With a turnover of around £60 million and a base in St Albans, the company hold various contracts with local councils, as well as in healthcare and education, ranging from £500k to £6m in value.
The client requirements
The client writes and manages all bids in-house and although they have been very successful, they wanted to avoid becoming ‘complacent and outdated’. Therefore, the team were looking to engage with an expert to review and improve the quality of the organisation’s bid submissions.
Tendering for contracts for SMEs is very competitive, especially when other bidders are bigger or more established companies, and it is important to ensure you are submitting the highest-quality bids to stay ahead of the curve. The client recognised the need to enhance their tender responses, look at writing techniques and identify areas for improvement.
The company also had new staff joining the team, so this was a good opportunity to refresh and align the bid processes moving forward. As well as an established bid team, they had staff from pre-construction, project management and senior management, who are involved in bids at varying levels and were going to be involved in this process.
Working with Executive Compass
Our Training Services Manager, Stephen Murray, took the lead on this and held a series of MS Teams meetings with the client to understand their specific requirements, review some of their past tender responses and produce a bespoke package of support. The client was looking to establish a long-term partnership and our support spanned across a number of months.
Our bid consultancy support consisted of:
- Comprehensive tender reviews
- Reviewing bid library content such as case studies and CVs
- Summary report of key overarching themes and improvement areas
- A full day facilitated tender writing training workshop for all involved in the bid function
- Ongoing support for the client bid team, including reviews for live tender submissions and short-format workshops.
Stephen specifically worked with them to help standardise bids across their team to ensure a consistent approach to tendering across many different sectors and buyers without sacrificing the individual styles of the writers. Other areas of focus included the importance of convincing the evaluator of our ability to deliver successfully by incorporating practical details and tangible benefits.
We also drew upon content from our Social Value in Tendering course to explain the importance of clearly describing the positive impact to be generated when responding to social value questions, supplementing the quantifiable commitments provided.
Outcome
Since the training session held in late 2024, the client bid team have been working on numerous tenders.
They contacted Executive Compass again in early 2025 to discuss support for a major framework for which the company is an incumbent and the contract is critical. Whilst retendering for the work, they want to ensure they elevate scores and use win themes throughout the bid. Our team are supporting via a series of bid reviews, as well as a further workshop held with Stephen.
Feedback from the team includes:
‘Many thanks for your time hosting the recent bid workshop. The feedback from the team has been very positive and well-received. Thanks also for circulating the slides and report – great reading, with some very useful insights and suggestions which we’ll review further.’
‘It will be good to read the submission reviews as [we have] not seen these yet. The training was very good, we all found it very beneficial.’