Best practices in bid management: 10 tips for successful tender submissions

This article outlines what bid management involves and how it adds value to your tender submissions. We’ll discuss the biggest challenges of bid management today, and then dive into the 10 best practices bid management, as well as its future.

What is bid management?

Bid management is a form of project management, specifically aimed at tenders or RFPs. The responsibility of a bid manager, also called a tender manager or proposal manager, extends from signalling to the final registration for a tender or Request for Proposal (RFP). 

When submitting a tender, an organisation first tries to have a winning bid strategy. Bid management ensures that this strategy is prioritised throughout the development process. Within that process a bid manager has a number of responsibilities.

Responsibilities of a bid manager

If we summarise the responsibilities of a bid manager, they boil down to the following:

Thorough knowledge of the tender

The bid manager analyses tender documents to identify any contradictions, risks and legal conflicts.

Compliance with planning and registration deadlines

Bid managers oversee the coordination and combination of content from different departments, also setting internal deadlines.

Developing a winning strategy

Bid managers propose the best solution for the contracting party based on the company's strengths, bid requirements, and competitive positioning.

Ownership of effective communication

A bid manager streamlines collaboration between sales, subject matter experts and other internal departments.

Comply with the requirements of the contracting authority

As a bid manager, you ensure that the registration meets all the stated conditions. You set the standards for quality and consistency.

Knowledge of market trends, competition and customer needs

As a bid manager, you stay informed of external developments that influence registration performance.

Evaluation and development of bid organisation

As a bid manager, you collect feedback and apply improvements for later registration processes.

In short, bid management is the linchpin in the registration process, with the responsibility to maximise the success of bid submissions.

Why is good bid management so important for successful tendering?

There are costs involved when submitting tenders. Wouter van Tienhoven, CP of APMP discussed this in The Bidcast.

Wouter estimates that losing a bid for a tender costs around 26,000 GBP. Not only are you missing out on revenue from this tender, but also on another tender where you could have focused your efforts. Good bid management ensures that the resources for registrations are used effectively.

The previously mentioned responsibilities show how a bid manager adds value. As a process manager and  ‘editor-in -chief’, a bid manager ensures that there is consistency in the development and final text of a tender. Executing it properly is crucial to your chances of winning.

The biggest bid management challenges

Bid management is not a simple profession. It requires an in-depth understanding of the contracting party as well as your organisation. Internally, bid management requires input from various departments. In the meantime, tight deadlines must be met.

In addition, bid management must deal with three major challenges:

Lack of capacity

Current labour shortages mean that bid management teams, including managers and writers, face capacity issues. Finding experienced workers is difficult and there are no specific university study programs for the profession.

As a result, it often comes down to training within the organisation, which is time-consuming. Colleagues are already busy enough and not always equipped to teach. 

Good cooperation between departments

In forming a tender, you need input from various departments within a company. They are all busy. There is an art to maintaining good productivity and meeting deadlines despite all these distractions. The tender manager makes sure that everyone is distracted as efficiently as possible.

Lacking quality

Partly due to this lack of capacity, you are left with inadequate competencies or an incomplete team. This in turn creates a lack of quality. Where a good writer takes 20 hours to complete a bid submission, it can take an inexperienced writer 35 hours.

In addition, the challenges of interdepartmental collaboration pose problems in the planning and quality of the bid submission. 

Finally, bid management teams often do not have their data in order. As a result, they lack insight, learn poorly from the past and have difficulty optimising registrations for profit.

Best practices for bid management: 10 essential tips

To assist bid managers as best as possible and ensure better bid submissions, we have collected a number of tips and best practices. Aim to implement these practices in your bid team swiftly.

1. Decide on the basis of a critical bid/no-bid

Not every tender is worth submitting a bid for. For example, often a project does not fit your offering. It is less profitable than it seems or you do not have the right resources available for implementation.

That is why it is important to systematically determine whether registrations are worthwhile.

Learn more about your critical bid/no-bid decision or download one of our handy bid /no-bid templates.

2. Create the ultimate team for your registration

A team that submits a bid consists of a bid director or lead, bid manager(s), bid writer(s) and sales support. 

To complete your submission, involve subject matter experts (SMEs), legal advisors and financial analysts. 

The input from those departments must be combined correctly. As a bid manager, you know the skills of the people available.

Bid manager

As a bid manager, you are creating your authority with all stakeholders who contribute to the registration. Participants in that team have other tasks. Therefore, in order to guarantee timely submission, maintaining strict planning is important.

Bid writer

A bid writer touches on all aspects of the tender. It is important that you have knowledge about all of these aspects, or absorb information quickly. Experience in writing texts within a tender environment is essential. 

Sales, SMEs, finance, legal

With every registration, you need input from sales, SMEs, finance and legal. Check whether the person you want to involve has the time to help. Do this by giving an idea of ​​the workload throughout the bid submission. Stakeholders can weigh these up for themselves.

In addition, set KPIs for the project so that expectations are clear.

Adding an extra expert to your team sounds smart, but it can be counterproductive. It is better to involve one person with deep expertise, than several, with partial expertise or involvement.

3. Automate tender pipeline

It is easy to see future tenders that are expected to renew these days. By setting  up your search profiles once, you will then receive an email every morning. This way you will never have to search through a database again with the added value of  still not missing anything. Moreover, you will be able to start your preparation as soon as possible.

4. Organise registrations (and the bid team) in one environment

When you work at a computer, you spend on average 28% of your time reading emails.

While you spend 19% of your time looking for information. That's almost half of your week spent on administration. 

A bid management team consists of 3 to 8 employees. By working in one central environment, you reduce lost time, streamline the process, and ultimately make more registrations.

Bid management platforms offer this central environment for all bidding processes. Additionally, you can take this even further with the help of automation that a central platform provides. 

5. Set decision points and don't go back on them

Have a fixed time for decision making on  registration topics. At this specific moment, it is negotiable. After that, you will not return to it. This way you create more focus among the bid management team and all stakeholders.

As a result, you do not return to topics that were decided on, which means you rewrite less and retain your storyline better. 

6. Maintain a central content library

Work with your entire team from the same content base. Make sure it is up-to-date with the feedback you request per bid submission. This strengthens your bidding process as follows:

• You can better guarantee quality. Optimal writing is based on the latest knowledge.
• You are no longer searching. This way you write faster and you do not have to constantly consult colleagues to complete texts.
• You work more securely because there is little chance of wrong sources being used for a text.

7. Learn from past registrations to optimise your bidding process

You always receive an award decision. But alongside that, you should ask for as much feedback as possible. Always request an evaluation meeting. If you always consistently ask the same questions you can build data points around them. 

8. Submit to fewer tenders to win more

Only register for tenders that are a good fit for your organisation, or where you have a competitive advantage. There the opportunity (and therefore win rate) is high for your organisation.

If you reduce the number of bids you register for, you have fewer capacity problems. This makes it easier to guarantee quality with the time and focus that is freed up.

9. Involve your management in creating support

Without support, no one will take a bid manager seriously. What works better for creating support than a clear directive from management? 

Have your management include tenders and RFPs as part of the strategic picture. With tenders as a strategic priority stakeholder deadlines are met more consistently and quality improves.

10. Make your data warehousing ready for AI

The conclusion from our AI panel discussion: AI is a wake-up call. 

The digital bid management process  has already made so much possible such as automation-supported project management, data insights and fully automatic signalling. But to implement AI properly, you need a lot of data.

Because of this, It is necessary to start creating data warehousing or storage for all tenders, award decisions and other feedback - all important data within bid management.

In summary: bid managers must win tenders as effectively as possible

The responsibilities of a bid manager are diverse but have one goal. Winning as many tenders as possible that suit an organisation as effectively as possible. 

There are major challenges in the field of bid management. By applying best practices you can deal with these challenges well. 

Try Altura and increase the output of your bid teams

Altura supports the entire bid process of the bid team and automatically captures important data. This way you can automate parts and use valuable insights. Also for private tenders.

By using Altura, you can significantly increase the output of your bid teams and improve your chances of winning in tenders. Request a demo today.