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Our tender win rate is 81%!
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Procurement compliance, contract management & value for money services
Taking the stress out of organising your current bids and planning your pipeline
Helping you to produce a comprehensive and compliant CRP
Our specialist bid recruitment division
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Finding tenders that suit your business
Partner with us to improve your bid output
Helping you build stronger, more resilient supply chains
Content creation that drives qualified leads
Managing a tender involves much more than producing a strong written response. From deciding which opportunities to pursue and coordinating internal teams to meeting submission deadlines and reviewing quality, every stage needs careful planning.
At Thornton & Lowe, we provide professional bid management services to help businesses take control of their tendering activity. Our experienced team can manage individual submissions, work alongside your existing staff or provide ongoing, outsourced bid management support. We help you build a more organised, efficient approach to bidding, reducing pressure on your team while keeping your focus on winning suitable contracts.
Whether you're responding to a particularly complex tender or managing several opportunities at once, effective bid management is essential to producing competitive, compliant submissions.
Our bid management consultants coordinate the people, information and activities needed throughout the bidding process. We help establish clear responsibilities, maintain progress against deadlines and ensure that your submissions reflect both the buyer's requirements and your organisation's strengths.
For businesses without a dedicated bid team, we can provide the expertise and capacity to manage the process externally. For larger organisations, we can work alongside existing bid writers, sales teams and subject matter experts, providing additional management support where it's needed. Our approach is flexible, with support available for individual tenders or through longer-term partnerships.
An effective bidding strategy starts with identifying the right opportunities. We help businesses monitor relevant tenders, framework opportunities and upcoming contracts, focusing on opportunities that align with their capabilities, resources and commercial objectives.
Our Search & Selection Service provides tailored opportunity research, helping businesses move beyond automated alerts to identify contracts worth pursuing.
We also support structured bid/no-bid decision-making, considering factors such as buyer requirements, competition, available resources, delivery capabilities and the likelihood of submitting a competitive response.
By applying a consistent approach to opportunity selection, businesses can make better use of their bidding resources and concentrate on opportunities with the greatest potential value.
Once you've decided to pursue an opportunity, we help establish a clear plan for the submission. This includes reviewing the procurement documents, understanding the evaluation criteria, identifying key deadlines and coordinating the resources required to produce a strong bid.
We work with your team to develop an approach that reflects the buyer's priorities and makes the most of your organisation's experience, capabilities and competitive advantages. Depending on the tender, this can involve developing win themes, planning response content, identifying evidence requirements and establishing review stages.
The objective is to give everyone involved a shared understanding of what's required, who's responsible and when each element needs to be completed.
One of the biggest challenges in tendering is coordinating the contributions of different people across a business. Technical specialists, operational managers, finance teams and senior leadership may all need to provide information, often alongside their existing responsibilities.
Our bid managers help coordinate these contributions, ensuring that responsibilities are clear and information is gathered in sufficient time for responses to be developed and reviewed. We arrange discussions with subject matter experts, monitor progress, follow up on outstanding information and maintain communication throughout the process.
For clients, this means spending less time chasing internal updates and more time providing the insight that makes their submissions competitive.
A strong submission needs to be persuasive, evidence-led and fully aligned with the tender requirements. Our bid management support includes reviewing responses against the specification, evaluation criteria and submission instructions.
We look for gaps in evidence, inconsistencies, unanswered questions and opportunities to communicate your strengths more effectively. We can also challenge proposed solutions, helping your team consider how evaluators are likely to interpret the information provided.
Where more focused assistance is required, our Bid Review Service provides independent feedback and improvement recommendations for draft submissions. Our aim is to help you submit a response that is complete, well organised and capable of demonstrating the value your business can deliver.
Tendering often involves considerable administrative work, particularly when businesses are managing multiple portals, procurement documents and deadlines. We can help coordinate portal activity, organise tender documentation, monitor communications and clarification responses, and prepare submissions for upload. Depending on the agreed scope, our team can also support supplier information, compliance documentation, bid tracking and final submission checks.
For organisations requiring regular administrative assistance, we offer a dedicated Bid Administration Service to support tender monitoring, documentation and portal management. This helps reduce the administrative burden on your internal team while maintaining greater visibility over active opportunities.
Effective bid management doesn't end when a tender has been submitted. We help businesses strengthen their approach over time by reviewing tender outcomes, identifying recurring weaknesses and developing resources that can support future bids. This can include organising existing bid content, creating reusable response templates, improving case studies and identifying gaps in supporting evidence. We can also help obtain and analyse tender feedback, using evaluation scores and buyer comments to understand where improvements are needed.
For businesses bidding regularly, these activities can be particularly valuable. They help establish a more consistent process, reduce duplicated work and ensure that lessons from previous submissions inform future opportunities.
Our approach is tailored to each client's requirements, but generally follows four stages.
We begin by understanding your business, existing tendering processes and commercial objectives. For an individual submission, we'll review the tender requirements, deadlines and available resources. For ongoing support, we'll also consider your wider pipeline, previous tender performance and internal bidding capabilities.
We establish the approach needed to manage your tender activity, including responsibilities, timescales, key deliverables and review points. Where appropriate, we help develop the bid strategy and identify the evidence needed to demonstrate your strengths against the evaluation criteria.
Our team manages the agreed bidding activities, maintaining communication with contributors, monitoring progress and helping ensure that the submission develops according to plan. We work closely with your team to address outstanding requirements, coordinate reviews and prepare the final response.
Following submission, we can help review buyer feedback, identify lessons learned and consider improvements for future opportunities. For ongoing clients, this forms part of a wider process of refining bid strategies, strengthening supporting evidence and improving tendering performance.
Bid management and bid writing are closely connected, but they perform different roles within the tendering process.
There is naturally some overlap. A bid manager may contribute to response development, while a bid writer may coordinate aspects of a submission.
At Thornton & Lowe, we offer both services, allowing us to provide a coordinated solution where needed. Our professional bid writing services can be combined with bid management support to cover the planning, coordination and development of your tender responses.
Different businesses need different levels of assistance. We offer flexible arrangements to reflect your bidding activity, internal resources and longer-term objectives.
If you're preparing for an important tender, we can provide project-based support to help manage the submission. This could involve taking responsibility for the overall bid process, coordinating internal contributors or providing additional management capacity for a particularly demanding opportunity. Our role is agreed around the requirements of the tender and the support you need.
For businesses bidding regularly, ongoing support can provide greater continuity and a more strategic approach. Our retained services allow us to develop a deeper understanding of your organisation, build stronger bid resources and support your tendering activity over time.
Our Bid Success Programme combines bid writing and management expertise within a structured, longer-term partnership. It gives businesses access to a dedicated team that can support live submissions while also working on preparation, evidence development and continuous improvement between tenders. We'll discuss your requirements before recommending the most suitable arrangement.
Our role goes beyond coordinating deadlines and documents. We help businesses establish a more effective approach to pursuing and winning contracts.
“Thornton & Lowe have recently started working with our company and the impact has been outstanding. Their team is exceptionally thorough, professional, and highly knowledgeable. From start to finish, the bid writing process has been seamless, well-structured, and clearly communicated. The quality of their work is excellent, and they have already added real value to our submissions. Highly recommended.”
Mark Norris
★★★★★
Our services are suitable for businesses at different stages of their tendering journey. You might benefit from outsourced bid management if you're:
Whether you need assistance with one opportunity or a broader programme of tenders, we can help establish an approach that fits your business.
What does a bid management consultant do?
A bid management consultant helps plan, coordinate and oversee the bidding process. Responsibilities can include reviewing tender opportunities, developing submission plans, managing contributors, monitoring deadlines, coordinating quality reviews and supporting final submission requirements. The precise activities depend on the scope of the service and the resources available within your business.
Can we outsource our entire bid management process?
Yes. We can provide outsourced support covering a substantial part of your tendering activity, from opportunity identification and planning through to response coordination and submission. You'll still be involved in key decisions, providing business-specific information and approving submissions, but our team can manage much of the work required to keep the process moving.
Can you work alongside our existing bid team?
Absolutely. We regularly support businesses with existing internal resources and can provide additional management expertise or capacity when required. This may be useful during particularly busy periods, when bidding for complex contracts or when your team needs specialist support with planning, strategy or quality assurance.
Do you offer bid management support for frameworks?
Yes. We support businesses pursuing public sector frameworks, including framework applications and subsequent tender opportunities. Our role can include helping assess suitable frameworks, managing submission requirements, coordinating evidence and supporting responses to call-off competitions.
Is bid management included in your bid writing services?
Our bid writing services include appropriate planning and coordination to deliver the agreed submission. However, businesses with more extensive requirements, such as managing multiple opportunities or developing a long-term bidding strategy, may benefit from broader bid management support. We'll discuss the scope of your requirements and recommend a suitable service.
How much do bid management services cost?
The cost depends on the scope and complexity of your requirements, the number of opportunities being managed and whether you need one-off or ongoing support. We provide tailored quotations for individual projects and offer structured ongoing services for businesses requiring regular assistance. Contact our team to discuss the options and receive a quote.
Whether you need support with an individual submission, additional capacity for your existing team or a long-term outsourced bid management partner, we'll work with you to understand your requirements and identify the right solution.
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