There’s no second chance with tendering. Through our range of tender support services, we’ll help you improve the quality and effectiveness of your submissions so you can submit your best bid, on time, every time. Once we understand your requirements we’ll assign a bid consultant or team to work alongside you, guiding you through the process to ensure your bid has the best possible chance of success.
Successful tendering relies on so much more than writing the tender submission itself. Our range of bid support services have been designed to cover the most common elements that contribute to tendering success. These include:
SUBMISSION DEVELOPMENT
Providing direct tender writing and design services to ensure you submit a highly readable, client-centric, compelling proposal.
BID LIBRARY DEVELOPMENT
Turning your commonly used boilerplate material into client-centric, tender specific inputs that support your submission — rather than distract from it.
PRE-BID POSITIONING
Setting your company up for tendering success through targeted positioning (capture) and practical gearing-up activities — prior to a bid being released to market.
BID/NO-BID DECISIONS
Applying a rigorous decision framework to help you decide which opportunities are worth pursuing.
STRATEGY SUPPORT
Using practical methodologies to develop win themes and content strategies that clearly articulate your story to win — before the writing starts.
BID MANAGEMENT
Planning, prioritising and coordinating inputs and activities to ensure your tendering process is as stress-free as possible.
POST-SUBMISSION PRESENTATIONS
Helping align your presentations to your submission win themes and building evaluator trust that you are the right choice.
SURGE SUPPORT
Supplementing your existing bid teams with experienced BidWrite staff who can hit the ground running.
Learning global industry best practice
Through choosing to engage specialist tendering support, the obvious benefit is that you’ll improve your likelihood of success. But the hidden benefit is that you’ll also learn proven best practice based on guidance from our global industry body, the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP).
If you have a must-win tender, contact us today to discuss how we can best support you.
If you’re interested in the security of a longer-term bid support partnership with BidWrite, check out our Ways to Engage.
My business or industry is unique. Can BidWrite really help me?
Yes! There is an important distinction to be made between writing for industry and writing to win. The former presupposes some degree of specific industry knowledge. BidWrite, however, applies its experience, techniques and processes with one objective in mind – winning. You are a vital part of the winning process, contributing important knowledge about your industry and more specifically, your business. We work with you, contributing our expertise on the art and science of winning. The strengths and inputs we each bring to the table are complementary. When combined, they make for winning partnerships.
How is BidWrite’s live bid support different from using a professional writer?
Put it this way. If you wanted your expensive watch repaired, you’d use a specialist watchmaker, right? Tendering is a specialised work-winning activity, with its own language and conventions that the average professional writer isn’t likely to be familiar with. And sustained tendering success results from careful attention to far more than just the text within the final submission document. We know this because tendering is all we do – we are specialists. As in most situations, you can’t beat experience.
Will BidWrite provide support to more than one organisation competing for the same tender?
No. BidWrite’s long-held position is that we will never support multiple organisations competing for the same opportunity. Regular clients seeking to lock in our services for known future opportunities can secure exclusive first right of refusal with a subscription to one of our long-term Secure or Transform In cases where there are no Secure or Transform clients competing for a particular opportunity, the organisation that first commits to engaging us will enjoy our exclusive support.
I often submit tenders but am unsuccessful. Can you help me improve my win rate?
Winning tenders is never easy, and success depends on many factors. However, BidWrite’s live bid support service provides a platform of experienced staff, tips, tools and techniques to give you the best possible chance of success. And BidWrite’s training courses teach these tools and techniques so you’ll be producing higher quality content before you know it. The ultimate proof is in the win rates of our clients. These are regularly better than those they achieve when working in isolation. Of course, we can’t guarantee that you’ll win every tender. But we can guarantee a dramatic improvement in your submissions.
I have been unsuccessful in previous bids because I did not comply. Can you help?
Many companies don’t even make it to the first cut in a bid evaluation simply because they haven’t provided all they have been asked to. This can be common with Government related submissions where probity and compliance is justifiably paramount. However, you should view compliance as a basic tender requirement, irrespective of the buyer type. It’s an initial gateway process that may not be enough to see you win, but can certainly stop you from losing. BidWrite ensures compliance by establishing a detailed writing plan at the start of the bid process, and a checklist at the end, to ensure you comply with all tender requirements so you ‘stay in the race’.
Can you help me decipher the overwhelming amount of complex tender documentation?
We know that the sheer volume of Request for Tender (RFT) documentation can present challenges to inexperienced organisations. But practice makes perfect. Collectively, we’ve read thousands of RFT documents. We know what we are looking at, and we know what to look for. Furthermore, a number of our staff have both tendering and procurement experience, we understand ‘procurement speak’. We can help you decipher it so you can focus on what’s really important – your response.
How does BidWrite deal with potential conflicts of interest?
Given the privileged role we play in our clients’ tendering activities, conflicts of interest can arise from time to time. We keenly understand commercial sensitivity, and therefore will disclose any conflict (potential or otherwise) to the relevant parties.
What is BidWrite’s approach to confidentiality?
We are critically aware that company information disclosed during tendering is often sensitive and that reputations, livelihoods and even business survival can be at stake. BidWrite has a strong and well-earned reputation for ethical business practices and we willingly enter into client confidentiality agreements whenever we are asked to. We can even provide our own agreement document to you if required.
Why is it important to BidWrite for its staff to have APMP certification?
Because we believe in it. Based on a global best-practice body of knowledge, the APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) certification program is the only internationally recognised professional qualification designed specifically for proposal professionals. BidWrite views APMP certification as a commitment that offers both quality assurance to our clients and a professional development pathway to our staff.
Can you help make my bids look more professional?
First impressions matter. Your bid document provides evaluators with their first insight into your company’s professionalism and commitment. BidWrite provides advice on bid structure and how to display information more clearly and concisely, using charts, graphs and tables. Our bid consultants are expert users of MS Word and know exactly how to present your bid in a digestible, professional, on-brand format. We can also supply professional graphic designers for situations where higher levels of cover page, executive summary and diagrammatic design are required.
Can you help me avoid the late nights and last-minute rush to meet submission deadlines?
A well-resourced and carefully planned bid, using an experienced and disciplined team, is the key to avoiding late night pizza runs. BidWrite can help you successfully plan and resource your bid to avoid the last-minute rush. Because we work in partnership with you, you’ll also need to prioritise the tender work, especially during the bid open period.
Doesn’t the lowest priced bid always win?
No, the best value bid is usually the winner. Clear articulation of value, in a way that matters to your buyer, is often more important than price alone. Although BidWrite cannot price your bid for you, we can help articulate your pricing strategy and influence how value is perceived by your buyer, either through live bid support or our training courses. This is of great worth, particularly to organisations who offer premium goods or services but struggle to sell their price.
What level of sales jargon is required in bids?
None. Sales jargon is meaningless. We focus on the art of persuasion, which is a vital part of tender submissions. We use a range of tools such as the Pyramid of Persuasion, the ISBP® technique, action captions and diagrams, as well as the correct use of headings and headlines, to improve the level of persuasion in your submission. In our bid response training courses, we teach you how to use these techniques so you feel more confident and empowered to implement them yourself. Persuasion ensures that your key messages are heard loud and clear, giving your tender submission a compelling edge.
Can you help me with grant funding applications?
Yes, but only if we have a prior relationship with you. While many of the principles for preparing a winning tender submission apply equally to industry grant applications, the ROI case for one-off grant submission support is often difficult for our clients to make given the effort required, the level of industry intimacy needed and often relatively modest grant sums on offer to successful applicants. Given our tender and proposal management specialisation, BidWrite does not offer a ‘grant finding’ service. Nevertheless, we are always happy to discuss opportunities, especially if grant applications are an important component of a wider work-winning relationship established through one of our Secure or Transform subscriptions.