Bid writing strategy for the New Year

Assess your 2018 success rates

Before putting together a bid writing strategy it is important to acknowledge the previous year: what worked, what didn’t work and how successful your bids were overall. This will help to determine areas for focus, current weaknesses and an objective for the coming year. It may also be part of a larger company objective, such as growth and obtaining more contracts from bidding in the public sector.

Knowing what your success rates are and where you want them to be can help you plan how many bids you will be undertaking over the course of the year. For instance, if your success rate is 50%, you know you need to submit ten tenders to win five contracts. Continually improving and increasing success rates should always be a priority, but in a more practical sense if you know how many bids you are likely to win, it will help with planning and bid management across the year.

Review your bid library

If you have some downtime at the end of the year it can be a good idea to catch up on the ‘bid admin’, including checking your bid library is up to date and previous submissions are filed and stored correctly. Inhouse, our writers create bid libraries for all regular clients to help categorise and store previous tender submissions, feedback, company information and data, to support future tender submissions. This is helpful in many ways: it is more efficient, you can make good use of feedback, and you can store your highest quality/highest scoring sections of past bids to refer to when suitable.

Pipeline for 2019

You should by now have a good idea of your pipeline for 2019, which may include contracts that are due to end, forthcoming bids from important clients and buyers, and any new contract opportunities. Pipelines can be difficult to monitor as the procurement environment is subject to so many changes, but it is important to plan as best you can. Having a good idea of your tender pipeline will then allow you to manage resource, obtain any training your team might require and ultimately focus on securing the important contracts.

If you need any input into your 2019 strategy, contact our team of professional bid writers to discuss how we can help improve your bidding processes and tendering success rates.