05 Sep How Brilliant Bid Writing Can Win You Work
What is Bid Writing?
Winning work or funds can often be the lifeblood of a business or charity, ensuring that they have the chance to survive and prosper.
Professional bid writers prepare documents and pitches for clients to help them win contracts that have been put out for tender, or craft applications for charities, non-profits and other organisations to help them secure additional funding. Bid writers may also design, implement or overhaul a systemic bid creation approach within specific companies.
A successful bid occurs when the bid writer’s client wins the contract to provide the work, product, or service that has been put out to tender. Alternatively, a bid will also be successful when the client is awarded the additional funding or resources that were being bid on.
As a minimum, professional bid writers will prepare technical bid documents and pitches, research opportunities, liaise with clients to understand their needs, goals and values, and produce persuasive, effective bids intended to win more work for the clients.
The very best bid writing support services also treat each business as an entirely unique entity. Personalisation of the bid — so that the individual expertise and approach of the business is highlighted to stand out from the competition — is key to winning work.
Why Are Professional Bid Writing Services Valuable?
They Make Use of Experts with Proven Results:
Bid writing professionals have experience in the key parts of the bid winning process. They can help optimise your bids to match and exceed the required criteria. They can phrase pitches and structure documentation into an effective, professional, and persuasive final package.
They Save Time and Resources:
Professional bid writers have a wealth of experience that they can use to achieve results. For clients, their time and resources that would otherwise need to be spent researching opportunities, pursuing new leads, meeting bid criteria, and preparing essential documents, can instead be saved by delegating these jobs to experts, who know how to complete each task to a high standard.
They Offer Sustainable Approaches to Securing Work and Funds:
Professional bid and tender support writers can also implement a bid creation process in your business, or optimise your existing approach. This means that as your business continues to grow, the bid process is always running in the background — maximising opportunities, approaching clients effectively, and continuing to successfully bid on contracts.
All these factors, and more, mean that professional bid writers can help you win more work!
How Bids May Differ, and How Bid Writers Can Help Companies Adapt
One of the reasons businesses are so keen to hire professional bid writers, is because of how widely the requirements for individual bids can differ, depending on the terms of the contract being bid on, the industry or sector of the organisation inviting the bids, the amount of money involved, and whether the bid is a pitch for work, or an attempt to secure additional funding.
Bids can even vary in their style and tone. Some bids will require a more creative approach, while it is imperative for others to meet certain criteria and parameters.
For example, flourishing creative industries such as online streaming platforms, video on demand services and premium graphic design have all become lucrative sectors of their own, and bids for work in these industries may demand a novel approach or a more visual, eye-catching style, alongside the tried and tested bid fundamentals of understanding the client’s brand, audience demographic and company values.
In the utilities sector, however, the bid writing process may be more technical and specialised, while the construction sector may have very specific resources, technicalities, regulations or budget constraints.
In science, healthcare and technology industries, the approach can be creative, technical, or a combination of both. In these sectors, it is especially common to use bid writing to secure funds and grants.
Charities and other non-profit organisations also make regular use of professional bid writers. It is especially important for charities to have a diverse range of incomes – donations are vital, but so is access to the grants and funding which support their work.
Whatever the nature of their business, professional bid writing services can help clients to identify the most appropriate and effective approach to take when making a bid.
How Bid Writing Has Helped Clients Worldwide
Professional bid writing services have helped clients in all sectors and all parts of the world to achieve hundreds of billions of pounds worth of additional work and funding.
It is a growing industry that a substantial number of organisations are coming to recognise as a vital part of their growth and success.
Bid writing wins work, secures vital funds, and helps businesses and charities to grow as a result.
But many bid writing companies are not just securing work and funds for their clients, they are also training the next generation.
As the old adage says, giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, but teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. In the same way, professional bid writers will often not just provide their experience and expertise to clients, they will nurture those qualities in others too.
Assisting clients to develop an effective in-house bid writing approach helps to ensure that businesses and charities can sustain themselves and continue to secure work and funds in the long run.
Also, bid writing companies both at home and abroad are continuing to innovate and expand the services they offer.
Genpact, for example, a global professional services firm based in America, are incorporating the use of AI into their professional services — including the bid writing process.
In 2019, they were rewarded for their efforts and named as ‘Bid and Proposal Team of the Year’ by the Association of Proposal Management Professionals.
Similarly, the company Upland Qvidian, who have their offices based in Austin, Texas, are also making an innovative impact in the industry. Their company intends to automate numerous parts of the bid and tendering process for greater speed, efficiency and cohesion.
Their software allows trained bid writing professionals to manage and access content within a centralised online library to keep extensive digital documents organised. This can facilitate extra productivity, which is often crucial with larger projects.
In Germany meanwhile, professional bid writing and proposal company Quality Bid Consulting has spearheaded an initiative to combine both the training and bidding processes.
Often, a professional bid writer or bid writing team would be called in by a client to assist with a specific opportunity, or else to overhaul their in-house bid writing process. Quality Bid Consulting, however, is introducing a procedure in which employees of the client company learn the bid writing process as part of their job.
The employees are then instructed by bid writing professionals on how to complete and manage the workload on an actual, real-life opportunity that the company is attempting to secure.
This, claims Quality Bid Consulting, helps to ensure that the company employees have genuine real-world experience that they can then apply to future opportunities. An approach like this helps to ensure that the impact the professional bid writers have on the client company is more sustained over time and creates greater long-term benefits, as their teachings will become part of the company’s culture.
There is also a burgeoning shift in the bid writing industry to offer a more comprehensive package as part of the bid and proposal services.
For example, US-based Cavalry Consulting offer extra services alongside bid writing and proposals, such as producing the photography and graphic design elements which are needed as part of the bids.
Offering complementary services like these helps to ensure that not only will the clients’ bids will be elevated above the competition, but that professional bid writing companies can gain an edge over their competitors in the crowded bid writing marketplace.
As you can see, the bid writing industry is changing all the time, but what businesses need time and again are bid writers who are passionate, knowledgeable, and highly experienced in their craft.
Success Stories
All over the world and across a range of industries, bid writing services have helped their clients to secure contracts, funding, and billions of revenues in additional work.
Charities have managed to continue their great work due to successful professional bids for funding, while every day businesses win contracts that are crucial to their survival and growth.
Even one-off projects such as local events and campaigns have found the financial support they needed with the help of a professional bid writer.
Here at Bid & Tender Support, we are highly experienced in a range of industries and sectors. Our work is as varied as our clients, and we treat every single job as a unique, individual project.
We recently provided a full end-to-end service support for an Event Management and Video Production client.
As the business provided creative, high quality video content and coverage for events, it was necessary for them to travel frequently. As a result, not enough time or resources could be used effectively to research opportunities, complete tenders and documentation, and win more lucrative work.
That’s where we came in.
We identified key opportunities through our Search Service, prepared effective and persuasive documents, and collaborated with their team to share documents, complete processes and secure more work.
As a result, the client saved time and resources by outsourcing to us and was able to take advantage of several great opportunities.
Another client of ours was a successful cleaning company determined to re-secure their most lucrative regular contracts. We were able to help them achieve this with effective documentation and presentations that distinguished them from the competition.
We also identified several additional opportunities for them across the area in which they operated and created a library of template tender documents so that the process can continue to run smoothly in the future.
Now, their documents will not need to be created from scratch time and time again, meaning that the business can instead dedicate extra resources back into providing an excellent service.
Another client of ours operated in the security industry, employing some of the most experienced security personnel in the industry. The business was experiencing rapid growth and did not have the time necessary to devote to extensive written elements of their internal training programme.
We pulled together all the key elements of their existing learning materials into one engaging and cohesive whole that can be used to train the next generation of security staff.
If you are inspired to continue researching the ways our bid writing services can benefit a variety of businesses and charities, you can read more on our dedicated case studies page.
Get in Touch
We are an experienced team of professional bid writers with success across a range of industries. We have produced remarkable results for our clients, working with companies of all sizes.
Bid writing is increasingly competitive, time-consuming and specialised. Allow our professionals to manage every aspect of the process and dramatically increase the rates of your success. We are proud to have secured over £1 billion in additional work for our clients and are keen to substantially increase this total.
If you have been inspired to use professional bid writers in your drive to win more work or funding, then why not get it touch with us on 01908 382 414 or email us at info@bidandtendersupport.co.uk
About Us
Bid and Tender Support are a professional bid services company based in Olney, Buckinghamshire.
Some of the services we offer include bid review, bid support, professional bid writing, bid writing courses, bid management training and bid consultants. We can also perform the role of both a bid writing agency and a freelance bid writer.
