A Pro-Active Approach to Bid Management

Bid Management. In any organisation, there is a wealth of information being passed around, shared, utilised or archived, every day. Each team within a company has a specific specialism, and the people who work within the team are experts in their particular niche of the organisation’s overall function. This means that on any given day, thousands of words, images and concepts are bandied around, to be picked up by people and used, or simply filed away for future reference.

All of this knowledge about a company is useful to the bid writer who represents the organisation through words. The process of conveying a company’s missions, culture and values is as important as relaying facts and figures about financial standing and product development when it comes to portraying the firm in the best possible light. This is why knowledge management is a fundamental component of the bid management process and core to the bid writing activity, as it is a way of capturing significant data in readiness for the next bid.

Despite this, many bid writers fall in to the trap of taking a responsive, rather than proactive, role when it comes to the accrual and storage of knowledge about the company whom they are writing for or on behalf of. This means that each time a bid comes through the door, the proposal writer is expected to pretty much begin ‘from scratch’, collating appropriate materials and information in order to furnish a decent response which results in a winning proposition.

A little bid management time spent organising the available knowledge within your company will go a long way towards saving time and resource when you are asked to produce a new bid. The following areas all stand as best practice for collating information which can be critical to producing compliant, compelling and engaging documents on behalf of your organisation:

Develop strong relationships with key content providers

Keep in touch with the HR and Communications team, to stay abreast of new developments

Learn who is responsible for product updates and solutions, and make sure you are regularly briefed about new initiatives

Set up a reliable and easily accessible content management system, which has automated reminders to update content which is scheduled to go out of date on a regular basis

Take time out every month to update material in line with organisational changes and developments

Keep abreast of company news every day, making sure that boilerplate content is updated accordingly

Meet regularly with key stakeholders to ensure that information is disseminated when new events take place across the organisation.

By following a set procedure each month for the maintenance of company knowledge, the bid writing will always be at the forefront of company developments, furnishing them with the best possible content to write their bids.