Well, you got the bid in on time, possibly by dint of having your bid team, including word-processors and print-room staff, working all night. You now have a few weeks in which to have a short post-mortem, ensure that all the in-house copies of the bid paperwork are safe and to return to your normal job managing the projects that the company is already working on.

You will be aware of your customer's stated adjudication period which may be anything from a couple of weeks to several months, or even years, depending on the complexity of the bid. The customer will have a review team in place and they will, almost certainly, be compiling a list of questions about your bid and those of your competitors.

You should have a procedure in place for handling these questions. They should come from one designated member of your customer's team to one designated member of your team. That person should record each question as it comes in, the name of the person to whom it has been sent for answering, the answer and the date on which the answer was returned to the customer. In this way, all questions will be answered in a timely fashion and they won't have the opportunity to get lost between members of the team.

When all the questions have been answered in writing, the customer may want a face to face meeting with your team in order to have you clarify your answers to his questions or he may give each competing company the opportunity to give a presentation with final clarifications of their technical solution and other matters. You must be prepared for this.

If the customer want a presentation, it will need to be slick. Don't have too many people presenting and make sure they know what they're talking about. Have rehearsals in front of senior management and be prepared to answer more questions.

If possible take a laptop computer with a Powerpoint presentation ready installed. Be sure to take a backup disk as well as paper copies of your presentation, just in case of a technology failure of some sort. In this way, you will have done everything possible to make sure that you win this project.