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  • Do you have a personal brand for tender writing?
    • All freelance tender writers, no matter how closely affiliated they are with a company, know that it’s important to forge and maintain a personal brand for their industry. Having an established brand helps you to generate tender writing business in a number of ways, including making your work synonymous with a name which is trusted and

  • Flexible tender writing practices
    • When we work as freelancers in tender writing, it can often be difficult to step from one methodology to another. Each person whom we align ourselves with will have a different way of approaching each bid, meaning it’s sometimes difficult to remember exactly what each customer is looking for when they sign you up to

  • Are tender writing opportunities deliberately obstructive?
    • As a tender writer, have you ever had the feeling that the company you are developing a bid to is being deliberately obstructive? By this, I mean the sense that a firm are putting needless and unnecessary obstacles in the way in order to deliberately occlude your company from managing to develop a bid compliantly.

  • Upping your competitiveness in tender writing
    • Have you ever thought of the words which we use when we talk about the world of bids and tenders? ‘Qualifying’. ‘Winning’. ‘Success’. ‘Preferred suppliers’. All of these words demonstrate a simple tenet about our profession – it’s all about competitiveness. This sense of competition is the adrenalin-fuelled boost that keeps us working long in

  • Staying focused on tender writing
    • If you sometimes lack focus when you are faced with a large tender writing task, follow these simple tips to regain your sense of purpose and keep you on track for winning… Have a firm routine Understanding yourself and the way you work most productively can be invaluable when you are taking on large projects which could sidetrack

Flexible tender writing practices

bidconsultant 300x225 Flexible tender writing practices When we work as freelancers in tender writing, it can often be difficult to step from one methodology to another. Each person whom we align ourselves with will have a different way of approaching each bid, meaning it’s sometimes difficult to remember exactly what each customer is looking for when they sign you up to tackle a new proposal. There is a wealth of resource out there on the correct way to produce a bid compliantly, and enhance your win rate, but the truth is, just like parenting, there is no definitive methodology which succeeds in every bid writing scenario.

Because of this, the bid writer can often find themselves in a difficult situation. They may have spent years honing their skills, learning from experience what works and what doesn’t when it comes to securing a win. However, the minute they are recruited to work on a project for a specific company, they may find that their established process and method for bid writing is suddenly challenged, perceived as wrong, or simply doesn’t fit in with the expected way of doing things for that particular organisation.

Bid writers know their stuff. We understand how to secure a win through clear writing, concise points, and maximum amounts of compliance with the questions set through the ITT or RFP. The more bids that we work on, the more set in our ways we become, as we learn through experience what works, and what doesn’t. Bid writers who also operate in the capacity of evaluator also have a great insight in to the main issues which many bid writers come across, spot them easily, and know how to keep them from creeping in to their bids.

The problem with peripatetic bid writing is that each company may regard the bid writing process as completely different. We need to be ultra-flexible when we encounter new bid writing environments, and defer to the person whom we are accountable to, whether that is another bid writer, a bid manager, or a subject expert. There are tales abounding in the industry of how a writer has sat down and crafted a beautiful bid, only to be told to re-write every word to match the expectations and experience of the customer they are reporting to. The bid is submitted, it fails to win, and the writer is held accountable even if the evaluation process reveals that they were right all along, and their original methodology was both compliant, and could have secured a win.

There is an argument for all bid writers to try and explain that the way they work is based upon successful records of winning. However, many subject experts are completely convinced about what is required for each bid, and it can be both difficult and uncomfortable to try and challenge the expectations and process of the customer.

In bid writing, we need to remember unfortunately that we always have to defer to the wishes of the customer for as long as we operate on a freelance basis. With experience, we understand how much we can attempt to influence the outcome of a bid to secure a win, and hope that our customer understands and recognises our experience. However, the worst case scenario is that we lose a bid because the customer has requested that it be created in a certain way. If this should happen, we need to have faith that our process may be adopted for the production of the next document, at which point we can continue our winning streak in complicity with the client.

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