The Most Important Job in Bidding (and why no one does it)

There are many elements that make a successful bid. Capture is vital; knowing the buyer and being part of shaping the tender is a huge advantage. Choosing the right win strategies and themes is also key. The bid/no-bid decision has huge impact on your organisation, as does ensuring that your bid is 100% compliant. But of all these jobs, there’s one that is vital for producing the highest quality bids that most organisations don’t make time for. Maintaining your  bid library.

What is a Bid Library?

A bid library should be an organised repository of your best reusable content. Whether you use a simple folder structure or a complex tool, your bid library should include:

• Model responses: Standard paragraphs or sections that can be used in multiple bids
• Your best past responses: Stored in a logical way for ease of access when you want to refer to them for rebidding, or new opportunities with similar clients.
• Case studies and testimonials: Success stories that showcase your expertise.
• Images and graphics: Visual elements that have been effective at supporting your written proposals
• Certificates and accreditations: Always to hand, ready for you to upload when you need them

Why Are Bid Libraries Important?

• A good library helps you to get to V1 faster:
  • By reusing your previously winning content, you can significantly reduce the time it takes to create new proposals.
  • A bid library ensures that your proposals maintain a consistent tone, style, and branding.
  • With all the collateral you need to upload with your bid stored centrally there is no last minute rushing around for insurance certificates or accreditations
  • With a faster route to V1, you have more time to tailor your responses to the needs of the buyer, scoring those all-important marks
• Enhanced Quality:
  • If you have the best examples of content that has won for you in the past to hand, you are more likely to create the content that will win for you again
  • Reduced Gaps & Errors: Looking at past content allows you to double check you haven’t missed any important points in a response, and also gives you something to check accuracy against

So why do so few companies do it?

If you ask most bid managers, whether they are part of a corporate team or the sole person in the bid function the answer to that question is simple: Time. While we all know that a good bid library will help us to do our jobs better, but with the next opportunity always on the horizon (it not sat un-started in your to do list), there is just never time to get it updated.

Of course, there are companies that have libraries. They may even be paying for expensive tools that claim to help them with just this problem. The issue is that no matter how good the tool is there still isn’t time to properly maintain the library.

At least until now.

Virtual Bid Team

As a bidding company that supports other businesses to win, we have a lot of experience of maintaining our response libraries for clients as well as working with their own bid libraries. That’s why we know that this important job is pretty much universally neglected. As a business working at the cutting edge of bidding technology, we knew we were ideally positioned to develop a solution.

That solution is Virtual Bid Team (VBT). Upload your bid and see it processed into usable chunks and indexed before you can even lift your coffee mug. Type in any search term and our AI empowered search will find the right content before you take a sip. Unlike pure AI solutions, your content won’t get rewritten using an LGM’s best intentions to regurgitate your winning words. Instead you get exactly the words you need to respond effectively with minimal editing.

Assemble your pieces, edit away, and use our range to tools to help improve your text, whether that’s changing tense at the click of a button, chopping words, or effortlessly rephrasing.

Unlike other solutions, VBT doesn’t price small companies out of the market supporting the government agenda to spend more with SMEs. We’ve tailored the product for the hard working Bid Manager who runs solo, or has a small team to support them. There’s no steep learning curve, no frustration of seeing your team struggle to adapt to a new way of working; just an intuitive platform that automates the job, so you have time to get it done.

VBT is a product developed to solve one of the biggest challenges in bidding; getting that most important job in bidding done so you can focus on winning.

If you think VBT could be useful to you, join our demo waiting list today.