Win More Public Sector Bids

With increasing competition for public sector contracts, in order to win you must fully understand how to exploit the tender evaluation process.

Having the best product or service will seldom secure you the business. Our public sector bidding course provides the knowledge and insight your team needs to focus your bid, influence the evaluators, and convince decision makers.

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Your team needs a proven approach for constructing bid responses that resonate with evaluators. Our training provides step-by-step guidance to help your team:

  • Ensure all questions are fully answered whilst being easy for the evaluator to assess and score
  • Understand how to achieve the maximum score
  • Craft the bid so that if any resulting score is lower than expected, it can be robustly challenged

We tailor courses to meet your specific business needs and public sector focus. Every course uses bid material extracted from your recent submissions. Our training is highly interactive and focuses on the skills, techniques and knowledge your team needs to win.

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2-Day Course (Classroom or Online)

An astute bid team can gain a significant competitive advantage by understanding how to implement public sector rules to their advantage, and even seasoned public sector bid professionals will gain insight from this training. For those less experienced, it is an opportunity to get to grips with the nuances of this challenging bid environment. The two-day course blends both education and skills development. Your team will learn how to interpret the rules whilst practicing new skills and techniques which can be deployed on your very next bid.

Exploiting procurement rules for competitive advantage

We start with a review of the evaluation process and the rules which the evaluators are bound by. We then look at how these rules can be used to gain a competitive advantage.

What evaluators want and why we must please them

Every bid must be critically evaluated by a person or team and then scored. Their work is reviewed, and a final score is allocated. However, these are real people who have some discretion about the scores they recommend and who they finally select. We look at how you can influence them to use their discretion in your favour.

Providing assurance to decision makers

After the decision to award the contract, any failure will reflect on the ultimate decision makers who chose the supplier. Therefore, the decision makers are reluctant to award a contract to any supplier who cannot provide assurance they will deliver. We show you how to give the decision makers the feel-good factor.

Competitive strategies to defeat the competition

We know that to win a war you must know your competitor’s capabilities as well as your own. We show you how to identify your competitive positioning and use that information to form your bid strategy. We show you how to roll out that strategy and improve your win chances.

Executive Summaries that truly articulate your value

The Executive Summary should never be an afterthought. It should be the focus of the entire bid effort from the outset. We show you how to develop an Executive Summary which is at the centre of your bid, that will be used by the evaluators to support their decision to recommend you as the winner.

Developing compelling content to achieve maximum scores

We show you how you can match your response content to the key criteria needed to score points. Then we show you how to increase the points scored.

Getting the best from your Solution and Technical Experts

Bid contributors are rarely taught how to write compelling proposal content. Responses written from a purely technical perspective generally result in low scoring proposals. How much better would it be if the contributors provided answers that could be dropped into the final bid response without rework? We will show you how.

Writing techniques that deliver incremental gains

If your response is difficult to understand, it will score poorly. We will share some simple techniques and tools that will increase the comprehensibility of all your bid responses and improve your win rate.

Evaluator empathy

The evaluator must allocate a score by picking through your response whilst following a set of complicated rules. If your team understands the enormity of this challenge, they will understand and empathise with why it is so important to deliver a bid that is easy to score. This unique exercise at the conclusion of the course brings everything together and will change your bid team’s perspective on bid writing forever.

Who would benefit from attending?

Sales Leads should attend to develop their understanding of how to influence public sector decision making, and how to guide their team to craft bids effectively in this rules-driven process. It will:

  • Enable higher win rates through insight and positioning
  • Demonstrate the value of adding insight into strategy and win themes
  • Steer the bid team to game the process
  • Show how to build an effective communication strategy, despite the public sector restrictions
  • Provide an understanding of how the process can be used to the advantage of the bidder

Bid Leaders/Managers who may be nominated to lead proposals should attend to understand how to guide their team to craft bids effectively in this process-driven environment. They will be able to hone their skills to better:

  • Craft the framework to successfully guide the contributors
  • Help the team to storyboard compelling content and maximise scoring through robust and forensic processes
  • Develop a strategy, win themes and solution most likely to bring bid success
  • Ensure the bid is crafted to exactly address the questions
  • Review the submission to drive quality and to maximise scoring

Service Delivery Leads who will be responsible for developing the solution and possibly running the service once the business is secured should attend to further develop:

  • Their approach to building winning service delivery models that balance price against quality to maximise scoring and hence win chance
  • Their skills in leading the deconstruction of requirements and questions to generate compelling content
  • Their ability to lead the client engagement to provide high levels of assurance to the evaluators

Bid Writers should attend to improve their approach to:

  • Content Plan development and writing high scoring responses
  • Extracting compelling content from key stakeholders
  • Engaging senior colleagues in value proposition development
  • Writing winning executive summaries

Contributors or subject matter experts (SMEs) should attend to:

  • Understand the public sector tendering environment and how to play a winning part in it
  • Acquire skills in crafting answers to the questions being asked which will lead directly to high scores
  • Understand their critical role in solution development and how to respond to scoring criteria in solution decisions
  • How to balance solution against cost to achieve a better score
  • Hone skills in content plan development and writing compelling responses

Your Principal Instructors

Andy Haigh

Andy helps companies improve their bid success rates and increase their efficiency in bidding. He has been leading bids and proposals since the 1980s, achieving significant increases in win rates. Andy focuses on small changes in bid preparation that can lead to big improvements in outcomes. Along with Peter, he has created training materials and delivered many professional level training events.  He, also, authored the Guardian book Winning Public Sector Contracts. His enthusiasm for advancing the bidding profession is evident in everything he does.

One client said, “I met Andy while he was helping clients like IBM and Capita enhance their Public Sector bidding skills. As the bid manager at MidlandHR, I worked with Andy from Sixfold on several training projects to boost our Public Sector bid performance. Our win rate improved from about 1 in 5 to better than 1 in 2, making a substantial difference to MidlandHR’s bottom line. Now, we focus on submitting winning bids on time.”

Peter Lobl

Peter is an expert in helping businesses sell effectively to the Public Sector. He brings a unique perspective, having advised both businesses and the government on navigating this complex environment. Peter has served as an Expert Procurement witness in the High Court and has played a key role in securing billions of pounds in business for clients bidding in the UK and EU public sectors.

One course participant noted, “Not only was it of enormous value to me, but it was also delivered in a relaxed manner that made it easy to absorb. I have taken away several important actions that will make a real difference to our business. Truly stimulating and an excellent use of two days.”

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Book your training online, or to discuss your bespoke training needs please call +44 (0)208 1583952 or email training@bidsolutions.com