The discussion after the presentation decides the outcome
A bid team was preparing to present to the leadership of a utility on a transmission program, the network of high voltage lines that carries electricity across a region. The preparation had gone into the material and the delivery, which are the parts a bid team controls. What decides the outcome is the discussion that follows the presentation.
A team rehearsing on its own asks itself questions from its own frame of reference. The client’s panel asks from theirs, and the space between the two is where a strong bid gets tested. Coaching sharpens how an answer is delivered, not what a utility board expects to hear. Closing that gap meant putting the team in front of people who had sat on the client’s side of the table.
We built the client’s panel before the client did
We convened former utility executives, network planning leads and regulatory and policy leads, and ran the session the way the client’s panel would run it. The team delivered the pitch in full and was then questioned without warning. Panellists were briefed to be demanding rather than encouraging, which is the only version of a rehearsal worth holding.
The room was assembled to match the likely panel by function rather than by seniority, so the questions came from where they would actually come from: the technical seat, the network seat, the regulatory seat and the board seat. Nobody with a relationship to the client or to a competing bidder was eligible to take part, and the bid itself was never disclosed to the room.
The hardest questions came from the regulatory seat
The questions the team had not anticipated came from the regulatory seat. The answers it had prepared for the technical seat needed the least work, so the effort went where it was short. Answers were rebuilt where they needed rebuilding.
The team went into the real presentation having already heard its thinnest ground discussed out loud, which changes how a room is handled. The firm kept the format, and a rehearsal panel ahead of a significant presentation became standard practice rather than a one off.
