Measuring up

Posted by Jon
​Another few statistics that interested me at Bid & Proposal Con, this time from the workshop that BJ co-hosted on the eve of the conference for staff working on ‘commercial’ bids (as opposed to those for federal government / defense).

Team size, first. Roughly 10% of those attending were the only proposal person in their organisation – that is, the ‘proposal centre’ is a one-person band. 40% were in proposal centres with two to five staff; 20% in teams of six to twenty staff; the remainder in centres of over twenty proposal professionals.

Deal value, next. Just under 25% of those there worked on deals that were typically worth $500k or less. The biggest proportion of attendees (45%) had deals valued between £500k – $2.5m. For bigger contracts:

• 14% worked on proposals worth $2.5m – $10m
• 9% fell into the $10m – $100m band
• 23% worked on larger contracts worth over $100m.

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A discussion on pre-written proposal content was fascinating. The vast majority did have some form of content knowledge base, but less than a third of these had this in some form of automated content management system.
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Finally, turnaround time:

• 5% were typically getting a day or less by their customers to produce a proposal
• around a fifth of those present were getting two – five working days
• a third get between one – two weeks
• a quarter were getting two weeks – one month
• and the remainder (just under 20%) are given more than a month.

None of the data’s statistically significant in terms of the sample size, but it does give some interesting rough guides for you to use to see how you compare to other teams.