17 Jan Cost Effectiveness in Bidding
By Penny Pinnell, Tuesday 17th January 2017
For many Companies, the cost incurred internally through the writing of bids can often be overlooked or at the very least underestimated. There are various factors which need to be considered before creating the content for the responses, arguably the most important one being – is the value of the bid significantly greater than the value of time we will spend as a Company writing it?
As an example, the time spent understanding the requirements of the question alone is a valuable task but often takes much longer than expected. Then we have the extensive preparing and writing the responses – do you know, typically, professional Bid Writers are between four and six times quicker at writing than the average Managing Director? There are many factors determining this, not least the numerous distractions throughout the day that Managing Directors experience.
Producing winning content for bid responses is not just a case of putting words onto paper, you must be able to afford the time to;
• understand the requirements of each question – unfortunately it’s not just down to interpretation, this takes time and as we all know – time is money!
• know what you’re doing – this includes using the right language, terminology and style for the question. Again, this is a lengthy process.
• manage the process – ensure you don’t put weeks of work into the bid to then run out of time and miss the deadline, this is a very costly mistake that happens too often.
• quality assurance – often the most crucial stage of a bid is verifying the quality of the final draft, again, this adds costs in terms of your workforce’s time and expertise which is often overlooked.
Failing to consider the costs incurred throughout the above key stages is all too common and can be detrimental to the Company if the value of time turns out to be greater than the value of the bid itself.
