What we do

Our advisory service covers all aspects of business winning through the competitive tendering process. We provide advice throughout the entire capture process, not just during the bid stage.

Our advice is generally most beneficial when taken as early as possible which often leads to saving money in the bid budget. It is most effective prior to the commencement of the bid phase to help with planning and hence avoid frenetic activity. However, our bid specialists are there to advise your team whenever needed.

We know from experience that the majority of the team looking to win contracts will not be capture experts, it could even be their first bid. Depending on the availability and level of expertise within the business, the advice needed could range from a simple “What’s the best way to …,” through to advice on their entire capture process. So, our clients rely on us to provide them with the right advice, in the right way and at the right time.

How we do it

The first key activity is to ensure we understand the problem so that we can advise appropriately. Much like writing a bid, we have to understand the requirements before we start answering the question. We then appoint the appropriate resource to advise you. For straightforward issues, our help desk team can usually answer themselves, but for more complex problems we will assign a specialist.

Why clients trust us

Organisations looking to improve their win rate come to us for advice on capture planning, bid methodology and best practice during the proposal preparation. This advice benefits our clients by improving the way they prepare their proposal and hence increases their win probability.

What we do

Our guidance is available at any time throughout the capture process but is often sought when the pressure is on. It is particularly useful for team members with limited experience of bidding, or who have not benefitted from formal training to have access to appropriate guidance.

Typically, we provide assistance to the team to achieve the progress necessary to submit a winning bid. This includes facilitating key meetings and workshops, such as bid launch, win themes, answer planning. Our advisors analyse the tender document and present guidance on how to address the response. This includes book plans, schedule, progress dashboards, etc.

For novice bid managers we provide mentoring support to help them through the intense bid response preparation process.

How we do it

Our specialists work closely with our clients to guide their thinking and find the best solution for the issue they are struggling with. We have the luxury of being able to step back and see the issues from an external perspective and provide pragmatic guidance. When facilitating meetings, we challenge the delegates to ensure the most advantageous outcome is achieved.

Why clients trust us

Many bid teams are formed at short notice from subject matter experts who are inexperienced in winning business through competitive tendering. Often there is no time to send them on training courses as the solicitation document has already arrived.

The benefit of taking guidance is that it provides on-the-job training for those members of the team that need it, plus it provides the security and peace of mind of a safety net of experts to help the team get it right first time.

We provide the process, tools and expertise to increase the confidence and efficiency of the resources and their ability to produce a winning bid.

What we do

Our bid support service can be as much or as little as required to achieve the best result. On most occasions we augment the in-house team with the specific skills they do not have available or would not expect to have in their permanent team. However, there are times when we provide the entire bid team with the exception of the client’s technical specialists.

The typical skills we provide are:

• Bid management
• Bid coordination
• Bid writing
• Graphic design
• Formatting
• Proofreading
• Printing and production

We have created a specialist facility, known as the Bid Production Studio, that acts as our centre of excellence and a location for clients to use for workshops, reviews and production.

How we do it

With vast experience of the pressures and time constraints of preparing a bid, we understand what is needed and when. Accordingly, we are flexible in our approach to providing support. We work with the client to understand where the gaps exist and agree a pragmatic solution of scalable services. The scalability is achieved through the consistency of approach across all of our associates achieved through the REWARD® methodology.

Our team members appreciate that bidding is not a nine to five, Monday to Friday activity and are prepared to work flexibly to meet the schedule. Often, we are not needed to operate on the client’s site so we operate remotely using our secure shared environment software tool, which is cleared by the UK MOD to handle official sensitive material.

Why clients trust us

Business winning is key to the growth of any company, but too often the specialist resources required to prepare a winning tender are not available. This gap in resources leads to people trying to adapt their skills to meet the need, but unfortunately, this usually results in a poorly prepared tender document and the contract opportunity being missed.

Our clients get access to bid specialists who are productive as soon as they arrive and are flexible about when and how they work. This provides a competitive advantage of using a team of specialists to help with the preparation of winning tenders, without the overhead of maintaining a standing army or the cost of keeping them trained.