Lessons learned bid response service offering: Elevating bid success with data-driven insights

We’ve all experienced it: bids are lost, but the lessons aren’t learned. Minimal feedback and the absence of a structured bid analysis mechanism leave companies in a frustrating cycle of repeating the same mistakes. Too often, teams default to blaming internal processes, overlooking the real reasons for failure. The result? People make the same mistakes in bid responses, failing to recognise deeper content strategies.

But what if you had the power to quickly unearth potential issues with bid analysis technology? By finding and fixing problems that have been missed for years, within seconds.

Our service offers more than just feedback; we partner with you to integrate a comprehensive lessons-learned process into your bidding strategy. We use our in-house software to review past bid responses and can identify key issues in a matter of Seconds. We work with your bid lead to pinpoint areas that need improvement and even provide tailored suggestions to help you uplift your content to a gold standard for future submissions.

Understand Customer Requirements: We begin by conducting a discovery session with your bid lead to understand what the client’s specific needs were, where the team thought they fell short, what buyer role personas may have marked each response and what the customer emphasised was value add that may of not been outside of the formal bid process.

Setup and what we need – To begin, we would need the customer documentation, bid responses, and, if possible, the job roles of individuals who contributed to each response. This information enables us to customise our analysis parameters, ensuring that our insights are tailored specifically to your bid’s requirements. Additionally, it allows us to assess the understanding, performance and involvement of the job roles in the bid response process. In our feedback, we can demonstrate how the system creates role personas, helping to fill gaps where content knowledge may have been missing in the responses. This may be due to individuals not having the capacity to fully contribute or a lack of bidding knowledge.

Review Responses Using Our Software: Once we have a clear understanding of the requirements, we upload your past bid responses into our software. The software analyses each response, providing a score against the marking scheme, aligned with our customisable rule based systems that integrates the client’s requirements, content frameworks, and key bidding ingredients. Our approach attempts to give as realistic a score as possible. We can even incorporate your customer feedback to provide suggestions on areas they believed were lacking.

Feedback Session with Bid Lead: After completing the analysis, we hold a feedback session with the bid lead to discuss the results. This session is designed to be interactive, allowing your bid lead to engage with the findings, understand the specific areas that need improvement, and ask questions about the feedback. We will share our in house system with the bid lead, allowing them to see how we reach our results.

Deliver Reports as Learning Aids: After the feedback session, we generate detailed reports for each response and the role personas, highlighting key improvement areas. These reports will provide your team with a clear understanding of where they can improve and how to structure future bids more effectively. The reports serve as valuable learning aids to guide future submissions. For more information on role personas check out our blog on – Bridging the gap between bid leads and subject matter experts – BidBot (bid-bot.co.uk)

Scenario: A company repeatedly lost bids and couldn’t understand why. Internal processes were blamed, but customer feedback pointed to poor quality responses without specifying what was wrong.

How We Solved It: Using our software, we analysed their past bid responses and discovered gaps in crucial areas like team capacity and capabilities, solution details, standards and accreditations. Our system discovered these issues in seconds, allowing us to feedback our findings.

Result: After implementing the above changes, their bid success rate improved.