, which I’ll mention later).  One of the best corporate bid libraries I have seen used a Lotus Notes database with most of the collateral held as plain text.  Technically it was very basic, but functionally it was excellent.

Like the tagging schemes, it is worth putting resource into creating and maintaining your content.  Large organisations sometimes have dedicated teams for this, others it part of existing functions such as bid management or marketing or a combination of these.

Company facts

There is a type of information that will be needed for pretty much any proposal, any request for information or pre-qualification questionnaire: the basic information about the company.  This can include an enormous number of things, such as registered addresses, the name of the contracting entity, your company registration number, VAT number, your ISO certification (9001, 14001, 20000-1, 27001 etc), your trade certification (CHAS, RoHS, ATOL etc), financials, locations, numbers of employees by skill set and location, staff turnover, company organisation, group structure (if applicable), insurance provisions, and so on, in an almost unending stream.  This kind of information is needed all the time and for most buyers is part of filtering potential suppliers out of the process, so you need it ready to hand and up to date.  It’s so often needed and so standard, that it’s worth creating a special section of your content library just for these “company facts”.

What about previous bids?

Will your previous bids be part of the content library?  This is a perennial question, and the answer is just as perennial: no.  It’s very tempting; you’ve just created a wonderful customised bid that answers such a lot of requirements.  What could be more natural than to use it as a reference source for future proposals? Except, it’s probably the most dangerous thing you can do.  For example, sooner or later (and it will be sooner rather than later), someone will leave the previous customer’s name in a bid and submit it.  And when that happens you might just as well move on to the next bid because there are few ways of recovering from calling one customer by another’s name that do not also require the ability to walk on water or leap tall buildings at a single bound.

In addition, using previous bids as collateral assumes that those responses were any good and ignores the fact that they were for a particular customer with particular needs on a particular occasion, so there is a good chance that when you come to re-use it, the material will turn out to be poor quality, not relevant, not relevant, or all of the above.

So, don’t do it.  Previous bids are not part of the content library; don’t treat them that way. Keep them separate as a record of what you said to customers in the past and as a learning and review mechanism, but don’t use them as collateral for future bids.

Extracting what you can from a previous bid

Although we are not going to put previous bids into the content library, that’s not to say that there won’t be useful material in a bid and, if there is, we should capture it for the library.  Make sure your post-bid process includes a review specifically to identify any reusable material and allocate resource to putting it into a reusable format.  Some of the things you might want to harvest include performance data for products or services, financial analyses, regional or functional resource information (in fact anything in a table – it’s amazingly difficult to complete tables in many organisations) also any processes and procedures not already documented.

Pictures or diagrams that you create for a bid should always be looked at for potential inclusion in your library.   Graphics can eat up a lot of your time on a bid, whether you are creating them from scratch or making pre-existing drawings into something presentable (which quite often turns out to mean creating from scratch anyway).  This is the one exception to the rule about not needing to enforce templates and formatting on bid library items.  Make sure that any graphics are in your “house” style, have the right colours and icons in addition.  If you have in-house artists, get them to do the work, because the average subject matter expert was not hired for their artistic ability and many bids demonstrate why.  It is startlingly easy to generate truly horrible graphics for a bid and, again, it is worth the effort to head this one off.  

Make sure that the resulting library item is editable with tools you have available, and make sure that those places that need a customer’s name adding are heavily flagged (it’s not quite so bad as having the wrong name, but “customer’s name here” in a bid doesn’t go over well).   Similarly, review the newly created item for quality and consistency before it goes into the library.

Was the library useful?