Six reasons to access external bidding support
Businesses large and small can struggle to achieve consistent bidding success without external bidding support. There are no prizes for coming second in the “race to win” important contracts, and it can be difficult to consistently beat the best that the market has to offer. Nevertheless, peaks in bidding workload, over commitment of subject matter experts and insufficient specialist resources can lead to underperformance on bids that if won, would have a significant impact on overall business performance. Consequently, it is worth investing in the best possible capability that you can afford, as the business case for doing so is easy to justify.
When set up well a good bidding capability will improve win rates, support effective contract mobilisation, enable stronger operational commitment to the solution and ultimately, underpin more successful contract performance, profitability, and customer satisfaction.
Sometimes, the foundations of success are not sufficiently in place: an understanding of the competition; strong customer engagement and/or research; good understanding of the buyer’s intent and effective effort to design a compelling solution with clear win themes. Alternatively, process elements may be missing: to find and select appropriate opportunities; agree roles responsibilities and deadlines; assess and achieve compliance and responsiveness or co-ordinate effort to meet required deadlines.
An answer could be to seek external assistance to support your bid teams to improve their approach and provide additional firepower when you are struggling. Reasons to consider this are:
1) To establish a more experienced team
Great bid teams consist of many people with complimentary skills, selling skills to engage with the customer and properly understand them, operational skills to develop a solution which matches their needs and communication skills to provide clarity of the offer. It is often beneficial to strengthen a team with additional knowledge and experience. This can be especially relevant when it is difficult to engage with the customer, such as in Public Sector Bidding, where a good understanding of government sector buying processes and buyers can make the difference between winning or not.
2) To consider improvement
It is very easy for a dedicated bid team to be entirely focused on churning the handle to complete bids. It is a tough and demanding role, especially when an organisation has a lot of potential opportunities to consider and has a high growth target. Such teams may not be aware of better practise or may not have the time or energy to introduce them. Your chances of success will be maximised by working with external bidding support that have prior expertise, innovative ideas, and fresh methods to approach a tender.
3) To understand new requirements
The business world evolves constantly and contracting for the UK Public Sector is no exception. For example, new thinking is being applied and is evolving which requires bidders to provide additional social value above and beyond the contribution associated with contract delivery. Contract scoring in this area can be as high as 20% of the total and therefore, those who do not fully understand and consider this are unlikely to win.
4) To save time and effort
Having that external bidding support means your team can focus on business performance and high-priority projects. It may also be more time effective to acquire external bid support to a professional writer who will be able to complete the submission in a shorter time frame due to their experience and skill. It is tempting to believe that more bidding will lead to more results. Organisations can spend a lot of time and energy, bidding for things which they feel they might win. Successful bidding requires absolute focus on those opportunities where you know you can win, have absolute confidence in you solution and in most cases, highly relevant case studies to prove it. External challenge to help you to define and achieve this focus can be beneficial.
5) To cover “difficult” times
At peak times, with tender contracts it can be a significant strain on resource. Bid teams with a lack of resource during peak periods with tight must-win deadlines some external bidding support will ease stress and ensure improved outcomes. A skilled and knowledgeable external bid management organisation will understand how to build a strategy to meet the tender deadlines effectively. They will use a systematic approach, working backward from the submission date, to ensure that you are aware of what must be done to implement your bid strategy and finish your submission on time. The added value of an expert can include deconstructing the questions, appropriate delegation to the bid team, accumulating strong evidence, and effectively organising the response. Each of these helps to put together a strengthened response of value. Companies like Augmentas Group will break down the questions to assist your team in completely grasping the degree of detail required, offer guidance on the best ways to demonstrate your expertise, and assist you every step of the way.
6) To improve scores, win rate and capture ratio
You may not really know what the tender provider really wants to see, choosing to hire external bidding support management will prepare you to respond to any relevant tender, setting you up for success. Ways external bid support can improve scores, win rates, and capture ratio is that they can assess your previous tender submissions, highlight any areas of improvement, provide guidance, increase the effectiveness of your case studies and maximise your evidence for future bids. Bids authored by a competent bid management service will mean that they carefully consider the list of requirements for your proposal and possess excellent in-house writing resources. At Augmentas Group, writing bids professionally on a regular basis has allowed our team to know exactly what the contracting authority is looking for in a response. Moreover, we have released and assessed tenders for the public sector ourselves, particularly within procurement, and we have also bid to win work from the government on behalf of private sector clients. It is something we do day in and day out.
Find the best tender management solution for you
Our bid management support comes from a combination of procurement professionals who have worked in both the private and public sector, our bid management consultants who consistently win responses for customers in various sectors and industries. At Augmentas Group, we have 100% success rate at the qualification stage and 88% success rate at tender stage across numerous industries. We understand the formulae to producing winning tender submissions and we implement this into every bid we write.
