Writing winning bids and proposals
Writing a professional response to a bid or tender can be an overwhelming task. With so much of your effort focussed on managing the client relationship, developing your solution, and building a viable commercial model, the job of professionally articulating your value proposition is often left until the very last minute.
We understand that your business development managers, subject matter experts, and even core members of your bid team might not have the skills or training to convey your written message in such a way to score maximum points with evaluators.
Writing professional responses to bids and tenders is a critical component of winning business and crucial to sustainable business growth.
Our bid writing courses will prepare and inspire your team to produce winning bids more effectively and efficiently. We will develop your writing skills, show you how to increase individual answer scores, give you the tools to create content from scratch, and ultimately improve your win-rate.
Your bid team needs a proven approach for consistently writing high-scoring answers that are easy to read and evaluate, giving them a winning formula for writing their next bid. Our training provides step-by-step guidance to help your team:
- Understand the importance of bid writing in the bid lifecycle
- Understand the importance of pre-RFP answer planning so you can quickly populate first drafts on receipt of the RFP
- Deconstruct complex questions and produce correctly structured, compliant answers
- Deliver compelling, easy-to-evaluate content, that answers questions fully and maximises your scores
- Take the stress and burden out of bidding by adopting efficient best practices.
Every bespoke course we deliver uses case study material extracted from your own recent bids and proposals. Our courses are fully interactive and focus on bridging identified skills and knowledge gaps.
2-Day Course (Classroom or Online)
To accelerate the adoption of bid writing skills into the DNA of your team, we offer in-depth pre-session analysis, reviewing previous bids and creating bespoke content and exercises to deliver additional value. Our 2-day course typically covers the following modules:
The Sales Cycle
Pre-Bid Activities
Win Strategy and Kick Off
Solution
Storyboarding
Writing
Executive Summaries
Review and Submission
Lessons learned
Sales Leads should attend to develop their understanding of this critical phase in the business development lifecycle. It will:
- Enable higher conversion rates through insight and positioning
- Demonstrate the value of high quality input into strategy and win themes
- Show how to build an informed commercial strategy
- Help the team to storyboard compelling content and maximise document impact through robust, client-centric reviews
Bid Leaders who are regularly nominated to lead proposals should attend to understand:
- Their responsibilities and required behaviours
- How they should select a winning bid team
- How to develop a strategy, win themes and solution
- Their role in ownership of the commercials and risks
- How to review the submission to drive quality and to provide impact
Service Delivery Leads who will be responsible for developing the solution and running the service once the business is secured should attend to further develop:
- Their approach to building winning service delivery models that deliver value and innovation for the client
- Their skills in leading the deconstructing of requirements and questions to generate compelling content
- How to lead the client engagement with impact and capture the client’s attention as the lynchpin of the delivery team
Bid Managers should attend to build on their techniques and approach to:
- Mobilising bid teams to succeed
- Engaging senior colleagues in value proposition development
- Project management, bid process and governance of tenders
- Maximising outputs from meetings and facilitating high impact reviews
Bid Writer should attend to improve their approach to:
- Storyboarding and writing compelling responses
- Interviewing content out of key stakeholders
- Writing winning executive summaries
- Engaging senior colleagues in value proposition development
Contributors or subject matter experts (SMEs) should attend to:
- Understand the full tendering environment and how to play a winning part in it
- Acquire skills in challenging and verifying strategy
- Understand their lead role in bid solution development
- Hone skills in storyboarding and writing compelling responsesges for APMP membership and exam fees to be paid to the APMP via their examination partners.