Want to win more million, hundred-million, or even billion-dollar contracts?
In this episode of How to Sell More, Mark Drager sits down with Alex McPhail, one of Canada’s leading bid managers with over 35 years of experience in complex government procurements for defence, cyber, aerospace, and more.
Alex breaks down the realities of winning massive government contracts, as well as how to navigate the most demanding procurement processes.
If your company sells via RFPs and procurement processes and you’re looking for insider tips to win more bids, contracts, and RFPs, this episode is for you.
Alex's biggest piece of advice? Winning large competitive contracts isn't just about writing good proposals; it's about the strategic positioning of the bid, understanding the unique rules of the game, structuring your proposal and response, and having the discipline to walk away from opportunities you're unlikely to win.
“Proposals are unlike anything else you do in business…If you have 1000 mandatory requirements, you have to get all 1000 right. If you get 999 right, you're out. It’s that simple.” - Alex McPhail
Meet today’s guest: As CEO of The EXA Consulting Group and founder of The EXA Way, Alex has led successful pursuits ranging from small quarter-million-dollar projects to huge billion-dollar programs.
He’s the author of Win Big The EXA Way: The Comprehensive Guide to Capture and Proposal Leadership. Alex has also taught strategic management in both the Master of Public Administration program at Carleton University and at the Sloan School of Business.
Ready to play a procurement process to your advantage so you can sell more? If so, this episode is for you.
Alex McPhail is a Canadian leader in complex RFPs, capture campaigns, and proposals. With over 35 years of RFP experience across industry, government, and academia, he has earned respect as one of Canada's leading bid managers.
Alex has led complex government procurements and major industry pursuits in defence, cyber, aerospace, health, finance, and infrastructure.
As CEO of The EXA Consulting Group and founder of The EXA Way, Alex has led successful pursuits ranging from small quarter-million-dollar projects to huge billion-dollar programs.
He is a recognized public speaker, lecturer, and podcaster in business leadership, Canadian procurement, and government contracting processes.
Alex has also taught strategic management in both the Master of Public Administration program at Carleton University and at the Sloan School of Business.
Mark Drager: So Alex, your book, and I guess by extension, your work, has been quoted to say that it's a must read for anyone eager to improve their win rates for large competitive contracts. So we're talking about RFPs and that sometimes is a bit of a dry subject, but having read your book and having worked for, just the complexity of the type of work that you do at your firm, it's almost mind-boggling to me that someone could spend five or 10 or 14 years getting $100 million dollar plus contracts. Like, I almost can't imagine the scope or size of it. So, tell me about the type of work that you do at EXA.
Alex McPhail: One of the things that we help clients do is talk to the customer long before, like years even, before the RFP comes out, and we want the client to be talking to the technical managers who are ultimately responsible for writing the evaluation criteria that will determine who wins, and say to them, “Hey, have you thought about this? Like, this is a good idea. You guys should do that.” Now, these guys are smart. They know they're being sold, but they also are smart when they see something that they could use, and they'll say, “oh, yeah, I didn't know about that. Okay, so let's build that into the evaluation criteria.” And by doing that, that makes the win more likely at the end.
So that's the first half of what we do. The second half is when the RFP itself comes out, and I'm really minimizing, the response to it is quite complicated. When the RFP comes out, we marshal a team that responds to the technical requirements, the financial requirements, and in defense programs, what's called the offset requirements, and we help them present the best possible solution at document to win. I mean, that's in a nutshell. And if it were that easy, then I'd be out of business.
Mark Drager: And when you say that, you're minimizing it, I will say to listeners that Win Big The EXA Way is like, just shy of 500 pages. It's textbook-sized. And you had mentioned to me in passing a few weeks ago that it's the type of book that sits on people's desks, and it's dog-eared and it's written almost because there doesn't appear to be, to my knowledge, any other kind of guide like this in the marketplace. Something that is going to help those of us who maybe want to become stronger at RFP responses, working with federal, provincial or local government contracts, winning more competitive situations, being able to sell through procurement better. There doesn't seem to be a lot of resources out there. I know, certainly in my 20 years of business, I have been very bad at winning contracts through anything aside from a relationship.
Alex McPhail: And actually, that's really interesting, because in the first chapter, I talk about relationship management, and it's very foreign to businesses about how the government does business. And I'm going to take a bit of a detour here, governments don't believe in relationships, and that's foreign to business managers and especially marketing people. So the only thing that lets you win a contract is your proposal, full stop. It doesn't matter what relationship you had earlier. Doesn't matter what contract you had earlier. It doesn't matter if they love you or hate you. The only thing that matters is the proposal.
I'm really good at relationship management, too. I'd say 80% of our business is repeat business through relationship management. But I have to put all of that aside when I go in and support a company, because I say it's not about relationships, it's about answering the question. So coming back to the earlier part of your question, yeah, the programs are very large. We tend to support programs of $100 million plus, often well into the billions of dollars.
We've come across companies where they've done this for the very first time, they had no idea how to do this, and so when we deal with those customers, there's a lot of hand-holding going on. There's a lot of just education. We have other customers that know what they're doing. They have all the capabilities, but they just run out of resources. They need horsepower, and we'll go in and they say, look, we've got everything. We know what we need to do. We know the process. We just want you to help us out in a few areas. And so we do that as well, and most of our business is somewhere in the middle, where they ask for our help, both in horsepower and in process.
So we have some customers who are what I call our strategic customers, and we have about, well, between five and 10 of those, and they're usually in the defense area and they sign a relationship agreement with us, and they say they come to us whenever they need help, and it can often be long before the RFP comes out. We'll help them set things up, and it's an exclusive relationship between us and them, and when they tell us, sometimes years ahead of an opportunity coming up, we lock them into that. And when someone else comes to us, because they will, when a competitor comes to us, like, can you help us out with this? We'll say, “I'm sorry. We can't. We're already locked in.” So we get a lot of that strategic alignment for many of our customers, and then we have, let's call them, walk-in customers, you know, who have never worked with us before, who, most of them, have been referred to us by customers and it's a one-shot deal, and we may never do business with them again.
Mark Drager: And so you write that the stress involved in developing proposals, like the types that we're speaking about, is unlike any other project, which is why people hate writing proposals. So when we get into the idea of how we will strategically pursue this, how we're going to scope it, how we're going to write it, what are the common mistakes, the common pitfalls people fall into? Because, first of all, I mean, people don't love this. So if you don't love this process, and if it's highly complex and it covers many months or years, and there's all these different components, it just sounds like a landmine of things that can go wrong.
Alex McPhail: It's a field. Yeah, it's a landmine. So, let's talk about the stress. First proposals are unlike anything else you do in business. There are projects and contracts that can be quite difficult, but if you have a project and you're not performing as well as you'd like, and then you can phone up the customer and say, look, we’ve got a milestone coming up. We really value your business, but we think we're going to miss the milestone. We renegotiate that milestone. We might take a hit. The customer might say, okay, you know what? That's going to cost me something. So I'll move the milestone back by a month, but it's going to cost you $10,000, It means, okay, all right, like that's give and take, right? So that's how most projects are run.
With a proposal you submit on time, you can have 1,000, and I'm not exaggerating, you can have 1,000 mandatory requirements. A mandatory requirement means you have to get it right. You have 1,000 mandatory requirements where you have to get all 1,000 right. If you get 999 right, you're out; that simple. So the pressure is enormous. There's no negotiation. There's no opportunity for say, “Hey, we're running a little late. We're having this problem or that.” No, you deliver on time, and you deliver perfectly, or you're out, that is extraordinarily stressful.
The second thing to think about is at the executive level. I think I mentioned in my book near the opening that I was in a meeting, and there's a president there, and he's commanding this meeting with his vice presidents and directors, and I asked him, because I always ask this, I say how important is the win to you. And he just looked around and said, Take a look. Half these people are gone. We lose, and I think they kind of knew it, but this is the first time they actually heard it, and their half, their faces went ash and white, right? Because they knew who the half is going to be. At the executive level, that's a horrible burden to carry.
At the manager level, things are extraordinarily complex. There are so many things that you have to worry about. You have to worry about the requirements management, you have to worry about the financial management, you have to worry about proposal writing, you have to worry about editing and, you know, on and on. So there are a lot of balls up in the air that you cannot drop any one of them, because, remember, you get one thing wrong. You're out.
And at the writer level, the writers know all of this, and most writers are voluntold, right. They're working on some project somewhere, and they say, you, they get the touch. You. You go and work on this proposal. And so now they're doing something that they don't like, doing something they're not trained to do, and they know if they make a mistake, they're going to cost people's jobs. Like that's a huge burden to carry as an engineer who's supposed to be doing quality assessment, and now suddenly you're writing your proposal. So it is very stressful for the people who work in it.
Mark Drager: So it sounds like there's an enormous amount of pressure to get everything exactly right. But I'm curious - is there also a strategic element to this? Beyond just meeting requirements, are there ways to gain a competitive advantage? I've heard stories of companies bidding low initially, knowing scope changes will come later. Is there a 'game' to winning these contracts? Can you share any examples of how you've helped companies optimize their bids?
Alex McPhail: So in one program, it was a small program for us. It was $65 million, we helped this company figure out how to put forward the best price. And one of the things we did is that the RFP called for what's called an SIL, a systems integration laboratory. That's a technical term for basically a place where you test things, you make sure things are working. So it was mandatory that you included an SIL in your solution, and then somewhere else in the RFP, they had the desired requirements.
So we said, Wait a minute, those are desired requirements. Those aren't mandatory. But I think they've made a mistake. I think that they wanted the desired requirements to be in the mandatory requirement part. So we sent a question in, and the question was carefully worded. We said, “you've asked for a mandatory SIL, and these are desirable requirements. Is that what you meant?” So we just asked, and they said, “Yeah, that's what we meant.”
So we proposed a mandatory SIL with, I think, like a table, a power bar, and a chair. And all of the technical requirements, we left out because the cost of fulfilling those requirements was going to be $10 million dollars, and we were able to take $10 million off of the $65 million program by not answering it. So my customer won, and the client was furious, right, but we warned them and even the contracting agency, the procurement agency, came back to the client, said, “no, no, no. They asked the question. They did everything right.” So because PSPC, it was called PWBS, got involved, and they said, no, they did everything right, so you have to live with this. Now, in the end, they did a scope change to the contract and added in the things that they needed. So that was one example of gaming.
Mark Drager: Okay, but in this situation, because you're, I feel like I'm breaking, we're breaking so many rules here, and you can do this because the goal is to win the contract relationships. So playing this game, making your client furious, I mean that again, I feel like this is not how we should operate. Like, knowing we're pulling $10 million out, knowing they're going to add $10 million back later, they're going to add them back in later.
Alex McPhail: So we won the contract
Mark Drager: Relationships. They're the ones who set the rules. They're the ones who have to live by it. But this just doesn't feel. I mean, it’s a win because we get the contract, and they get it supplied. But it doesn't feel quite right.
Alex McPhail: You're saying it's slimy.
Mark Drager: No, no, it's not, it's not that it's slimy. It's just if, if, we are obviously undercutting everyone else, because we noticed this little loophole, and we're taking advantage of it, it feels like it's against the intentions of what everyone wanted, to operate as a team to try and deliver the best project possible.
Alex McPhail: That's why we put the question in during the RFP process, all right, so we gave them an opportunity to recognize their mistake and correct it. If I, my ethos, would not allow us to put that in without the question first, so we point it out to them, and they either missed it or it's what someone wanted, but in the end, they realized it's not what they wanted. So there’s the difference between being unfair, which I don't think we were, and being shrewd. And those are different things, and my job is to help my customer achieve the advantage for everyone else. One of my jobs is recognizing little things like that.
I mean, I'll give you another example of how we did it. It was a smaller program, and we had to put in a bid. And it was really weird. Evaluation criteria, the financial criteria, said the bidder that is closest to the mean average of all the prices gets the highest points for score, for financial score. Wow, that's really weird. Never seen that before. Okay, so then we put in a question again. We put the question in saying, “Could we submit more than one bid?” And they thought the reason we put that question in was because we had multiple teams, and we wanted to bid multiple teams and hope that…
Mark Drager: Ah, but instead, you wanted to affect the average or the mean?
Alex McPhail: That's what we did. We just put in multiple bids and had them $1 apart, so we skewed the mean average around our bid. And the client was furious.
Mark Drager: But when you have a great accountant, when you have a great lawyer on your side, when you have someone like you who spots a little opportunity here, let's go ahead and widen this and leverage it.
Alex McPhail: We put the question in. And I always insist on doing that. I don't like it when you think that they've actually made a mistake. I don't like capitalizing on that. I go and say, “Hey, have you? Is this what you want? Is this what you meant to say?” And if they come back and say, “yep,’” then okay, we're good.
Mark Drager: So you mentioned a few of the skills that are required if I'm looking to strengthen my in-house team, or I'm looking to pursue more of these types of contracts. What types of team members? What types of skill sets do I need in-house? What can I outsource? What are the common structures?
Alex McPhail: So I'd start at the top. A lot of executives don't understand what's involved in major, complex bids. Now, to them, it's just a project, right? Well, I've already talked about the unique elements of a proposal. Proposals are a drain on the rest of the company, because if you're committed to winning this proposal, you need people to write, and the only people who can write are the subject matter experts who have the knowledge to respond to the requirements. That means you're pulling people off of profitable programs, and you're putting them into a proposal where you may or may not win, so the whole company takes a hit, because you're pulling those people from all over so you need to understand the unique elements of managing a company that engages in proposals. I would make, if you're not familiar with this process. I would hire a capture manager or someone who really understands capture management. I do that.
Mark Drager: What is that? What does that term mean?
Alex McPhail: So I'll get to that. I'd hired the capture manager before a proposal manager. So the capture manager starts from the very beginning. The very first time you sniff out an opportunity. Maybe you're talking to a supplier. Maybe you're at a conference, and someone says, “Hey, have you heard that this tank system is coming up in a few years? No, I didn't know. Oh, wow. Okay, we'd really like to get involved in that.” So that's what we call first contact. First contact is when you first hear about something.
So now the capture manager starts sniffing around and realizes, oh, there is a program coming up, goes in and talks to the defense managers who are responsible. Oh, yeah, they're really serious. So this has happened, okay? So now the capture manager looks inside their own company, and they realize, we don't have a logistics support inside of our company to be able to respond to what I think the RFP is going to be. So I need to go out and find a company that specializes in logistics support and sign an agreement with them before anyone else does, right? So that capture manager is essential in creating the team that will help you win; that person is extremely knowledgeable about the field that they work in, and they are a champion of the company.
Mark Drager: And so this role sounds like it's part strategy and part business development. It's part understanding just the entire scope and what is required to deliver, almost like a General, I suppose, looking at a map, you know of a war that's going on. You have to be able to have the right people in the right places at the right times. And people don't go to school for this, do they?
Alex McPhail: No. So that's the other really interesting thing there. I don't know of any educational programs that teach you how to do capture management. Or even proposal management, you can go and take proposal management courses, but I don't think you can go to Carleton or U of T and get a proposal management certificate or something like that that doesn't exist. So a lot of this is self-learned. There are companies that specialize in this kind of education, and you can get certificates through private enterprise organizations. So that's a way to do it.
So after you've got your capture manager, because the capture manager is going to build the team, right? So if there are proposal managers, if there are other people, other leaders, the capture manager is going to drive it all. So find someone and notice the second qualification of the capture manager that I said, that they are a champion of the company, right? So, in other words, it's someone you can trust to go out and talk to another supplier or a competitor, but always put your company's position first, someone that you trust implicitly.
So someone, when they come back to you and they say, “Hey, we need to realign our production facility in order to do that,” and you say, “what?” “Well, if you want to capture this program coming up, we're not going to meet the requirements unless we change now, like it's going to be too late. By the time the RFP comes out, it'll take us a year to do it. So we need to change now.” And so you need to look that guy or girl in the eyes and say, “Wow, okay, I did not see that coming, but I trust your judgment. We're going to take it under advice,” so that's why the capture manager is so important.
Mark Drager: And so it sounds like there is a tremendous investment. There's an opportunity cost, for sure, but there's an investment that has to be made. Do you believe that the lack of investment, so the lack of resources, the lack of staffing, the right positions, the lack of giving people enough time, the trying to just kind of like bang it out, so to speak. Do you believe that's actually what hurts more organizations than maybe other parts of it?
Alex McPhail: Yeah. So we have a capture and proposal maturity index that I talk about in the book, and we rank companies at four levels. One is the lowest, four is the highest. So one is the kind of company that sees an RFP and says, Oh, we should respond to this. I wonder how you know, so muddle their way through it.
Mark Drager: Yeah, so that's me. I'll put my hand up there. Okay, there's something here. What should we do and can we get it done for next week?
Alex McPhail: Four is a company that has all of the management and physical infrastructure in place already before an RFP comes out. And not only that, knows that the RFP is coming, and has pre-positioned themselves to respond to the RFP in such a way that they have a good chance of winning it. So that's level four. And then there's some work in between, most companies straddle, and I’m talking about big companies. You know, companies that you've heard of, large companies, have surprising straddles across a three or four or two or three.
So I've worked with one company that's a multinational organization. They have a robust management system. Quality Management System is what I'm looking for. And so they talk about the capture process, they talk about finance, they talk about this, and their quality management system is probably 100,000 pages. It's embodied in some computer network somewhere. And then when it comes to proposal writing, it has one line write the proposal. That's it. So not every company has the maturity and depth that you think they would so I've actually helped that company develop their quality management system to improve it.
So companies are often their own worst enemies. My take is, if you don't have a one-in-three chance of winning, you probably shouldn't go after it. Iin other words, every third when you win. I mean, consider that somewhere between 2 to 5% of your contract cost goes to proposal development. That's every cost, you know, the internal costs, external costs, lost opportunity costs, like everything. So 2 to 5% goes into proposal development if you win one out of three. So that's anywhere from 6 to 15% of the one program that you won, the one to pay for the three that you went after.
So what we push more than anything else is what's called win rate, and it sounds self-serving from my perspective, because I'm a consultant that's out for hire. But I tell people the cost of the proposal development is inconsequential next to win rate. If you can win one out of three, whereas you were with one out of four, if you can increase that win rate, your total costs go way down, even if you double your costs themselves. But because now you're paying, instead of paying for three opportunities for one win, or instead of paying for four opportunities for one win, you're paying for three opportunities for one win, and you're winning more often, right? You're winning more so your revenue is higher, your costs go down.
So that's what we talk about, more than anything else, is win rate. And so, when we look at the maturity of companies, we ask them, “do you even measure your win rate? Because a lot don’t. Do you understand why you win and why you don't?” Because a lot don't, and if you do all of that, then do you manage your win rate at the executive level? Is it a KPI, and is it something that your executives have on their dashboard, and is it something they're managing at the executive level to say, how do we increase it?
Mark Drager: And so if I wanted to improve win rate, if we wanted to focus on this, my immediate thought is, I need to increase my volume, to get more at-bats, to increase the cycle, to increase R & D, to essentially just increase the volume. So that way, we can get better and better as we go. The other side of that might be just do less better, right? And just spend more time, more energy, more focus, more resources on fewer things. So that way, you can essentially really knock it out of the park each and every time. Which, if you had to go left or right, which direction do you tend to go?
Alex McPhail: Hands down? No question. Do less better. There's no competition between the two. If you try to do more, then really what you're doing is throwing more jello at the wall and hoping that some of it sticks, right? You're burning out your people because, you know, they only have limited resources. You're going after opportunities that you shouldn't, right? So remember the one and three? If you're below one and three, you should be saying no..
So one of the problems is just human dynamics. Some companies have pretty robust go no-go processes, and I talk about that in the book. So your capture leader comes to you with this program to say, hey, we want to go after this program. It's $100 million, I think we should really go after it. So, after you start passing more and more penetrating questions, it looks darker and darker. They just begin to say, look, like our win rate is like one out of 10 here. Like, what are we doing? Because I really like it. Well, I don't care that you like it. The numbers aren't adding up. So stop and bring us an opportunity that we can win.
When you do that, you aren't burning your people out with the proposal side of the team. You're going after high-quality programs that you have a pretty good chance of winning. And then, because you're not burning people out, you can invest in them more. You can invest in the IT. You can invest in the infrastructure, as long as you maintain your wins. And so that's why you have a very mature and careful process where you decide what it's called a go no-go process: do we go after this program or not? And that must be very, very mature, very comprehensive, very deep, and, quite frankly, very brutal.
You just have to say no. That's the biggest thing that executives have, the problem saying no. Because what they're saying no to, in their mind, is this is no to revenue. Oh my god, there's revenue out there. And I'm saying, No? You know, but you have to rephrase the question, and is this revenue we actually have a chance of securing? So I've worked with, so I worked with a company once, and they had, they were a small company, and they had 22 business lines, like a small company, 22 business lines, and they said, we're really struggling here. I said, Yeah. And so I got them to whittle it down to four business lines, and they doubled their revenue in a year.
Mark Drager: Yeah… removing complexity from a business is always a great strategic play. I mean, that's a perfect example right there, and it clearly paid off. Now, I’m curious, you have 35 years of experience across all these industries, project types, different sizes, what part of the process do you love? Winning? We love winning, don't we?
Alex McPhail: Yeah, yeah, beyond winning. So I have a client. Just yesterday, I ran what I call a clinic, and I walk its usually the authors, and I walk them through. This is why we're doing things like this. It’s why evaluation points are so important. This is why we're asking you to do this. This is why we're asked like, rather than just going out and telling them, do this, do that, we're explaining to them why. And then this is how you do this, and this is why we're asking you to do it this way, because this is how we get the points, and we need the points to win.
And so it's a three-hour process, and at the end of it, they sit back and they just say, “wow. Like, I have never understood this before. Like, I now understand why I'm here. I understand my raison d'etre. I know what I'm doing. I know how to do it.” To me when I see that light switch on, like, that's really cool. Like, that's very cool. So when I can help people do their job to a point where they actually enjoy doing it, you know, because they've been voluntold, right, to me, that's really gratifying.
Mark Drager: So for me, the most eye-opening experience I've had is the shift from pitching and bidding on projects, to being on the other side of the table.
Let me explain. In our role as a strategic branding and marketing agency, our clients often have complex projects with requirements that fall outside of our in-house capabilities. So, we consult with them to help them scope the full project - the strategy, the project needs, to write the briefs, qualify potential vendors… I mean, we have industry experience and a much deeper knowledge base then they do, and frankly, we can save them time and money, avoid future scope creep by sniffing out the BS… to help quantify and qualify potential vendors…
So, being on the client side is really revealing. Because we get to see exactly what bidders are doing right, and what they’re doing wrong.
So the question is, if you're always on the vendor side, how do you get yourself to the other side of the table, to build that experience? And is that something that you recommend?
Alex McPhail: So it's very difficult because the procurement side, what you're talking about, is a closed community, for good reason. Right now, EXA, never, ever participate on the procurement side. We only participate on the vendor side, and we do that for a couple of reasons. One is pragmatic, we get paid better on the industry side. But in addition to that, see if we work on the government side, then we are precluded from working on the industry side. Conflict of Interest. Okay, so, so we spend most of our time working on the industry side, but I have worked on the vendor side, and I understand how it works. I've run procurements, I've gone through exactly what you're talking about right now.
And so I can infuse that knowledge into the team that I'm working with and explain to them the psychology, like I spent 15 minutes talking about what it's like to sit in a procurement room for six weeks going through five proposals from different vendors and how difficult that is. So I want them to understand who they're dealing with.
So one of the things that I talk about, I went and I did this yesterday during the clinic, I opened up the floor and I said, “Who's your customer?” And in this particular case, its a defense program. So they said, “well, it's DND, it's the army.” It could be, I said, “Who's responsible for the offsets?” It could be PSPC. I know I’m using acronyms here and these go beyond your listeners, but anyway, they come out with all of these, these clients. And I said, “so all of those are right after you win the contract, but you haven't won the contract. Who's your client now?” And they all think about it. And I said, “the only client, your only client, is the evaluation team who's looking at your proposal. That is the only group of people that is going to decide whether you win a $500 million contractor or not. That's it, period. End of story. Don't think about DND. Don't think about the army. Don't think about those, just think about the evaluator team.”
So I help my team understand what you're talking about by resetting their frame of reference, because they think that they're writing to the defense community. They're not. They're writing to the evaluation team. And so then I walk them through the whole process about how do you write to an evaluator, as opposed to how do you write to a defense manager?
Mark Drager: And so, I don't know if this is too light of a question or a little bit off the mark, but when I was reading your book, I kept visualizing that scene in the first Iron Man, one of the opening scenes. I don't know if you saw Iron Man years ago, but Tony Stark...
Alex McPhail: I love that scene. Yeah, he's out in Afghanistan or something...
Mark Drager: Yeah, he's staying there and his tie is loose, and he looks like hell, and he's a little drunk, and he's in front of all these, you know, majors and government officials, and he gives this patriotic speech, and then they just blow a bunch of shit up. And everyone's like, bravo. Let's go ahead and hand him the military contract. This kind of stuff doesn't happen, does it? Or really, at the end of the day, it's like, Let's blow some shit up.
Alex McPhail: Not in Canada anyway. I mean, so no, Canada is actually really, really boring when it comes to procurement. We have among the most complicated, most expensive, most pedantic, most convoluted procurement process in the world. And I'm not exaggerating when I say any one of those words, procurement and candidates, to the point where we have international customers, customers usually want to do work in Canada. And the first thing I say to that is, on behalf of Canada, I apologize, because you are going to do so much more work than you think is necessary, so you have to write projects, management plans and engineering management plans and quality management plans that are really part of the contract once you win, right? But you, and you're not paid to write them at the proposal stage, but you have to write them as part of the proposal.
And you know, my international customers are saying, Surely, you read that wrong, like you, they're asking me to give them work for free. Yeah, if you want the job, then that's how it works. And so they kind of hum and haw, and sometimes they say no thanks, and other times they say, oh, okay, so it's a very difficult process, but the probity of the process is also unmatched. And when I say probity, I mean the transparency and fairness of the process.
We have had international customers, and I'm not exaggerating. They said we want to win in Canada. We don't care about the Canadian market. It's too small for us, but we want to win in Canada because it's recognized internationally as having an open, fair procurement process. If we win in Canada, that opens markets to other countries who would hum and haw otherwise, because if Canada selects something, then it means they've gone through a very rigorous and fair process and come out with an evaluation.
You know that no there is, there's no demonstrations blowing shit up at the front end but sometimes there are demonstrations. It doesn't happen often, but I've been in some programs where there are demonstrations, and so you submit your written proposal, and then they want to demonstrate the solution after they've reviewed the written proposal. In that case, the demonstrations are very carefully controlled, like really tight control, because the procurement authority cares about fairness. And they don't want one company to come in and go rah rah rah and the other company say, Well, it's good. It does this. And so they don't want to have the effect that you've talked about, the Iron man effect. Don't want that.
And so sometimes what they say is, the procurement authority says we will run the demonstration. You give us a manual on how to use the system and if we can't figure it out, that's your fault. You should have because we're eventually gonna have to figure it out anyway when we buy the system. So let us know how to run the demonstration. We'll run the demonstration. Or they'll say, run the demonstration yourselves. Here's the parameters, here's the rules, here's the guidelines, here's what you must do, and we will oversee everything. And if you do something that's not within those guidelines, we're going to disqualify that part of the demonstration. So it's very tight, very controlled.
Mark Drager: So I've been speaking with Alex McPhail, who is the author of Win Big The EXA Way. The final question I have for you, if you could give us one tip or one strategy to help us sell more? What would that be?
Alex McPhail: How about three.
So at the executive level, I would say, educate yourself more about what's involved. You should, especially if we are, and I've spoken to companies where they know we're going to get into this business, but we're not there yet. Don't start hiring the middle managers and so on. First, educate yourself, find someone or hire someone to coach you or whatever about what's involved, because the decisions that you make at the executive level can reach far and wide into the company. I've seen companies and thank God I wasn't involved in the procurement of this, but I've seen companies after they lost a major program, the company shut down. I mean gone. Everyone loses their jobs. So when you're an executive, you need to understand the implications of what you are getting into. So educate yourself.
Probably at the proposal manager or capture proposal lead. Pardon me, capture leader level, so the middle management level, I'm not sure it's answering your question, but I would say make sure you find a way to achieve life balance, that this job can consume you, it can own you, it can take away everything that you have, your family. It is an amazingly huge life suck. Make sure that you find a way to find that balance for both, not just for your sake, but for your employer's sake, right? Because if you fall over, you're no good to your employer.
And probably at the subject matter expert level or the writer level, you're not as good a writer as you think. And everyone, right, like everyone is told and says that they're good communicators, right? Oh yeah, I'm a good communicator, right? And everyone puts that on your resume, right? But you're not as good as you think, so go get some training, especially for proposals. Specifically for proposals, proposal writing is like no other writing.
