I’ve been travelling pretty extensively for work of late. So much of the core of proposal management ‘best practice’ is common around the world, but I always find it fascinating to uncover the subtleties associated with bidding in different countries and cultures.
Take a recent trip to Abu Dhabi. Flicking through a local paper at dinner one evening, my eyes were drawn to an advert announcing an ITT for an engineering project to be delivered for a public sector body.
And there, in the write-up, amidst the format of the proposals they’d require and the submission dates, was a quite fascinating phrase:
Deadline for buying tender documents
Even the most experienced international purchasers to whom I’ve mentioned this since have been astonished and quite dismayed! But hey, it’d certainly focus minds during the qualification process if a ‘go’ decision involved writing a cheque to the prospect, on top of any internal bid costs!