Bid Tender Management

We strongly believe our role is not simply to 'write' or respond to tenders but to support our clients to win contracts.

At Thornton & Lowe we're expert Bid Writing Consultants, we provide a 360-degree bid service, which has been developed over the last 8 years. Our services include:

• Bid Writing Support, mainly for those organisations without an existing bid team but who need consultancy and support to secure formal tenders.
• Bid training, both through open workshops and bespoke sessions.
• Bid Resource, which is our Bid Recruitment division supplying temporary and permanent Bid Writing Staff, such as Bid Writers and Bid Managers largely to organisations who are looking to add to their existing Bid Teams.
• Tender Library Software, our bespoke tender management system allowing you to quickly find previous responses and information, so you can spend time continuously developing your responses.

Through these core service areas and depending on our clients' requirements our bid consultancy could include:

Strategic Bid Support

Having a clear tender/bid writing strategy is essential. We work with many companies who are initially not happy with their return on investment (ROI) from their formal bid work. We often find this is because their approach to tenders and bid has not been planned effectively with clear strategy and vision. A clear strategy is key to winning bids and can have a vast increase when looking at business development.

Bid Management & Tender Writing

Tender writing can be very time consuming, often with little success. At Thornton & Lowe we support organisations to effectively and efficiently tender for public contracts. Read more about our Bid Management & Tender Writing service.

Tender Training

Our bid training courses are proving popular with clients, as they receive hands-on, relevant information, as well as plenty of opportunities to ask questions and increase their chances of winning bids. This ranges from an introduction to the public sector and how to write an effective tender response, to specific and practical sector-specific training on how to improve performance/success rates. It can be training to a single member of staff, or Director, or to a team of thirty.

Grants & Funding

We support charities, social enterprises, and private companies to effectively apply for grants and funding or bid for contacts.

We have successfully supported our third sector clients to secure funding, grants, and contracts with Local Authorities, Home Office, Foundation Trusts, DFE, Universities, ESF, ERDF, Awards for all and HLF.

Interim Bid Management

Our larger clients will often require interim bid management support and expertise. We fully appreciate that demands for our service are sporadic due to the nature and flow of business and whilst we work across a vast number of sectors our team's specific experience for this type of interim bid consultancy includes...

Why use a bid writing consultant?

Writing a bid or tender is a specialist skill. Thornton & Lowe can fulfil this role and support your organisation. The experienced bid professionals who form our bid management team really are experts on tendering. This year alone we will have supported our clients with contracts in excess of £37 billion making us one of the largest bid management expert consultancies in the UK.

We have successfully supported many sectors from construction, facilities management, utilities and infrastructure, professional services and healthcare. 

We share best practice across these sectors to ensure our varied experience can be fully utilised by our clients to maximise their bid and tender success. We can work with you to help develop and tailor all aspects of your tender including your PQQ & ITT submissions, to ensure that you make it through the PQQ and offer the most competitive ITT response possible.

We have a first-class bid team, including bid directors, bid managers and specialist bid writers with vast experience in developing outstanding and effective tender submissions who will work closely with you to ensure you stand out from your competition.

PQQ & ITT Development

We often get told by companies that they will use a very similar response and sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't - even with the same contracting authority. We work with companies to help them develop and tailor all aspects of their PQQ & ITT submissions to ensure they consistently make it through the PQQ and offer the most competitive ITT response possible.

PQQ & ITT Final Audit Service

Where a company might have internal resources or might have already completed a substantial amount of the required documentation we offer a Final Audit Service, whereby we assess the documents as though we were the contacting authority (e.g. Council, Housing Association, NHS, School etc) and suggest/draft ways to improve the response, therefore, increasing the chances of success.

We also find that many of our clients do not have the time or resources to monitor their in-house bidding team. Very often a string of PQQ or more so ITT failures are not scrutinised due to operational demands, therefore the habitual negative practices are compounded.

In essence, there is always added value that can be found by way of monitoring those you entrust with the first stage towards the growth and therefore the success of your business unit, after all the mobilisation of operation can only set in if a bid has been successful! What we offer is a ''critical friend'' scenario, this allows us to interact with the bidding team on a semi-formal basis and from such generate reports and recommendations for improvement as well as identifying, nurturing and ring-fencing best practice.

It is a form of ''silent'' training without having to take them out of the workplace thus ensuring continuity as well as being very cost effective. Find out How We Work and together we can start winning bids.