Bid Writing Consultancy Demystified: The Fine Art of Winning Proposals

What is a Bid Writing Consultancy

Bid writing consultancy can involve providing guidance, training or support - but all focused on bid writing and bid management. It's consultancy on winning contracts and tenders!

Bid writing consultants use their industry expertise and expertise to coach and mentor your business to performance at it's best during a tendering exercise. They are adept at tailoring the value proposition and strategically presenting the qualifications and experience of your team.

A bid writing consultancy or bid management company is a business which offers this training, guidance and support, but as an outsourced service. They help businesses navigate the complexities of business proposals, providing invaluable insights that can transform their approach and enhance their chances of success.

Writing About Your Business

Are you not best placed to write about your business? In some cases, 100%. However, is responding to a tender or writing a bid about your business, or it about the customer?

Even for those business owners or Directors who have a vast experience and the perfect skillset for tender writing, do they have the capacity? Do they have or need a full time dedicated in-house team?

Using a Third Party Bid Writing Consultancy?

An external or professional bid writing consultancy can't write a bid without you, well not a convincing one anyway!

It's a partnership. At Thornton & Lowe, we work with our clients, plan and storyboard the tender answers, interview their team, their subject matter experts, review previous bids and share a first draft. This is a chance for our clients to feedback. We often highlight additional information or evidence we wish we would have for the bid in order to improve.

The client shares any comments and we run through these and provide an updated second draft, fully packaged up, including supporting documents, filed as per the tender instructions.

It's your bid writing done! Managed and delivered by a bid writing consultancy! Before you even see you first draft we have completed an internal review, challenging and developing the responses, as well as checking any updates and clarification questions.

Now imagine we don't just write bid for you, but 2 or 5! We have worked with some of our clients for over 14 years! Producing all their bids, monitoring their tenders and managing their portals. Continually pushing and driving the quality of the bids to get better each time.

Our bid consultants, who are directly employed by Thornton & Lowe, become your part-time bid writer!

What Value can Bid Writing Consultants Add?

Let's use Thornton & Lowe as an example. Within our in-house bid writing consultancy team we have expertise including public and private sector procurement, and of course commercial bidding. It is all we have done since 2009! We have worked with thousands of businesses to win billions of pounds of new business! That's a lot of learning, developing and improving to maximise our win rates across ITTs, pre-quals and business proposals.

Our systems are continually refined and we have worked across hundreds of different sectors from construction to healthcare, from legal services to office supplies. We understand the needs of buyers and their expectations from suppliers.

What value do we bring as a bid writing consultancy? We know what is required to win.

Support for your Bid Team?

Quite often bid writing consultancy businesses will work with their customers to provide not just bid writing but also:

• Additional bid management capacity
• Training
• Mentoring
• Bid review and challenge
• Tender monitoring and research services.

Writing Winning Proposals

As a bid writing consultancy, one quick win for our clients, is often how they can use their existing customers to win new contracts - and this far more than getting a good reference.

This is both a chance to further build your relationship, demonstrate your commitment to partnership working, while also collecting a lot of evidence to make your next bid stand out from the competition. Working closely with your clients can also often lead to you refining your delivery model, which can then be proposed in the next bid (if the requirement/ challenge is the same). Evidence includes:

• Case studies
• Testimonials
• Social value
• Examples of innovation – value engineering
• Continuous improvement sessions

Continuous Improvement Sessions

This is a real chance to build relationships and see how you can better support your client. By further understanding their wider challenges, creating and testing new solutions and interventions, you can help them save money, improve service delivery and maximise KPI performance.

By further understanding the client – it’s a perfect chance to refine your bid solution for similar customers, similar public sector buyers. This new solution, supported by evidence of satisfaction and performance – is what could make all the difference when bidding for new contracts!

It’s this innovation, this clear drive for improvement, but ultimately your refined and better solution, which can make your business the choice rather than a choice. Linking this to most scoring criteria, you 'ensure it is fully aligned', 'understanding of the client issues', 'full assurance of the ability to deliver' and is supported by 'evidence'.

It the practical and operational description of your new and improved solution, which brings the true value of your offer to life and you never know, might even made your tender response interesting!

Using this within a Formal and Structured Tender Response Document

So how do we describe this clearly within the formal nature of public sector tendering and ITT requirements?

When understanding the wider requirements of the tender and the customer, you will develop your win themes. These win themes will include your proposed innovation delivery structure/ solution. As a result, you take the same approach as you would when embedding clear win themes throughout your tender response. This should be checked throughout the bid writing process including storyboarding, draft stages and final bid review to ensure it is clear.

You will likely have quality tender questions based on:

1. Approach to delivering the contract question: At a practical and granular level ensure you have pre-drafted your delivery structure, how you mobilise your new delivery, and highlight each key feature of it. Often a table or bullet point structure will allow you to do this concisely, while still ensuring there is a clear area to highlight the benefit of each feature. This benefit is the focus for the client, but your description of how it is achieved makes it comes to life and ensures you score those higher ‘reassurance’, ‘evidenced delivery’ points
2. Contract management question: Taking the same approach as above
3. Innovation question: if your solution is a key element of your innovation, it will of course also go here. An extra chance to provide highly relevant contract innovation
4. Added value, social value questions: As well as your core offerings, are there any additional social value benefits of your new solution? If so, great - let’s also get them in here as well.

These are of course only examples, however, hopefully you can see how easily they can be embedded so that your solution is clearly enhanced, aligned to their challenges and scoring criteria!

This is one benefits of using bid writing consultants. Hello@thorntonandlowe.com