Interim Bid Support

Interim bid support

Why use an interim bid manager or bid writer?

Interim bid support from an external organisation can save your company the expense, risk and hassle associated with recruitment, onboarding and employment, all whilst guaranteeing the support from an industry professional. It is especially common for a larger, ‘must-win’ bid, where you may need additional resource for a short period of time.

As a professional bid writing consultancy, that offers bid and tender writing services, all our bid writers are also experienced bid managers, trained in not only bid writing itself, but also end-to-end project management, interview techniques, proposals, and interpreting the evaluation/specification criteria to support service development. Completing circa 600 bids per year and working with both SMEs and household names (national and multi-national companies), our team has a wide variety of experience across all industry sectors.

How we integrate into your team

Our expert bid writers regularly integrate into existing organisational bid teams, or help form a new bid team for a specific tender project. This can be in the role of bid manager or bid writer, depending on the client requirements. In our role as specialist procurement professionals, our team brings a wide range of skills and attributes to a large-scale bid, with years of experience. We are fully confident and well versed in drafting large volumes of high-quality narrative, for bids across all industry sectors.

Our approach is flexible and will be structured around your existing infrastructure and specific requirements, but ordinarily includes support with:

• Kick-off meetings
• Capture planning, storyboarding, creating win themes and agreeing client solutions
• Bid writing – typically, being allocated a section of the tender response to take responsibility for, working alongside the other members of the bid team
• Interviewing subject matter experts
• Bid reviews and editing (including red team reviews)
• Progress meetings (sometimes referred to as ‘scrum calls’) with management and operational staff, ongoing communication and regular bid team meetings
• Submission of the bid; debrief meetings and lessons learnt.

Recent examples of Executive Compass interim bid support:

• Client bidding into the criminal justice sector: one of our senior bid writers on secondment for a five-month long bid, comprising 200,000 words.
• Client bidding into Heathrow Airport for a large civil engineering contract: a two-month secondment for two of our senior bid writers. Circa 20,000 words plus preparation of responses and presentations in support of tender phase buyer subject matter expert visits.
• Client bidding for a National Rail contract: one of our senior bid writers supporting with circa 10,000 words as part of a wider bid team.