Heather Melton

Altura

There is a better way to win tenders & RFP’s. Discover Altura - Your virtual bid manager. A full-cycle bid management software that streamlines your process and gives your team the power of data insights powered by AI and automation.

- Established UK Partnership program
- Built brand awareness in green territory
- Implemented GTM strategy for UK market

 UK/I GTM - Partnership Lead

There is a better way to win tenders & RFP’s. Discover Altura - Your virtual bid manager. A full-cycle bid management software that streamlines your process and gives your team the power of data insights powered by AI and automation.

 UK/I GTM - Account Executive

Account Executive - Benelux

Mind Your Bidness

• Organise and host the Mind Your Bidness podcast series to connect with industry-leading bid professionals and contribute to community knowledge sharing.
• Developed insightful content and facilitated discussions to explore market trends and best practices in bid management.
• Collaborated with industry experts to provide valuable insights and perspectives on bid strategies and industry developments.

https://mindyourbidness.com/

Creator/Host

RevGenius

Member

Revenue Squared

Ravio

Ravio brings transparency to HR by allowing you to benchmark your salaries, benefits and diversity against other tech and tech-enabled companies in the scale up space.

Account Executive (Iberia and Nordics)

Win the war for talent with real-time compensation data.

Ravio is Europe's first real-time compensation benchmarking platform purpose-built for the tech industry. We help some of the world’s most innovative and ambitious companies understand what the market is paying today, including equity and benefits. 

And it's FREE :) Get in touch and I'll help you get set up.

Business Development Manager (UK and EMEA)

Hopin

Helping educate customers all over Europe and Africa on how to make their events more engaging and interactive.
▪️Expert user - Salesforce, Outreach, Zoominfo, Sales Navigator, Hubspot
▪️Video tools - Zoom, Streamyard, Tolstoy, Loom, Vidyard, Google Meet
▪️Sales Training  - Winning By Design
▪️Built out territories in BeNeLux, Nordics, Southern Europe and Africa
▪️Enterprise BDR for UK/I - experienced in mapping accounts and speaking with C-Level Prospects
▪️Cross-collaboration with marketing, SE and management to leverage company-held events and public tenders

Enterprise Business Development Representative (Redundancy due to global restructure)

Melton Language Services

▪️Managed renewals
▪️Cultivated referral requests
▪️Ensured almost no churn
▪️Expanded existing accounts 
▪️ ESP/EAP: Design of various ESP/EAP courses within the private and public sector, both face-to-face classes and virtual classrooms.
▪️ Residential courses: Course design, planning and coordination of one-week conflict resolution courses for government negotiators. Designed residential courses for various private companies and public ministries with specific industry focus.
▪️ Company Management:  Issue Payroll, Hiring, Train teachers on new technology, Maintain website, Implement SEO, Invoicing, Managing Email, Managing Social Media, Attendance records and progress reports for clients.

Co Executive Director

Account Executive | ex-Hopin | Listening to problems and trying to fix them 🔹 Full Cycle Sales 🔹 Creative Outbound 🔹 Below Average Golfer

Did you get into bid management to read 50-100 page documents?

How about to chase down your busy colleagues to ask them questions about previous proposals?

From 100s of conversations with bid managers and bid leaders, I'm certain this is not the case.

Most of you got into it because of the creativity and the thrill of competing.

How would you feel if you could automate those tasks that are necessary, but don't move the needle?

Modern bid management is NOT:
❌ Building a content library for copying/pasting
❌ Bidding on more tenders = getting more profit
❌ Ad hoc and repetitive tasks in Excel, Sharepoint, Dynamics, Salesforce
❌ Getting insights about competitors from sales
❌ Seeing hiring as the solution to capacity problem

Modern bid management IS:
🚀 Learning from historical and current data from tenders, award decisions, public data and qualitative data
🚀 Only applying after a thorough and rigorous qualification model
🚀 One streamlined process with automation
🚀 Using data insights to understand where competitors are winning or losing and know their quality criteria pitfalls through award decision evaluations

The best part? We implement everything for you. 

Please reach out for more information: heather@altura.io or book time on my calendar in the featured section.

Helping educate customers all over Europe and Africa on how to make their events more engaging and interactive.
▪️Outbound,  Use Multi-channel approach - Social, email, calls, video
▪️120% - 220%  Meeting Quota Attainment every month
▪️Expert user - Salesforce, Outreach, Zoominfo, Sales Navigator
▪️Video tools - Zoom, Streamyard, Tolstoy, Loom, Vidyard, Google Meet
▪️Sales Training  - Winning By Design
▪️Ongoing certification - AWS Cloud Practitioner, CRM Fundamentals and Practice: Salesforce Reports, Objects, and Data Management
▪️Built out territories in BeNeLux, Nordics, Southern Europe and Africa
▪️Enterprise BDR for UK/I - experienced in mapping accounts and speaking with C-Level Prospects
▪️Cross-collaboration with marketing, SE and management to leverage company-held events and public tenders

Still recovering from what I’m now officially calling Bidconfluenza, which is that post conference condition where you’re buzzing from all the conversations, but also require a small nap before attempting any form of productivity.

What a brilliant day. (I should have gone both days - note to self.)
It was such a joy to finally meet people in person that I’ve only ever spoken to online and as well as all the new people who made this event so special.

I particularly enjoyed:

🔹 Sam McAlister’s session - completely gripping. Her storytelling, her negotiation tips, the honesty. It was one of those talks you wish had an encore.
🔹 Sophie Plested’s session on bid/no bid - clever, practical, and packed with those small shifts that make people more open to conversations they usually shut down.
🔹 All the conversations at the cocktail party, during the interactive bits in sessions and in breaks. So informative but also a lot of laughs.

For my own session, I’ll admit I was really nervous. But as soon as it was finished, I realised I shouldn’t have been. Everyone showed me the exact same kindness, openness and willingness to collaborate that they always have. 

Thank you to APMP UK for organising such a great event and to everyone who made it so special. What a great time!

#TBO #bidmanagement

Heather Melton 🥾

I speak to bid professionals about their challenges. | Bid adjacent | Clay Bootcamp

Tonight’s APMP UK cocktail event was the perfect lead in to tomorrow. It was so lovely seeing people I’ve only ever chatted to online. There’s something special about going from comments to conversations.

I’m excited to hear everyone’s presentations and properly soak it all in. And I’ll admit it I’m feeling pretty chuffed because two people told me they’re coming to mine. That’s basically headline act territory, right?

See you in the morning - caffeine in hand.

I caught a Bidtopus.

Remember my “Meet the Bidtopus” post – the one about a single bid pro doing the job of eight? (link in comments) 

In the next episode of Anchor AI's A Bid Of This, A Bid Of That, I’m talking to a real-life Bidtopus: Timothy Semenza. He's the Senior Manager of Proposals at The Facilities Group and a one-person proposal team.

We dig into what it’s actually like to run bids as a team of one, and how Timmy uses AI:

- wrangle competitive intel from stacks of competitor bids
- turn a 30-minute voice note into a slide deck in under an hour
- run “proposal roasts” that hurt less and improve more

You’ll learn:
🐙 How to survive being the lone bidtopus in your organisation
🧠 Practical ways to use AI for brainstorming, reviews, and after-action learning
🛟 How to find community and stay sane when best-practice frameworks assume you’ve got a whole army

Hope you can make it!

Life as a Bidtopus: A candid chat with a one-person proposal department

Clay update 3 - It only took me a year of using Clay to discover I’ve been doing something the hard way. 🤦‍♀️

Whenever I built a big table with lots of columns, I’d set up all my formulas and then realise I needed to change something. Which meant:

🔹 Opening every single column
🔹 Tweaking every “only run if” condition
🔹 Inevitably missing one
🔹 Then spending 20 minutes hunting for the mistake while questioning my life choices

Clay Bootcamp 🥾 and Nathan Lippi 🥾 taught me a trick that has officially changed my workflow and my mood.

Use a checkbox column as your trigger.

Everything ties back to that one checkbox.
So if I want to change a conditional formula, I update it in one place and the whole table updates itself.

No more playing hide-and-seek with my logic.
No more detective work.
Just click. Update. Done.

Honestly, I’d like this feature rolled out across my entire life.

Sales: “They just need you to tick yes or no.”
Infosec: “Then why are there 900 rows and an appendix?”

Nothing exposes your lack of planning like trying to explain a workflow to someone else.

I realised this in Clay Bootcamp when I watched Natalia Moura Gaal 🌲/ 🥾 walk through the same process mapped three different ways:

🔹 A simple version for leadership
🔹 A more detailed one for the people actually running it
🔹 A deep, nerdy one for debugging and onboarding

Same workflow. Three views. Because different people need different levels of context.

It sounds obvious, but most of us (me included) go straight from idea to execution:

- Wire some tools together.
- Build the system.
- Hope for the best.

And then the fun begins when someone asks a perfectly reasonable question like, “So how does this actually work?”

That’s when you realise:

- You built a view for yourself, not for everyone else
- The logic makes sense in your head, but nowhere else
- And you now have to reverse engineer your own thinking just to explain it

Planning isn’t just drawing a tidy diagram. It’s deciding how many versions of the truth people need.

Executives don’t want the weeds.
The person running the workflow definitely does.
And whoever inherits it from you one day needs even more.

Clay Bootcamp 🥾  is making me rethink planning as a communication layer, not just an ops layer. And honestly that shift alone saves so much future chaos.

If the work feels messy, it might not be the tools.
It might be that the only person who can understand the plan is you.

Happy Bidsgiving.

It stretches from now through the new year.

Bob, our favourite bid manager, would like you to know that if SMEs miss deadlines this Bidsgiving, he has an entire list of festive “adjustments” at the ready: 

🧂 The Kids’ Table Sentence
If you miss the deadline by more than 48 hours, Bob moves you to the kids’ table. Enjoy your plastic fork and dinosaur-shaped nuggets.

🧂 The Dry Turkey Penalty
Submit your answers at 4:59pm on deadline day and Bob assigns you the driest slice of turkey known to humankind. No gravy privileges.

🧂 The Cranberry Sauce Embargo
Ignore two follow-up emails and Bob quietly removes your right to cranberry sauce for the remainder of the quarter.

🧂 The Folding Chairs of Shame
Send your input in three separate emails with different versions? You’re sitting on a folding chair that wobbles.

🧂 The “Bring Your Own Plate” Directive
Paragraphs still missing? You’re not getting a seat setting. Bring your own plate and don’t expect matching cutlery.

🧂 The Brussels Sprout Consequence
Three late submissions in a row? Bob assigns you a bowl of unseasoned Brussels sprouts and a reflective moment.

🧂The Pumpkin Pie Prohibition
Try to edit a final draft after sign-off? No pie.

🧂 The Last-Minute Login Time-Out
If you “can’t access the document” at the exact moment the deadline hits, Bob places you in a brief emotional time-out with no access to Wi-Fi.

🧂 The Lukewarm Gravy Lesson
Deliver sections with missing context? Enjoy gravy that’s been reheated one too many times. It'll be lumpy. Bob doesn't care.

🧂 The Mystery Casserole Assignment
If you send answers in a format nobody asked for, Bob makes you take home the one casserole no one will claim.

🧂 The Leftover Duty
For every day overdue, Bob assigns you one additional day of creatively repurposing leftovers.

🧂 The Seat-by-the-Draft Punishment
For ghosting the tracker, Bob seats you right by the drafty window. No blanket.

Bob just saw the award notice.

He scrolled once. Then twice. Then once more, just to check there weren’t any stray zeros.

We’ve heard of a million.
Then a billion.
We’ve had a trillion.
Some people even claim a gazillion.
But now… we have a bidillion.

It was a bid so big it didn’t make sense.

The kind of deal that makes you:
- Recalculate in a spreadsheet, just to be sure
- Say “wow” out loud, even though you’re alone
- Question if your entire career has been a side quest

This afternoon at 2pm CET (Different time than normal!) I'm speaking to Natacha Alamo Rios (CF CL APMP), Global Bid & Pursuit Strategy Director at Oracle and CEO of APMP en Español, about how global bid leaders win multi-year pursuits. (Link in comments)

We can ask her if she's ever had one worth a bidillion!

I found the bid management community by accident. I started a job in sales and started connecting with people, asking questions, and trying to understand how this profession works.

What surprised me early on was how welcoming the community was. People shared what they knew, pointed me to resources, and never made me feel like I didn’t belong. (Even when they were probably nervous I was just trying to sell something to them. 😅) I’ve always appreciated and valued that.

Sometimes bid teams feel like they're seen as admin. 🤯 I really don't know how this happens, when you consider the strategy, the problem solving, the coordination, the diplomacy, the pressure, and the intelligence involved. It’s far from simple.

And it really tees me off. So hopefully what I've learned can help the community.

Next week at APMP UK's BIDx® The Big One, I’ll be talking about how LinkedIn can help make that expertise more visible - internally and externally. When teams connect, share, and collaborate openly, it becomes much easier for colleagues and leadership to see the value of the work. 

The added value is that potential buyers also see how your company thinks and shows their expertise. 

If you’ll be there, come say hello. I’d love to meet some familiar names in person and get to know some new ones.

#TBO2025 #ProudToBeAPMP  #BIDx

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