Tips and advice on improving your bid process to reduce time input and produce higher quality and more effective bids.
Many companies complain that the public sector procurement process is unduly complex and discriminates against smaller organisations. While parts of it are certainly in need of review, the brutal fact is that a great many companies submit shockingly poor tender responses.
The way you plan, structure and write a bid should not vary according to the value of it. It doesn’t matter if your proposal is for £5k or £500m.
Pre-written content is often called “boilerplate” or “template” text. Working from boilerplate is supposed to save you time because editing is assumed to be easier than writing.
Before you submit any electronic documents, thoroughly check the embedded data fields. Your potential customer will not be impressed to see you have cribbed from a tender which was previously submitted to one of their competitors.
As soon as an opportunity arises, either through your business development work or as an invitation to tender, you should question it in terms of:
Proposal writing can be a daunting task. With its unforgiving deadlines, it is a complex process, the outcome of which can have a huge impact on the business.
A surprisingly high number of companies work on bid documents then decide not to submit them. A bid / no-bid decision made at an earlier stage could save you time and energy.
Tender material should be recycled whenever possible because this is an efficient use of your resources. To reuse it successfully, however, you must check the relevance of the material to the new tender, and ensure it is tailored to the requirements of the new customer.
