Editing Service for Bid Writing: Improving Draft Tender Responses

Why Bid Editing Matters for Tender Success

You've spent weeks drafting your tender response. The content reflects your expertise and capabilities, yet something isn't quite right. Despite your knowledge and effort, the document lacks the impact needed to win. This is precisely where a professional editing service for bid writing comes in! Transforming promising drafts into winning submissions.

When procurement teams review dozens of submissions, the quality of editing often determines which bids stand out. Poor editing undermines credibility, whilst professional bid editing services, often known as a bid review, ensure your tender responses directly address evaluation criteria and clearly demonstrate your value proposition.

Our Bid Review Service at Thornton & Lowe maximises the true value of our bid consultancy. It is our experience of 'what a winning bid looks like' which quickly ramps up the quality of your tender submissions. With over 75% success rate for our clients, professional editing makes the critical difference between winning and losing valuable contracts.

Timing is everything in the tender process. The sooner you engage editing expertise, the greater the impact on your submission quality. Many organisations wait until the final days before submission, significantly limiting the improvements possible. For maximum benefit, involve professional bid writing consultants (the editors) during the planning stages of your response.

Our Comprehensive Bid Editing Process

Our editing approach follows a structured methodology refined through years of successful bid consultancy. The process begins with a thorough compliance check against the buyer's requirements, specification and selection questionnaire. This meticulous verification prevents the all-too-common issue of disqualification due to missed mandatory requirements. This includes checking clarification questions and updates.

Next, our bid writing specialists analyse every response to ensure all aspects of each question are addressed thoroughly and in context. This stage often reveals critical gaps where evaluators might deduct points and identifies opportunities to strengthen your position through more compelling evidence.

When reviewing supporting documentation, we assess not just its presence but its relevance and persuasiveness. Supporting documents should be seen as an opportunity to add more value, to further meet the evaluation criteria and improve the buyer's confidence in your business and solution. Our editors often recommend additional evidence types that could strengthen your overall submission.

Win theme assessment forms a key element of our editing service. To maximise your scores, we help you fully understand the pain points of your potential customer and align them with your strengths, developing powerful reasons why your business should be successful. These win themes are then consistently integrated throughout your submission.

Where time and budget allows - we can further development and reorganise content to create a logical flow that mirrors the buyer's question order and your USPs. This methodical structuring, often called storyboarding, presents a coherent and professional proposal that makes it straightforward for evaluators to find and assess information.

The language refinement stage involves sharpening your writing by replacing generic statements with specific, evidence-backed claims. This transformation significantly enhances the persuasiveness of your tender response and directly addresses the buyer's requirements and concerns.

Our bid writing proofing process eliminates grammatical errors, inconsistencies in terminology, and formatting issues. This attention to detail reflects your company's dedication to quality and excellence, significantly boosting your credibility with evaluators.

How Our Editing Service Improves Your Win Rate

We review and take action before you submit the tender! We are reviewing and feeding back, or reviewing and improving your draft tender submissions. This is how we ensure it improves your win rates and chances of success.

Perhaps most importantly, professional editing significantly enhances the persuasiveness of your tender response. By tailoring content to echo the client's specific needs and values, we help you convert interest into contract awards. We integrate well-articulated arguments highlighting your unique selling points and demonstrate how your services exceed expectations.

Our approach to bid reviews not only enhances the quality of your bids and aligns them closely with the evaluation criteria, significantly boosting your chances of success, but it can also act as a bid training tool for your team. The skills and insights gained through professional editing can be applied to future bids, gradually improving your in-house capabilities.

Bid writing also needs to be 'real' - practical and thought through. If you have started with a previous draft - we will check to ensure it is still tailored enough for your customers specific requirements and needs. It needs to be about them!

When to Invest in Professional Bid Editing

Professional bid editing delivers maximum value in several specific situations. High-value opportunities where the return on investment is substantial benefit greatly from expert editing. Similarly, strategically important tenders that represent new markets or key client relationships warrant the additional investment in quality.

If you are not happy with the quality scores you are achieving, a bid review offers a chance to let an external expert in bidding and procurement challenge your bid. For a live tender, you benefit from improving your quality scores and therefore your chances of success. You further benefit from your team being up-skilled on bid writing best practice, which they can apply to future tenders.

Situations where your in-house team lacks experience with a particular buyer or sector also justify professional editing services. Tight submission deadlines where expert intervention can rapidly improve quality likewise benefit from our editing expertise.

Our bid review service prices start from £450, and we can often add value very quickly.

Our Bid Editing Service Options

Bid Review & Improve Service

Our comprehensive Bid Review & Improve service can transform your draft into a polished, competitive tender. Share your drafted bid responses along with your available timescales, and we'll provide a quote to use your draft as a starting point. Our bid writing consultants will refine your content, gather additional information, and deliver an enhanced tender response.

The process begins with a detailed review meeting to understand your approach and unique selling points. We then redevelop all responses to maximise evaluation scores (based on our 'review and improve' option), chasing up and integrating evidence and examples from your team, for example. Multiple revision cycles ensure your tender reaches its full potential before final submission.

This level of service requires your drafts at least week before submission (in an ideal world). We take your initial work, speak with your team, collect further insights and information, and redevelop the tender responses. We then share these with you for review before returning a final draft ready for submission. This approach can lower your overall bid writing costs as your initial work saves our bid writers time.

Bid Review & Comment Service

Our Bid Review & Comment service provides expert guidance for your in-house team to implement. This is a lighter touch and lower cost option and something we can also turnaround a lot quicker. We review your draft bid response against the specification, client requirements, best practices, and our extensive bid writing experience. Our detailed comments address compliance, added value, formatting, structure, accuracy, design and win themes.

Using tracked changes, we provide guidance and suggestions for improvement along with a summary report of recommendations. During a follow-up meeting, we explain our comments and offer practical solutions to make the necessary changes before the tender deadline.

For small tenders, we can often turn this around within a day or 2, especially if urgent. However, it's important to consider you then need to have time to implement the suggested improvements. This option is cost-effective and leverages your in-house bid writing capacity, focusing on adding value through expert feedback.

Quality and Social Value Enhancement in Bid Editing

Our editing service places particular emphasis on quality and social value sections, often critical to public sector procurement. When we refer to quality, we consider both the solution and the quality responses required in the invitation to tender. This solution needs to focus on value for money, which balances your price, level of delivery and wider impact on the community.

When editing social value responses, we ensure alignment with the buyer's priorities by thoroughly examining the procurement documents. We enhance how you showcase past achievements with detailed examples of projects where you delivered social value. Our editors help you make quantifiable commitments with clear and measurable objectives, and detail your implementation strategy for delivering and reporting on social value.

As noted in our guidance, TOMS (Themes, Outcomes, Measures) is the acceptable measurement tool for social value, and we ensure your responses incorporate this methodology appropriately to maximise your evaluation scores.

Proofreading Techniques in Professional Bid Editing

Proofreading within bid editing goes far beyond simple spell-checking. Professional bid editing uses a systematic approach that catch errors most in-house teams miss. We believe proofreading should be part of your writing approach from start to finish, not merely the final step.

Looking over your own writing presents significant challenges. Your brain knows what you meant to say, so it often skips over mistakes. This makes it difficult to spot errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation. Additionally, your emotional attachment to the work creates a hurdle to objective assessment.

Our editors use proven techniques such as reviewing content sentence by sentence in reverse order. This odd technique forces focus on each sentence individually, making errors stand out more clearly. We also use text-to-speech tools to identify awkward phrasing and flow issues that visual reviewing might miss.

Consistency verification forms another crucial aspect of our editing service. Inconsistency undermines credibility with evaluators, so our editors meticulously check terminology standardisation, format alignment, voice and tone consistency, and accuracy of all data and claims throughout the document.

When proofreading tender documents, our specialists focus on question-response alignment, ensuring each answer directly addresses the specific question asked. We optimise content while respecting strict word limits, review against evaluation criteria to ensure maximum potential scores, and verify the use of buyer-specific terminology required in the tender documentation.

The Competitive Edge of Professional Editing

With our specialised editing service for bid writing, your tender response will directly address evaluator priorities and scoring criteria, present compelling evidence of your capabilities and track record, and highlight unique selling points that differentiate you from competitors.

Professional editing ensures your submission demonstrates thorough understanding of the buyer's requirements, conveys professionalism through clear, concise writing, and avoids common pitfalls that lead to point deductions.

Bid reviews are essential whether completed in-house or externally. The better your tender management, bidding systems and bid writing processes are, the more the bid review can focus on adding value and win themes. Professional editing serves as both quality assurance and a valuable learning opportunity for your team.

To discuss how our editing service can improve your next tender response, contact us today on 01204 238 046 or email hello@thorntonandlowe.com for a no-obligation consultation. Timing is everything in the tendering process – early engagement with professional editors allows us to add maximum value to your bid and significantly enhance your chances of success.