Bidding
Bid Management as a Service (BMaaS)
Through the application of our best practice bid writing methodology, we help organisations produce high-scoring and compelling tender responses and grant applications. We implement a robust and agile bid management process, including levels of accountability and governance and, most importantly, an iterative review cycle, through which we help clients strengthen the quality of their content.
Some companies often don’t have the bid expertise/capacity to do themselves justice and secure a contract. For many a 1 in 4 win rate may sound good, but it means 75% of pre-sales activity is wasted. The cost of our support is a fraction of what is “wasted”, therefore, with a 90+% win rate, we can address this imbalance between selling and writing high-scoring tenders and grant applications, leading to a significant boost in an organisation’s level of success, revenue and profitability.
Effective resource utilisation is difficult to achieve in a traditional bid team due to the variable nature of the activity, leaving teams over and under-utilised, often to the detriment of the responses they produce. That’s why we provide a highly flexible and bespoke service, capable of meeting the demands of the tender process, scaling resources as required to ensure cost-efficient support.
We’ve successfully applied our best practice approach across all major industries and sectors, working with bid teams of all sizes and skillsets. Whether you’re an SME, large multinational or public sector body (such as a Council or Trust) looking for end-to-end bid management or ad-hoc help, we can provide the support you need.
For clarity, we have split our bid management and support services into their constituent parts; however, for many clients we undertake all of the services as part of our BMaaS.
Bid/no bid support
Our Key Opportunities Review (KOR) and bespoke Opportunity Assessment Tool (OAT) support clients in assessing whether they should commit resources to pursuing opportunities. They enable organisations to objectively assess opportunities against their specific business and strategic priorities, and support the bid/no-bid decision. This approach delivers a more robust and objective assessment of an organisation’s opportunities, which in turn informs which to pursue to maximise the return on the available resources. Ultimately, this improves the accuracy of the sales forecast and the performance/success of sales teams. The OAT can also be used informally by a sales team during the early qualification of an opportunity to help identify gaps in their knowledge and support the development of their business case.
Portal management
From identifying potential opportunities to submitting the tenders/grants, we undertake all aspects of portal management. Each portal is unique, from the format of responses to the submission of clarification questions, meaning the experience of our Bid Consultants saves clients time and resources, and ensures all portal requirements are met.
Bid libraries
For many of our clients we have created and continue to maintain their bid libraries. This delivers many long-term benefits, such as high-quality standardised content that can be reused as required, saving time and effort, and a central knowledge base for all staff, offering faster access to data and statistics.
Best practice bid writing approach
We develop Answer Guidance Templates (AGTs) for every tender and grant application we work on with a client. These bespoke AGTs offer instruction and guidance to subject matter experts (SMEs) and break questions down into subheadings and key phrases that mirror the structure of the question. These are proven to reduce the time and effort it takes SMEs to produce high-quality responses, whilst making the responses very easy for evaluators to review and score.
Through our Iterative Review Cycle, we review, edit and comments on SMEs’ draft responses and asses them from an evaluator’s perspective, transforming them into high-scoring and compelling submissions, and ensuring they meet the requirements of the specification and evaluation criteria.
Meeting facilitation / management
We run comprehensive kick-off meetings which, amongst other things, comprise an analysis of the client organisation and its competitors, and the development of the win themes. We identify stakeholders’ responsibilities and accountabilities, and ensure they understand the bid process and what is required of them. This ensures stakeholder buy-in, which is key to producing a high-quality response.
To further support SMEs, we work with them in whatever way they prefer to produce their responses. For instance, some prefer to deliver their responses verbally, so we would conduct an interview and transcribe their content into a first draft for them to review/edit.
We host Red Team Reviews – a peer review workshop that provides an independent and objective assessment of the response prior to its submission. In advance of the workshop we prepare a draft final submission document, which is circulated to the nominated stakeholders who haven’t been involved in the production of the tender, for them to review. We then meet with them to discuss their observations and feedback and add the final polish to the tender. This process not only ensures stakeholder satisfaction with the response, but it also further strengthens the quality of the final submission.
Presentation development
Many formal procurements involve a presentation at some stage, with some even contributing to the overall score of the submission. We often support the development of presentations, chair practice sessions and deliver feedback and guidance on presentation and Q&A best practice. This not only helps to make them higher-scoring, but it also ensures they are professionally developed and delivered.