Deadline schmdeadline: surviving the tender crunch

Deadlines are the bread and butter of bidding. They are also the cause of 90% of our grey hairs. Buyers’ deadlines are immovable.
Miss them and you are out. Internal deadlines, however, are where the real drama plays out.

Ignore them and you are setting yourself up for chaos. Picture this: it is midnight, the bid is due tomorrow, and you are desperately trying to chase a subject matter expert who has just gone “offski” to Spain. The only thing keeping you company is a flickering laptop screen, an empty packet of crisps, and the faint sound of your will to live fading away.

Plan backwards, not forwards. Start from the submission date and work back to today. Factor in reviews, approvals, and the dreaded portal upload. Suddenly your “two-week” bid is actually ten days of writing and four days of herding cats.

Snacks are strategy. This is not a joke. A well-timed Mars Bar or a slice of cold pizza has saved more responses than I care to admit. 

Hungry people do not write good bids.

The playlist matters. Energy is everything. Some prefer classical music, others drum and bass. Personally, I reach for a bit of Wu-Tang. C.R.E.A.M. may have meant something else originally, but in bidding it is gospel: Case studies Rule Everything Around Me.

Communicate early, communicate often. If you are going to miss an internal deadline, tell someone. Do not ghost your team like a bad Tinder date. They would rather know and adjust than find out the night before submission.

Respect the portals. They hate you. They always have. Assume the upload will fail at least twice. Build in time. And remember that the IT support person you need most will definitely be on annual leave when the error message pops up.

Even the best-run bid hits a crunch. Someone will be late. A case study will need rewriting. A policy document will go missing. The trick is not to eliminate stress, but to manage it.

And when the panic hits, remember: Jay-Z had 99 problems too, and somehow he still came out on top. Keep your head, lean on your team, and remember that laughter (and maybe a strong cup of tea) goes a long way.