Contract and Tender Bidding - Analysis and Writing
Looking to bid on a contract but not sure how to write or compose quality bids?
Not sure what will make your bid stand out to a particular audience?
In charge of procurement at your company and need to analysis bids?
The Business Debater can help from only £150
​
Procurement is a complex part of any business and is the essential component for B2B sales. Business who may wish to purchase your services and products are going to make sure that they get the best value for money that you are offering. Writing a successful bid allows you to communicate the vale that you are offering to an organisation undertaking procurement.
​
Our bid writer has worked as a business manager dealing with procurement bid evaluation in the UK Department for Education and the, then called, Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy. Using their experience evaluating public sector procurement bids, we can support you with writing your contact bid so it focuses on the particular audience with whom you are bidding for. This allows you to focus on specific contact weighting and increases the chance of your bid being the winning bid.
Our involvement can range from providing feedback on a bid you have written all the way to writing the complete bid ourselves so you don't have to.
​​​​​​​​
Contact for your free consultation​​​
​
​
Providing feedback on bids will cost £150 and writing a bid will depend on the complexity of the contract you are bidding for. A typical free for writing a bid for a small business is £300 - £500. If you are looking for a bid to be written for a large government contact then we will need to look at the contact to be able to quote.
Guide to writing bids and tenders
Phase One: Find a contract or tender to bid on.
There are two main forms of government contracts in the UK. Lower value contracts are between £1200 (Inc VAT) and circa £139,688 (Inc VAT). These contracts are publicly listed and can be found using the UK Government Contract Finder
​Higher value contracts are typically over £139,688 and are considered to be tenders. Open tenders are also published and can be found with the UK Find a Tender service since the UK left the EU. You will need to make a GOV.UK account to view tenders but the account is free. Large companies will typically publish contracts on their websites, or approach potential suppliers directly to ask them to bid. Every company will run their procurement with their own method.
​
Phase Two: Is it worth bidding?
This is probably the most important question early on in the bidding process. Bids will take time to write and review and to make a high value tender bid competitive you will need to invest a significant amount of time and research on the bid. However in many cases you can quickly determine if you could feasibly put in a bid that is both competitive yet profitable to your organisation. Firstly, look at what weighting is given to cost in the bid process. This is typically one of the highest weightings to provide value for money (VFM) to the buyer. If cost represents 70+% of the weighting then your company must be competitive in it's pricing or you will be wasting your resources bidding for the contract.
Contracts may also put a high weighting on quality. A contact may also use the similar "bidder experience". Naturally in these cases you need to be able to provide a better product than your likely competitors without costing too much above your competitors. "Bidder Experience" doesn't just mean a high quality offering but also that your organisation has a reputation for delivering the offer. For example, If you are potentially bidding on a high value consultancy tender that is 70% bidder experience and quality you will need to be a well established consultant in your field since professional management consultancy firms will look very attractive in those bids as they can write bids provide an impeccable reputation even if they will charge more than their competitors.
Finally, don't forget to check if there are eligibility criteria that would exclude your business from bidding. If no criteria are mentioned on the contract advertisement, it is worth contacting the buyer to ask
​
Phase Three: Plan your bid
You will need to plan your bid to focus on areas that the contract has high weighting. It is likely that you may need to change the service you plan to offer to make your bid more competitive. Remember, a higher cost weighting means you will need to focus on providing value for money and a higher quality/delivery weighting means you will need to focus on the product you will offer. Typically expect quality and experience to be highly weighted on contracts involving white collar services and consultancy work whilst price will be often highest for simpler manufactured goods and lower skilled delivery work. The ideal approach is to think about how your offering is better than your competitor's offering for every aspect of the contract. If you can make your offer the best across the board then your bid should win the contract if it is written properly and professionally.
​​
Phase Four: Write and review
Now you will need to put everything you learnt from your planning phase to digital paper. Professionalism is key and be wary of AI writers as it can include inaccuracies and sloppy wording. At this time, the technology is not up to writing competitive bids. Your bid is effectively an argument of why your business should be chosen over your competition. When writing your bid you need to think about how different phrases can support your bid and the ideal ones are as follows:
Core Statement: The main thing you want to explain in your argument
Method Statement: How you are going to do it. Here you should be technical as you are trying to show that you know what you are doing to the evaluator/buyer
Quality Statement: How is your item of good quality without going into too technical detail. Think about the specs that are relevant to your purchaser. If you are providing delivery drivers and vans for a company, then they probably don’t care about the engine RPM. What they would want to know is likely range and milage as well as the van’s models.