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“Bidding without walls” – Realising the health sector opportunity through brilliant bids
“The NHS”, says a man who should know, “is quite literally crumbling”. But thankfully the man behind those words, the Rt Hon Wes Streeting MP, has a strategy to fix it. At the centre of this is the New Hospital Programme (NHP) – a plan to build 41 new hospitals to a fresh blueprint, dubbed “Hospital 2.0”. The vision is that these are hospitals “without walls” – with innovative digital, data and technology systems working in harmony to provide seamless, integrated care across settings and transcending traditional organisational barriers.
Author
Paul Collins
Read Time
5 mins
Employees who allocated 20 minutes per day for thinking and reflection outperformed colleagues who didn’t by 23%.
The opportunity for the market is huge. The NHP has committed to 5-year, £15 billion “waves” of investment. An alliance of ten main contractors is being formed, with bids from across Europe currently being scored (we were at the coalface with one of them, and have our fingers crossed). This alliance will amplify the market engagement already started by the NHP team, sourcing and procuring the materials, products, solutions and technology to make Hospital 2.0 a reality. If your business has these, it’s your time to shine.
And if you don’t, the wider health and wellness opportunity is equally enormous, just in the built environment alone. Government funding is being invested in re-imagined urban spaces, public-transport, electrified infrastructure, active travel, and biodiversity – all targeted at happier, healthier lifestyles.
But, even when the walls are virtual, it can be hard to get a foot in the door. This is where brilliant bidding becomes an essential part of your fitness regime.
Take off the straitjacket and wear the client T-Shirt
Successful health sector bids will include targeted offerings, hyper-personalised to your client. Like any good health professional, you need to understand and diagnose their need before you can prescribe a cure. Bids (like hospitals, if we’re honest) need some walls – process, governance, gateways – but too often these become a straitjacket that suffocates think time, collaboration and new ideas.
In a constantly connected, digital world, we are losing touch with the importance of having space to think – both individually and collectively. And yet it’s vital to business success. A Harvard Business Review study found that employees who allocated 20 minutes per day for thinking and reflection outperformed colleagues who didn’t by 23%.
Keep the walls you need but make sure they don’t become barriers between your people and teams. Create the space in your bid process for them to collaborate. To get under the skin of your target clients, discuss what’s keeping them awake at night, and map existing solutions or new ideas against these needs. We hold sessions called “T-Shirt Days” that do exactly this, and they have proven to be extremely successful in laying the foundations for winning bids.
Bids lacking in this upfront collaboration and creativity tend to cough and splutter along on chance, complacency, and – dare I say it – copy & paste. Client analysis and creative breathing space are the oxygen that your bids need to thrive.
Forbes has estimated that people in small businesses spend 36% of their work week on administrative tasks.
AI – loves the jobs you hate
But how do you make creative time when your diary is back-to-back and lunch is a meal deal and a cold coffee at your desk (if you’re lucky)? Well, AI may hold the remedy. Forbes has estimated that people in small businesses spend 36% of their work week on administrative tasks. Used in the right way, AI tools can give your bid efficiency a shot in the arm, freeing up your teams to focus on collaboration and innovation.
With proper security in place (more necessary walls), AI offers unquestionable benefits, speeding up many previously time-consuming bid activities. Those 300-page technical documents your client has kindly issued with its ITT? Well, the bad news is, someone in your business probably still needs to read them. But the good news is, AI can rapidly interrogate them, providing instant answers when it’s 9.30pm and you can’t quite remember the wording of KPI 76, buried away on page 198. It can also effortlessly conjure up evidence snippets from your content library, or “standard” prequalification information, in the blink of an eye.
Use AI to free up the creative process, not to fulfil it. Remember, AI is hopeless at innovation. It can only harvest what already exists or what it’s been taught. So, by all means use AI to help create skeleton answer plans, or to validate your own. But if you depend on AI to do your storyboarding – or actually write your responses – you will at best be a parrot, repeating your client’s (or worse, your competitors’, if you use open source) position without adding any value to it.
In short, get AI to do the dishes so you can make a delicious dinner – not the other way around.
Don’t talk, just prove
The final way to seize the health and wellness opportunity is to educate your target clients. It’s all well and good coming up with what you think are amazing solutions. But if your bids can’t convince your clients why they are amazing for them, they will fall on deaf ears. How does your innovation solve Wes Streeting and the NHP’s problems? Your bid needs to focus on demonstrable benefits, not features. Don’t tell them about the size of the processor or the colours it comes in. Tell them it’ll reduce waiting times, increase diagnostic accuracy, and free up spaces on wards. Reassure them that you understand where it hurts, and that you can make it better.
Once you’ve told them, show them. Except in bidding, all too often, you can’t. Like the Beegees, words are all we have, to take their heart away. So, use evidence to back up your claims. Case studies, testimonials, award wins and verified data from comparable projects (all stored and managed in the right AI tool, of course) will give your stated benefits credibility and secure the high marks required to win the contract.
In summary, while the financial opportunity in the UK health and wellness sector is huge, you’ll need a razor-sharp bid strategy to make your incision. Dissect your clients’ needs, use AI to free up time for innovation and added value, and educate through clear benefits and evidence in your responses. Got all that right? Well then come in, the doctor will see you now.
Health and wellness are evolving faster than ever, we’ve created a free trend report that highlights the biggest shifts happening now - and how you can apply these to your business and marketing activity. Click here to get your copy.
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