Building bridges with professional services SMEs

Effectively engaging with highly intelligent, highly motivated and very busy lawyer, accountant and consultant SMEs is a critical skill for bid and proposal professionals working in the professional services industries.

I really enjoyed exploring how to improve engagement with professional services SMEs at the Global Bid & Proposal Summit earlier this month, and attending the very timely and topical sessions others like Christina Godfrey Carterand Kathryn (Hahndiek) Potter CP CAP APMP presented.

Effectively engaging with and influencing subject matter experts (SMEs) is a make or break skill for all bid managers. It is often a particular challenge for those working with the super smart, super busy, multimillionaire SMEs working in legal, accounting and consulting firms (they don't call it herding cats for nothing). And improving this one aspect of your proposal management process can have an outsize impact on your win rate for professional services bids and pursuits.

In this session I provided practical examples and approaches that bid and pursuit managers can use to improve SME engagement on their individual bids. Some key points I discussed included:

• why a lot of SME engagement is particularly challenging right now

• what is different/special about professional services SMEs (vs those in other professions)

• why bid and proposal managers should check (and potentially change) the internal framing around the SMEs’ role on bids and proposals, as well as their own

• the need to understand organisational/team culture and the context the SMEs are working in (and how to go about building that understanding)

• the importance of understanding the reality of bid and proposal workflows (including the impact of tools like content libraries and AI), with an example of how things can quickly go wrong when your planning doesn’t reflect this reality.