Seven Steps Before Bid Success

If you're like many smaller organisations, without an in-house bid resource, you often wait until a bid is released before preparing to write it. As a result, you’re always reacting: having only a loose sense of what your unique story is, and why the buyer should care about it; people have to be pried away from their day job to write, manage and contribute to the bid; teams scrambling around to find evidence to back up claims; rushing through reviews and decisions without fully considering if the bid is a good strategic fit. This creates weak bids, stressed teams, poor return on investment and higher risk that you bid for unprofitable or undeliverable opportunities.

But it doesn’t need to be this way. Even organisations without dedicated bid resource can prepare for when a bid will arrive. Over the next weeks, I’ll explore seven basic steps any organisation can take to make sure that when a bid lands, you’re prepared for it.

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Number 1: Collect your evidence

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What is evidence? There are several types, and you should have strong examples of each.

Quantitative evidence uses numbers to show your advantages over the competition or demonstrate the quality of your solution or approach. Traditionally this is your appeal to someone’s head, their rationality. Examples include financial data (value for money), or overall reach (users serviced, units installed).

Qualitative is about creating a human connection: making the reader feel the impact of your evidence, an appeal to the heart. Examples include case studies of users positively impacted by your service,

Quantitative evidence by itself can seem cold and impersonal. Qualitative evidence by itself can be partial or easily debated. Combining both allows creates synergy, with each supporting the other to best demonstrate your suitability for delivering the chosen solution.

Finally, expert opinion, preferably independent, uses authority and expertise to position you as the chosen bidder. A professional who is seen as impartial and expert in their field can lend credence that your approach is the most suitable.

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I support my education provider clients to find evidence from each of the areas, to present the most compelling argument that we’re the best possible supplier. For example, for a recent bid, evaluators commented positively on our use of

• Education and Skills Funding Agency achievement and retention rates (supplemented with more recent data where available). This allowed us to compare the client’s rates positively with national benchmarks.
• Independently collected employer and learner satisfaction data from the government’s Find Apprenticeship Training website. Internal satisfaction data is good, but can easily be seen as partial or influenced. While not very granular, the FAT website data is impartial and covers almost all training providers.
• Grading information, showing that almost all learners who pass score highly on their final exams (most at Distinction). Where possible, we compare this with average scores from the exam bodies.
• Statistics on diversity, including where most diverse candidates were recruited through the client and their positive relative success rates compared to the average (demonstrating the strength of support the client provided).
• Quotes and short case studies from learners and employers (including ones from the same industry as the buyers) showing the impact training had made.

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The evaluator feedback also made clear how we could have used evidence more effectively: by better quantifying return on investment. However, my client found it difficult at the time to produce this information (e.g. year+ long programmes, broadly fixed pricing, challenging to benchmark). As a qualitative alternative, we could have used case studies combining what projects learners had completed in the workplace with employer feedback about the difference that had made.

We could have also used visuals well here: a colourful picture of a learner with their employer while talking about their story could have created a personal connection, while connecting my client’s training directly to the impact it made on a learner and their workplace.

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How might this be relevant for you? Depending on your industry, the evidence you’ll be able to gather and that evaluators will find compelling will be different. Look at past bid feedback and identify what evaluators said would have made your bid score higher. See what KPIs bid list in their requirements. Look at competitor websites and see what evidence they use most prominently. Ask colleagues or a tool like ChatGPT what performance data is available for your industry.

Gather performance data internally (potentially invest in systems to start collecting it) and centralise it on a live or regularly updated dashboard if possible, so that when you’re responding to a bid, you’re able to quickly pull the most relevant stats without chasing colleagues.

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Preparing a suite of evidence that displays your organisation’s effectiveness before the bid arrives allows you to choose the data that are most likely to convince evaluators of your proposal’s worth. You can track the three types of evidence through a simple dashboard of the most relevant stats, combined with stories of the impact your organisation has and testimonies from experts, allowing you to have on hand evidence that makes the most impact on the buyer.