How to improve the quality of your bids through bespoke bid training

In today’s competitive climate, bid teams are finding it increasingly difficult to win new contracts. Complex tender requirements, limited resources and a lack of market knowledge can all lead to a sudden loosing streak.

But all is not lost!

There are several things you can do to save time in responding to bids, and there are key steps you can take which will help you to write winning bids. We work with our clients, on a consultancy basis, to take them through a structured process to drafting winning bids – from strategy, to planning writing and review.

But maybe you don’t want to outsource your bid writing. Instead, you’d like to give your internal teams the knowledge and tools they need to improve their own bid strategy.

This is where bid training can really help.

Bid training helps your own bid teams to learn best practice techniques for drafting winning bid responses. There is always the opportunity to grow and develop, from an employee, employer and business perspective.

Human resource is the key driver to the success of most businesses and ensuring they are equipped with the right tools and skills can be the difference between success and failure. Investing in training helps to create the right environment for people to continuously deliver. This environment has to be a balance of flexibility, accountability and independence.

How do we approach bid training?

eXceeding has experience with responding to tenders, running procurements and providing outsourcing consultancy services. It is from this breadth of experience that we are able to provide tailor made training sessions specifically for your needs.

Whether the training is group based or 121, businesses can realise the return on investment immediately and over the longer-term. As tender processes get more sophisticated, bidders need to ensure that their skills and knowledge remains up to date so that they are in a strong bid position to secure new business.

Our Approach

1. Our expert bid consultants approach training by conducting an initial assessment of your market, sector, aims and objectives alongside benchmarking your processes against industry best practice.
2. The most effective bid response training sessions, tend to take the form of an interactive workshop over the course of a day. Though this can be tailored – we have delivered shorter sessions with focus groups in multiple location, and also remote training via video conferencing.
3. Our objective is to make the session as relevant as possible for the attendees. It will be designed specifically to meet each individual client’s needs for responding to bids (SQ/PQQ, ITTs etc.).
4. The topics covered can range from every aspect of responding to bids, win strategy development to publishing and maintaining a bid library but can be as focussed as homing in on how to respond to specific questions.
5. The sessions really come to life through using interactive exercises that are based on constructing responses to actual questions from recent client bids, or critiquing actual answers submitted. The key is to make the session relevant to the audience.
6. Our sessions are delivered by seasoned professionals that are well-versed in planning, preparing and reviewing bid responses that have appropriate training skills rather than trainers who might not necessarily be subject matter experts.

eXceeding’s training solutions include:

• Identifying possible opportunities
• Responding to tender documents including ITT, RFP, FRI, PQQ and SQs
• Bid library development
• Change management
• Contract negotiation
• Win theme development
• Tender evaluation
• Procurement process
• Bid readiness
• Proposal planning
• Red team or governance reviews

How do we deliver results through bid training?

We understand that it can be hard to justify budget for training when new business pipelines are slow. So, proving ROI is important – but can be hard to quantify.

With ROI being one of the deciding elements when businesses consider training options eXceeding’s Steve Rowland adds:

Often when counselling businesses on bidding and procurement processes, training is one of the key elements where we can add value over the long term. Changing business processes to become more lean, agile and efficient is most effective where there is investment in people that can deliver the results through continually improving their skillsets.

When justifying training investment, the questions to be considered include:

• Why should I invest?
• What should I invest in?
• Who should I train?
• How is this delivered?
• Can technologies assist?
• Who is going to deliver the training?
• How do you assess the impact of the training?
• What is my ROI (Return On Investment)?

We can guide you through these questions in as part of a free consultation, to see whether bid training is the right solution for you and your organisation.