Brilliance in Bidding Builds Better Businesses with Matt Light

Christina Carter (00:08) Hey Stargazers, today we are joined by Matt Light, the Deputy CEO of APMP UK and the Director of International Proposal Teams at Acela Health.

The whole point of today's conversation was to go into how to be a bid leader and to raise the perception of your proposal and bid team within your organization in a way that is strategic and smart and will help raise you and the whole entire company just by making sure that your bid team is seen in the right light by your executive leadership team.

If you are a proposal or bid leader or somebody who's trying to become a proposal or a bid leader, or even if you're just struggling along with figuring out what's next in your bid career, then listening to this conversation is going to help you decide what you need to do next to raise the perception of yourself, of your team, of bids and RFPs in general.

All right, let's get into the conversation.

Christina Carter (01:04) Hey Matt, thank you so much for being on the Stargazy Brief.

Matt Light (01:07) Yeah, thanks for having me, Christina. I really appreciate it.

Christina Carter (01:10) The vast majority of people are going to know who you are, but it would be great if you could give some background on what you're currently doing right now, especially in terms of APMP and it being in addition to what you're doing in a full-time role.

Matt Light (01:28) Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, I balance two things. My day job is Director of International Proposals at Acela Health. It's an American pharmacy supply organization. So my day job is working across both sides of the Atlantic on proposals, both public sector and private sector.

And that's been really exciting. Actually, from a bid professional point of view, that's been brilliant because it's been right at the forefront of what does the strategy need to look like for Acela, how does that tally into the bids that we'll be working on in the UK into the NHS and pharma manufacturers.

I then balance that with my volunteer extracurricular activity with APMP UK. This year I've stepped into the Deputy CEO role and broadly that has responsibility to plan the annual conference for the year. So I'm all guns blazing towards that, trying to make sure that that's the best it can be, particularly given that the chapter's celebrating its 25th birthday this year. So there's absolutely no pressure on that at all. We're trying to make it as great and grand as possible.

Christina Carter (02:45) I think it's probably going to be a great event. No, I know it's going to be a great event because you're in charge. So it makes sense. It'll be a wonderful one.

Okay, so our first question for you, Matt, is really going off the back of the fact that you have been a leader in proposals for a long time. You have said, quote, "brilliance in bidding builds better businesses." And besides just alliteration, if a CEO truly believes that, what would look different tomorrow in how a bid function is structured, measured, and represented at the executive table?

Matt Light (03:36) I think brilliance in bidding does build better businesses. We're that strategic growth engine in the business. I genuinely believe that. Actually, that profitability and that sustainable growth in businesses wouldn't happen if bid and proposal professionals weren't there.

To take each of those three bits, I'll probably start with the measurement first, because I think for me that's the bit that particularly for CEOs, I'd say CFOs as well, you've got to hammer them with the measure bit.

For me, primarily, that comes down to how they understand the value of bid people and the profession. It's been all the surveys done with APMP and various vendors and then independently as well. And the percentage varies a bit, but broadly I think we've always said that bid functions in organizations bring in somewhere between 35 to 50, 55 percent of annual organizational revenue. Probably towards the lower end of that if you're a single person in a bid function or you've got a small team, more towards the higher end of that if you're in one of the big multinational corporates that has bigger teams.

But I think just that on its own, if that message could really land in your C-suite, they would look at that and go, well, actually, if that's right, and it is right, and almost 50 percent of my business is being generated annually by bid people, do I not need to understand a little bit more about what they're doing? Do I not need to understand a little bit more about what they need, what their challenges are, what more help and support I can give them?

Then that would drive into how the bid function is measured. Quite a lot of bid teams that I see just get measured on their win rate. I think with the better understanding comes actually how you'd measure a bid team better against how it performs within its market, completely end to end. So you'd maybe look at your capture ratio, how many really good opportunities have you managed to pull through from capture all the way through to business. You'd probably look at the qualification in your pipeline and the types of customers that you're going for, whether they align for you strategically rather than just pure volume. And then the other thing I think you'd look at from a measurement perspective is your return on investment, particularly from the bidding function. Have you got the right amount of people? Have you got the right tools in there? And is that investment that you're giving them showing a return through the business that they're then able to generate?

So I think there's that from the measurement perspective. Then structurally, you have to get that right as well. Bidding shouldn't be in its own silo. There has to be that alignment between sales, BD, commercial, whatever it might be, and the bid function. And there has to be that understanding from a CEO and a CFO that your bid teams are a key part of that. You can't have one working without the other. You have to have both driving strategy. You have to have both in capture. You have to have both making really good qualification decisions. Because otherwise you do end up with those bid teams that are just the compliance function or treated as admins.

The other thing I'd say with structure is dedicated resource. I used to work with a wonderful lady, a good writer who had been a journalist in the past, and she was very keen on this. Some of the publications that she'd worked at, some of the non-journalistic facing people had objectives built into their PDPs and their job descriptions around how what they were doing would help the journalists to do their job and break news and all that kind of stuff. And she said, which I absolutely agree with to this day, that everybody in an organization should have that for bidding in their objectives and job descriptions as well, because it would then force the issue a little bit in terms of when the bid team comes to you, they're there to win work for the organisation. And actually, if you're the dedicated resource for them, you need to be there to help them with that.

And then from there, I think feeds the representation bit. Once you start to build that structure in the organization, once C-suite have got the understanding of how they're measuring you, they can then let you into the room because they understand what you're going to bring. You get your foot in the door, you get in the room, you have your voice heard in those conversations. You elevate yourself into the strategy discussions, you become a driver and an influencer of that.

One of the things I think we are definitely going to see, I did say over the next five to ten years, some organizations have probably got there already, I think we're going to see bid professionals getting to a C-suite level while still actually retaining the bid knowledge and bid expertise level that they've got. Something like a Chief Growth Officer, for example, somebody who can draw into what the CFO and the CEO are thinking, but use their specific skillsets and knowledge to bring that together to say, well, actually, this is how it's going to help our strategy, this is how it's going to help our business move forward. I genuinely believe that's such a big opportunity for us in the next five to ten years for people to start to get there.

Christina Carter (10:24) Yeah, I completely agree with you. I have been speaking to so many more VPs of Proposals, specifically in the software industry, SaaS industry. And also I've been talking to a lot of CROs and CGOs lately who have come from a proposal background and they feel so strongly about RFPs and they know how to win them, which is probably how they became a CRO in the first place.

But that kind of starts at the beginning, which is, let's say you first enter an organization. What are the first signals that we can look at to tell us whether bidding is genuinely treated as a strategic growth engine or as a compliance admin process, cost centre, that sort of thing?

Matt Light (11:21) I smile wryly because I know this from experience. I think you might almost get some of those tells, Christina, even before you get into the organization. You're going to have something through the interview process where the recruiter or the HR person goes, yeah, I'm recruiting for this bid role, I don't really understand it, but I'm recruiting for it. Or you'll get to the interview stage and you'll sit in front of a head of or a director that doesn't have anything to do with bids in their title. And they'll go, bid sort of sits under me because we've decided as a business that's where it sits because we couldn't work out where else to put it. You'll get that kind of stuff where you'll go, I know where this journey's going if I go into this organization.

I think then, even if you don't get any of that, once you're there, there are some definite flags that you're walking into a compliance-admin-focused bidding business. For me, it's that perception with your sales and BD people and other SMEs. If you were being treated as a genuine strategic function, they would come to you within your induction or really early on and go, I know exactly what to expect from you, I know exactly what you need from me. You help us and guide us in what you need us to do. You're the experts. We defer to that.

Whereas in a compliance-led organization, you just get, brilliant, thanks for being here. We'll tell you when and where we need you. We'll tell you what we need you to do. We'll just ferry it all through the churn machine.

So I think what you're probably looking for when you go into an organisation is that level of understanding. And from that, you'll see very quickly where the opportunities are to get involved for you to be treated strategically. You'll have heavy involvement in supporting sales and BD in capture. There won't be a misalignment or a misunderstanding in terms of why you're helping at that stage. You'll have that deep understanding from SMEs. They'll know the kind of support they need to give you. They'll co-create rather than give you something and go, use that, or make it look pretty, or whatever people tend to do.

And I think for me, you're looking for those organisations that really understand bidding and work winning as the strategic architect of the business. It holds everything together. It is that revenue driver. And actually some of the best organisations that I've worked in really get it, current company included. It's not just focusing on the winning, it's focusing on the growing and the thriving, not just the surviving, even if you are winning.

I've been in another organization. I was brought in to set up a bid team and I thought this feels like a really great strategic opportunity. And they wanted it simply to be a compliance function, and needless to say, I didn't stay there for very long. But I remember one of the rather frank conversations that I had with a fairly senior member of staff where he said, well, we don't actually need to change much of our bid processes. We don't need you to do that. We just need you to focus on the writing because actually our bid win rate isn't that bad for the industry that we're in and the type of bids that we do. The win rate was 25 percent. But let's put that to one side for a minute.

And I said to him, well, that's absolutely fine. If you don't want me to do any of the great stuff that can improve your win rate, then okay, don't worry about it, I won't. Let's just keep bidding by compliance. I have no problem with that, but just bear in mind, we're bidding by luck. And at one point, our luck will run out unless you want any of this great process and strategy put around what we do. The luck will run out at some point. So for me, I think they're the real key distinctions in what you know you're going to walk into for an organization, how they treat bid people.

Christina Carter (15:40) Yeah, it's so interesting when you do end up having those conversations with sales leaders who don't want you to do something strategic and do want you to stay in that admin compliance function. It's almost like saying, I hate revenue. I hate growth. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I've never understood that. But I think so many people in our industry have probably unfortunately come from something like that.

So if we were to go into these people's shoes, let's say I've just joined an organization, I'm running a proposal team. Maybe I'm the only person there who does RFPs. And I found out that they do kind of want me to just be in compliance, to just do admin work. Is there anything I can do to maybe shift that perspective? Because maybe that organization just isn't very mature. Maybe they just don't know very much about RFPs and I need to be there to guide them. Is there anything I can do?

Matt Light (16:35) Yeah, I definitely think there is. For me, I would focus on probably just for a bit getting to learn and understand how the business works. Why is the business working in that way? Why do they see that that's the approach that they want to take? Now it might be because they go, actually, we feel like we're doing all right. We don't feel like we need any of this strategic stuff. We're doing okay. We'll just keep churning.

I think getting an understanding of that and what's driving people to be like that, what's behind the scenes, is definitely really good context and background. I think you can then use that. And I wouldn't go big bang with this. I would go small bits at a time, but I would look at that bit of the process and then I would map it against the process that you as a bid professional really want to run. And I would go, right, where are my opportunities here to draw some lines and go, well, if I just focused on that bit for now, maybe it's capture, maybe it's better relationships with salespeople, maybe it's where does the content come from, whatever it is. If I focus on that bit for now, because I can see where I can get a marginal gain out of that.

Let's focus on that bit and let's see if we can turn the dial up on that bit first. Because when you can do that, you're then proving to people, you're showing people that you've got that strategic thinking, you've got that capability to come in and improve something and make it better.

I'm not saying the light bulbs will go on for everybody because they don't immediately, but the light bulb will then go on for somebody who has a position of influence perhaps more than you do at that point in time, who would come to you and go, I really like what you did there and that is actually working better. You got anything else that we can do? What else can we do to help make that better? And actually, if you need any support from me in that, if you need me to feed that up the chain, be your link to make that work, then I'm happy to do that because I can see where this is going.

So I think, understand where your business is at. Look for the quick wins of what you can implement, really little marginal gains, and find yourself a sponsor. I think if you can just do those three things early doors, it really does help.

Christina Carter (19:14) Yeah, I completely agree. Especially with getting people on your side. I think that's a huge one.

And going along with that, obviously you've gotten really high win rates with your proposal teams, which is amazing. 80 percent win rates. It's unfortunate that one person said 25 percent is enough. And obviously the vast majority of us know that good writing, good process hygiene, everything like that helps with that. But is there something that's more structural or cultural that helps sustain that high win rate and high performance?

Matt Light (19:49) So I think the first thing, Christina, look, I have to absolutely acknowledge my privilege with this. I've been really fortunate to get the kind of win rates, both personally and through teams that I've got. I know not everybody has that same opportunity. I think I've been quite fortunate in the sector that I'm in, the type of organizations I've been in, types of bids that we've done, how we've approached competitor intelligence, all that kind of stuff that feeds into doing bidding better. Notwithstanding the fact that I've had some amazing people in my bid teams who, I will be completely honest, have been much better at the job than me. You love those kind of people as a leader and you want them in your team.

But structurally and culturally, I think there are things that you can do to boost your win rates up to that kind of higher level. Maybe it's not the 80 percent because that might not be achievable in your sector, but there's definitely ways you can do it.

Coming back to that piece of getting your bid function to be recognized as the strategic architecture within the business, for me is fundamental. And that doesn't just come down to good writing and good process from the proposal point of view. I would look to get a handle on everything. Not in a way that is going to put people's noses out of joint, but in a way that people can see the benefit of you having some ownership of it. Not necessarily responsibility and accountability, because that's not right, but having some consultative ownership over it.

I'm talking about things like being more involved in how pricing gets put together, how it gets approved through the business. Having a bit more sight of what the legal team might be doing from a contractual point of view, the kind of risks and red flags that they're looking for. Managing all of the content across the business, not just content for proposals, but actually being that knowledge base for really great, consistent tone of voice content that anybody can use in marketing, corporate comms, public affairs, whatever it might be. Be the complete master of that.

And then the other thing I would say we can get involved in structurally as well is pitches. We shouldn't stop at the proposal. We should see ourselves through into the pitch with the expertise and the knowledge of the bid that we've just submitted, as well as being able then to man-mark any procurement people in the room who are going to ask those detailed questions that, with the best will in the world, and I mean this positively, your senior people who might have gone into the room to do the sales closing bit might not necessarily have the answer to.

So I think being able to bring all of that into a bid function's ownership, for the bid function to say we're going to support absolutely end to end structurally in the business from start to finish, I think that helps your win rates go up. But you have to balance that culturally as well. One of the great things that I've found works with that is setting your own vision, strategy, and objectives as a team.

I've done this a couple of times now in the past and whenever I've done it with teams, and it's great to watch, people have always looked at me and gone, hang on, why are we setting a vision and strategy for the bid team? We know what the business's vision and strategy is. We surely should just relate to that by winning business, right?

And you go, no, hang on a minute. Every other function in this business is going to have their own vision and strategy. Yes, it might tie to the ultimate business one, but we're talking here about how we function as a team and how we want to articulate to the business what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, what we're going to achieve and why.

That for me is an absolute game changer. If you can get that in and embed that culturally with salespeople, SMEs, right up to C-suite, if they know what you're aiming to achieve, how you're aiming to do it, and actually what your red lines are as well, so you're creating that psychological safety and fail-first environment within the teams, there's no pressure on that bit. That's a really strong cultural basis for you to be able to change the entirety of the business, to be honest, and take it forward into better performance and better win rates.

We did that at McKesson. When I first came in to manage the team, having been a bid writer for a few years beforehand, the management that we'd had before that, we were completely on the floor because there was nothing in the culture, there was nothing in the strategy. We were just treated as a compliance function. And being able to turn it on its head and go, this is how we're going to make things better by actually putting ourselves first and doing what we think is the right thing to do first, that just worked amazingly.

Christina Carter (25:25) Yeah, and I think that kind of goes into the structure and culture of when we'd have to rebid as well. So I'm wondering, what systems or leadership behaviours prevent you as an incumbent from eroding your competitive edge over time and then losing that next RFP?

Matt Light (25:43) There's always been a real tension with this, particularly when the bid team has tried to have that early involvement in capture when you're going through that rebid cycle.

Trying to turn the perception of that from a sales and BD point of view, from one of those people going, why are you here? Why are you at this stage? Stop coming in and telling me how to do my job. To: okay, I get it. I understand why you're here. I understand what you're doing. You want to, I'm being challenged healthily in an independent way to ensure that we're best placed to win this business again.

Again, if you can get that level of collaboration, particularly in your leadership, and get C-suite buy-in or maybe one of your top salespeople or sales leader buy-in and sponsorship to that, that's a really good direction in which to go. Because you can mitigate that complacency almost at source. Actually, even before you start getting into the rebid cycle, if you're there constantly in the background going, I just want to understand how we're doing with this contract, what's new, what are we changing, how's that benefiting the customer, that's really good capture and intel all the way through.

I heard a really good suggestion. Won't surprise anybody to know it came from John Williams because he's the absolute master.

Christina Carter (27:30) Yeah, I've got his book right over there.

Matt Light (27:42) He mentioned when I heard him speak last week about when you go through your review cycle after bidding. And he talked about doing annual birthday reviews. You do your after-action review or your customer feedback review or whatever you do after you submit the bid. But actually, how often do you go back every year to look at the bid that you submitted and then compare and contrast that against where the contract is now?

Are you delivering what you said you would? If you actually had to write that bid again, would you write the same bid or would you be able to write something that shows the contract has progressed within a year? And I really liked that idea. That's something I think I need to take and do a bit more of.

And it's about capturing the outputs from that because you can easily see where new case studies, new innovations, testimonials are going to come from. Having this approach of then feeding that in and going, yes, this is a rebid, but why can't we treat it as new business? Let's not just go, well, we've got the model, it works, just bung it in again.

Because that is where your competitive edge erodes. You've got to remember that while you're delivering a contract for three to four years, your competitors are using that three to four years to go, I'm going to FOI the hell out of what they submitted and get as much as I can out of it. I'm going to get stuff from industry conferences and things like that, where I can get whatever intel I can to understand how they're running that contract and then work out how to do it better.

Christina Carter (29:26) Yeah, that's what I'm doing to people.

Matt Light (29:30) Exactly. And it feels like common sense, right? Why would you not do it? But you don't, because you're in that comfort zone of, we're delivering the contract, they love us, we haven't done anything wrong, they don't really need anything else. Well, they might do.

So modelling it from scratch to go, actually, let's meet them where they are today, because that's exactly what our competitors are going to do. Again, I think that's a great thing.

Ultimately, the ideal state in this is you want to get clients to sacrifice the RFP altogether. I know that's not always appropriate in public sector because of the regulations and things like that. But if you've got a private sector client and you can get them to the ideal state of ditching the RFP altogether, you've done your job. In public sector, if you can get them to at least sacrifice any pivot to a new service state that you haven't influenced, again, you've done your job. And if you marry that with everything else that we've just talked about, that should put you in the best position to not lose.

Christina Carter (30:38) I've really rarely ever seen a proposal process that includes that part within the process. You have the feedback and then the review cycle and then you stop and it ends. So I think seeing this as a continuation throughout is so important.

Yeah, I could go on. We could talk just about this all day.

I have a question that I've been, it's new. I've never asked this question before to anybody, but it's something that I think is probably going to become more relevant, especially right now, unfortunately. You've mentioned in the past that you have backed teams to choose not to pursue bids based on value misalignment. And I'm talking about ethical value misalignment. So how would you say that proposal leaders should formalize these ethical qualifications without appearing to be commercially negligent? How do we balance that out?

Matt Light (31:34) That particular situation I had a few years ago of one of my team coming to me having been allocated a bid and going, I really don't feel comfortable with this. This is absolutely nowhere near where both my professional and personal values lie. That's just stayed with me because number one, I don't think I've ever seen anybody be so brave to come forward and say that. And number two, it's helped me to get to this way of thinking of, actually, we probably need to do more of it as good people.

So part of it, I think, comes back to how you've set that vision, that strategy, the objectives for your bid function, and setting the boundaries within that. What are your red lines? What are the things that if the business is looking at it more widely, you might sit there and go, we get it, but we're not comfortable with it. If you want to go forward, you do it without our support.

I think if you can put those boundaries and red lines up front really early and get the business to understand where they've come from and why they're there, you're coming from a point of view of, we're not doing this because we don't want to. We're doing this because we've got a real reason that fits against what we've said to you and how we've said we will work within this organisation.

Layered on top of that, I think, is actually the articulation of it and how it's communicated. Particularly when you get to that directorship and C-suite level, you've got to articulate it in a way that they will understand. For me, it's about learning the language of risk. Because ultimately when you get to that level, even if they say they're not, anyone at C-suite level is going to be risk-averse to anything that they think is going to really put the business reputationally or operationally in a bad light.

Yes, from our point of view, we can talk about the ethics argument or we're getting some bad vibes from this. And yeah, they're good reasons not to progress, but they don't land with C-suite. You've got to be talking about things that they will immediately recognize in terms of, this is a threat to our reputation. We've got some supply chain challenges in here. We might erode some of our margin and profitability if we go for this. There's going to be a heavy compliance piece in here if we go anywhere near this. The debarment list now, particularly from a public sector point of view under PA 23, is a big one as well.

I think if you link any of those reasons in with that, light bulbs are immediately going to start going off. We don't want to be in a place where we can't bid anything anymore.

Yeah, definitely the language and the articulation. We're walking away from this opportunity because our resource is too valuable to spend time bidding on something that will cost us reputation, et cetera, is better than, well, we're not doing this because we don't want to. Which is still a valid answer internally, intra-team, but the articulation of it matters.

The other thing that I would definitely advocate within this is, if you've got one, I know not everybody will, but more so in your larger organizations, if you've got a procurement team or you've got a GNFR resource or something like that, lean on them. Because they do this kind of stuff day in, day out. They will be ethically qualifying customers every single day in terms of who you use as a business, as vendors.

So I would lean on them. I would use their knowledge and expertise, the language that they use to articulate why you wouldn't work with a particular vendor from an ethical point of view. And then apply that to our side of the fence. Procurement people are a great resource and a great learning tree to sit under for this kind of stuff because they do it day in, day out.

Christina Carter (36:00) Yeah, you should be making friends with these people anyway within your organization. You should already know them and you should be able to have those conversations with them.

And obviously you've moved from being a bid writer to a bid director. So what do you think the misconceptions are that people have, these high-performing bid professionals, when they want to step into a leadership position? What are those misconceptions that you see them often have?

Matt Light (36:26) Really good question because I've struggled with this in the times that I've stepped up into roles, particularly when I stepped up from bid manager to bid team leader. And when I've reflected on it and when I've seen other people, not necessarily in bid teams, but just across organizations do it, I think the way I put it is: it's doing the job versus being the person.

I found a CMI study. It's a couple of years old. They interviewed about four and a half thousand managerial-level people in all sorts of organizations. They found 46 percent of them had been high performers in their previous role before they got promoted, yet 60 percent of those people had failed in a leadership role within the first two years. And then they found that 82 percent of those people had had no formal people or leadership training whatsoever.

And that I think is the big misconception. The biggest misconception is that you can manage people in the same way that you've managed your work. And you can't.

Christina Carter (37:51) If only it were that easy.

Matt Light (37:55) Yeah. When you manage the work, you're very narrow-focused. Let's be honest. The person that you are thinking about the most when you manage your work is yourself, because you want it to go well, you want to look good, you want all those individual drivers that people have to want to do a good job.

You can't focus on yourself when you're managing people. That's just completely the wrong thing to do. And that is where I've seen managers that I've had, or other people have had, who have just been so focused on going, right, well, I focused on myself and the results that I get, that's worked for me, so I'm going to get everybody else to do that, and I'm going to manage them in that way to get the results. And again, it just doesn't work.

I do more of this now. In the times when I've changed jobs after I had my first leadership position, I take a step back. I go, right, I am now leading a team of people. If I was in this position and somebody was coming in to lead me, what are the things that I would want and need from them? How would I want them to behave? How would I want them to act? What would I want that dynamic to look like?

And then I flip it on its head and go, well, actually, if I'm saying I would want that kind of person, I need to be that kind of person. And really, it's just about being a good person. It's just about being the kind of really nice, good, empathetic human being that we're all capable of being. We all do it outside of a work environment. Mostly.

Christina Carter (39:32) Most people.

Matt Light (39:35) Yeah. But then something happens when we step into a professional environment and some people lose it. And I don't quite understand why.

But that piece of, be a human-centred leader, lead with empathy, lead with understanding, lead with vulnerability actually, because that's what I tend to do now a lot. You all know that firsthand because I asked if we could rearrange this because I have to go and pick my daughter up this afternoon from school. And I have vulnerability in that. I'm the first person to stick my hand up in my day job and go, look, I've got these commitments, family, whatever it might be. I'm going to give myself enough flexibility for that. And so you're going to get enough flexibility for that as well. It's not just I'm going to say it, I'm going to do it, and I'm going to leave you lot to struggle. I think that vulnerability is really key.

And you can see then the results of that. That same CMI survey said that leaders like that who are human-centred, something like 53 percent more team engagement, 41 percent less attrition in the team. And it worked out it was a 2.3 times better performance than competitors who may not have had the same kind of leader.

You can just see how that immediately applies to the bid world. That 2.3 times better performance just by being a nice person and a human-centred leader. That's a no-brainer, isn't it?

Christina Carter (41:05) Absolutely. And then when it comes to automation, obviously that kind of changes things for us. What do you think that means for the bid leaders out there? What do you think that they should be giving to automation? What do you think that they need to keep strategic ownership of?

Matt Light (41:22) So I think the first thing with this, I've probably said this for the last 18 to 24 months as automation started to come in, and you have seen the people who've gone first mover with some of the first tools out there. It's all about efficiency of speed, that kind of stuff. And I think we're just starting to see a point now where people are going, do I want efficiency of speed or do I want efficiency of something else?

I think some of the really smart vendors are starting to turn on to that now. And they're getting away, and there's still some that do it, but most of them are getting away from this kind of, well, you put AI in, you maybe don't need bid people anymore. I cringe every time I see that.

So I think actually one of the responsibilities we've got as automation comes in more is actually understanding it and driving the direction of it. Being in the chair of having the useful expertise and experience in a business to go, well, let's not just run headlong into it and put something in and then sit there dormant in six months' time. Let's work out why we want to use it, how we want to use it. Because if we can answer those two questions, we're then going to have much more success in identifying and implementing what we want to use it for.

And also I think we've got the opportunity to do a little bit more around setting businesses' expectations of what are the guardrails. How does the AI get managed? What does it do? What doesn't it do? What happens if it goes too far and we lose control over it? All of this strategic thought leadership stuff in a business. We're going to have to lead change with AI. It might lead us a little bit, but we can get a handle on how we lead it as well in our organization.

I think that's a massive opportunity then, again more widely, for us to show as bid professionals that strategic thinking and leading change in any scenario is something that we can do. And it's not something that automation can do.

So I'd go back to the things I mentioned earlier. We know our businesses unlike any other person in the business. And particularly as AI comes in, we've got the opportunity to prove it. Get more involved in capture, get more involved in solution design, get more involved in the pitching and the implementation side of things. The human bits that the AI, as it stands at the moment, can't do. Who knows where we'll get to in five or ten years' time, but those bits at the moment, the AI can't do.

Give it some of the draft content stuff. Give it some of the really basic process automation and workflow stuff. Give it the stuff that it can do really well. Use that time that you've got freed up to get really into the heart of the strategic thinking and leading change part of the discussion. Because it's always going to be there in businesses. And I think, relating back to what we said at the beginning, that's where your sweet spot comes if you want to get into those directorship and C-suite levels. The kind of skills that people look for, for you to be able to get there.

Christina Carter (45:05) Yeah, I really hope people listen to you when you say that. You're part of one of the round tables, but I put quite a few of them out there in different geographies and the vast majority of them said, my manager, my leader who's not on bids, wants to implement an AI RFP tool. But why should I be a part of that? Why should I be part of that decision? Why should I be taking demos with these vendors? I'm like, what do you mean? You don't want to be a part of that? You don't want to decide what's going to be a part of your everyday? And you're missing out on being a really strategic resource in your organization when it comes to automation within your sales process. So I hope people listen to you, Matt. Because that was so surprising to me.

Matt Light (45:55) Yeah, Christina. And to add to that as well, there are still so many bid teams that don't have that correct reporting structure where they are reporting to somebody who will look at the RFP software, even with the vendors who are doing it brilliantly and have got the right approach to it and all that great stuff. That person will still not know what they won't know because they won't be the person using it. They're not the bidder who's going to end up using it and have to get their heads around what it does day to day. And yeah, that is a missed opportunity if we're not getting involved in those conversations. I completely agree.

Christina Carter (46:41) Yeah. So if you're one of those people, go and listen to what Matt just said over again. It's a huge opportunity for you.

My last question for you, Matt, is let's say a Director of Proposals or someone similar is listening to you today and they want genuine executive influence within the next 12 to 24 months. What deliberate move can they make right now to reposition themselves and maybe their whole entire bid function?

Matt Light (47:05) So first thing I would do, go and create that vision, strategy, objectives, boundaries, red lines for your team and get your team to buy into it. Because if your team aren't bought into it, then you've got no hope of getting it anywhere else.

As well as that, know your team. Know them inside out. Know what drives them, know what they're looking for in terms of their own career paths, how they want to work within the business in this profession. And actually know your process inside out as well. Because fundamentally, that is what we do.

Create that right environment, get the psychological safety in there, get everyone on the same page. Have everyone feel that there's the opportunity to fail first, be vulnerable, all that kind of stuff. That is the cohesive team unit that you need to make everything else work.

Once you've got that and you're happy with it and you've got the team's buy-in to it, think about how you're going to communicate it. What language do you need to use with who to get this to land successfully? It's not going to be the same for every audience. Salespeople, your SMEs, your C-suite are going to need to hear it in slightly different ways. So work on how you're going to do that. What does that look like? What are the key messages that you need to land with who?

To help with that, I'd actually socialize it first. Get some of your really supportive SMEs and seniors involved. Get your sponsors in. If they can understand the messages and if they can see the benefit of what you're saying, the whole, we're going to do this with you and for you, we're not going to do it to you, you can get them to understand that's where you're coming from on it and get them to understand that's the message. Socializing it will definitely help because they can then give their expertise to where you might need to tweak certain bits.

Once you're there, you then need to decide how you're going to implement this. Okay, you've got the buy-in, you've got the sponsorship. Everyone understands what success looks like in rolling out what you've said you're going to do. You can go big bang. You can try and do it all at once. There are definitely scenarios in which that works. Or do you look at it and go, actually, I've got some certain focus areas here, I know where some quick wins are. We drip feed this in over time. We get the light bulbs to go off with people. We do it incrementally, but it creates more lasting change.

And then once you've got into that cycle, once it starts to land and get embedded, sustain it. You can't treat this as a one-and-done exercise. Even now, it might feel early days, but think about how you're going to keep that momentum. What does that look like? How are you going to keep progressing? Where do those marginal gains come from over two, three, five years?

You do that. And honestly, okay, it could take a little while. You might get frustrated along the way sometimes. But if you're looking at that as a sort of 18-month, two-year journey, I could 90 percent guarantee you, by the time you get to the end of that journey, you'll be in the rooms that you want to be in. You'll be using your voice where it's heard and where you want it to be heard. And you will be part of that strategic architecture.

Christina Carter (50:39) I also think it's a mindset change as well that we have to go through, not just a structural one. I'll give you one of mine, but then I'm curious what you would have to say about it. For me, it's that I'm worthy of being there, that my mindset is worth listening to. And the data that I have is worth listening to. And I didn't always believe that in myself.

And also being likable, like taking my time out of my day to make sure I'm not just heads down doing the work, which is important, but also talking to people who maybe I don't wouldn't normally talk to on a daily basis with RFPs. But I don't know what your thoughts are on this at all.

Matt Light (51:19) I absolutely appreciate that, Christina. It's really hard. I make a bit of a generalization in this, but if you're a bid person and you do one of those characteristic personality trait exercises, you are predominantly going to come out either heavily blue or heavily green because you're going to be in that introverted space. Some of us fit into that extroverted introvert box. But you're going to be in that bit.

I remember doing one of those years ago where I came out and I think it was something like 92 percent blue and 3 percent yellow, which has now created the running joke in my household that I'm the least fun person that my wife and kids know.

Christina Carter (52:06) No.

Matt Light (52:10) Which I take as a compliment actually. But it's one of those where it's really difficult. And in addition to that, the imposter syndrome is real. Particularly, I think, in a bid professional's mind. Because I don't think it matters whether you've been in the profession for very long or not. You have that thing of, everyone's telling me that this is what the perception of bid people is. So actually, is anyone going to listen to me? Does anyone really care what I say?

I still feel that now after 15 years. I still feel it doing this, thinking, is anyone actually going to think that this is worthwhile or not?

But I think that is such a big challenge that we have to get over. I have started treating it now as something to almost lean into and be excited about rather than fear. And I've only started doing that ever since I heard, recently, that scientific study that actually the fear receptor and the excitement receptor is pretty much one and the same thing. And it's just how you react to it, whether you do that fight-or-flight thing of leaning into it or not.

So actually, if you find the excitement within you to be able to do it, I think it crosses a massive bridge. Because then people will look at you and go, okay, well, I've never spoken up before, but actually I've got some great stuff to say. I completely understand where they're going and I'm on board with it. And again, that opens doors massively if you just take yourself out of that comfort zone. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable about it. But that would be the big thing for me. That's definitely how I've approached the last few years, but it took me quite a while to get there.

I think we've all got the capability to do it. It's just about finding whatever we need within ourselves to unlock it.

Christina Carter (54:13) This was incredibly useful, Matt. Hopefully the people who are listening to this are going to get a really good idea of what it takes to be a leader in the bid and proposal industry, maybe some mindset shifts, and then also to help your wider team understand what those mindset shifts need to be to recognize the proposal and bid team enough to grow the revenue. Thank you so much, Matt. Where can people find you? If people want to connect with you, learn from you, follow you, where's a good place?

Matt Light (54:55) Yeah, so LinkedIn. I am probably quite annoyingly active on that. So come and find me on there. Also, it doesn't have to be APMP related, but if there's anything that's interesting you around APMP, and it definitely is a great support to quite a lot of the stuff that we've talked about, then go on the APMP website as well. You'll be able to find my email on there and drop me an email too.

If you find me on LinkedIn or send me an email, I will absolutely come at anything from the point of view of I'll help you because it helps us all get to where we want to be. It's not for personal gain or anything like that.

Christina Carter (55:31) You're volunteering for the good. No, thank you so much. Go follow Matt. He said he's annoyingly active. It's not annoying. It's really helpful, active. It's useful stuff. Thank you so much, Matt. I appreciate you being here today.

Matt Light (55:44) Thanks, Christina. Really enjoyed it.

Christina Carter (55:46) If you made it this far, amazing. I hope you learned as much as I did from Matt Light. If this was useful to you or you know somebody it's going to be useful for, please give it a share. That is how we grow on this channel, usually by word of mouth. We want to be as useful as possible to the right people. So please share, like, and subscribe. And I will see you next week with another conversation with a proposal and bid leader in our industry. See you then.