Bids, Tenders & Proposals - Discontinued
Description
Bids, Tenders & Proposals: Winning Business Through Best Practice is a practical guide to winning contracts and funding through competitive bids, tenders and proposals.
New topics include action during pre-proposal stages of business development and market intelligence. There is more advice to help manage the process of proposal writing, including tips on document collaboration and version control. Gives the reader the benefit of powerful, best-practice techniques.
Table of Contents
Contents include: Bidding for public sector contracts; The EU procurement framework; Tendering for the private sector; Tendering for research projects; Analysing client requirements; Managing bids; Resourcing and researching the bid; Building a bid team; Developing and writing the bid; Defining outputs and deliverables; Communicating added value; Presenting CVs; Describing professional experience; Producing and submitting tenders; Stating your price; Understanding how clients evaluate tenders; Making presentations to clients; Doing your own tender auditing.
About the Author
Harold Lewis
Harold Lewis is an independent consultant with more than 30 years` professional experience as a specialist proposal writer, technical editor and trainer. He is a leading authority on the development and writing of competitive tenders for professional services contacts and consultancy assignments. His extensive experience includes preparing successful bids for projects funded by agencies, government departments, local authorities, research bodies and corporate organizations in the private sector.
Reviews
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Review By:
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James England |
Reviewed On:
13 January 2009 |
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Subject:
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For all aspiring and current bid writers |
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Review: |
Harold Lewis is something of an authority on proposal development
- authority that has come from over 30 years eexperience writing
winning proposals in a cross-section of public and private business
sectors as well as writing books like this one.
Bids, Tenders & Proposals, Winning Business Through Best Practice
is a structured guide to the anatomy not just of the proposal, but how
to develop you proposal strategy and people. What I love about this
book is that it's a clear "how to" guide to almost all the different
elements of your proposal...and some of the problems that you will have
during your proposal development.
The book covers every aspect of bid preparation and it's easy to find
the infromation you need with a very modular and direct table of
contents. Each chapter provides detailed yet practical information,
covering the following topics:
- A bid to succeed
- Bidding for public sector contracts
- Tendering for the private sector
- Bidding for research funding
- Pre-qualifying for tender opportunities
- Deciding to bid
- Analysing the bid specification
- Managing the bid
- Talking to the client
- Bidding in partnership
- Thinking the work through
- Developing and writing the bid
- Explaining approach and methodology
- Focusing on contract management
- Defining outputs and deliverables
- Communicating added value
- Presenting CVs
- Describing professional
experience
- Making good use of graphics
- Stating your price
- Producing and submitting the bid
- Understanding how clients evaluate tenders
- Presentations to
clients
- Doing your own tender auditing
- Ten true stories
You can see that just from the table of contents that this book is comprehensive. I know from visitors to Learn to Write Proposals
that many people involved with proposal writing are interested in not
only writing business proposals but also getting public sector money
for various new opportunity funding - it's good to see a section
dedicated to this area where a comprehensive and detailed proposal is
required.
If there is any negative comment about the book, it's that it could be
more visual. One of the things that the Shipley Proposal Guide does
well is include a lot of graphics - and though proposals are written by
wordsmiths (I hope) and we may have a reading/writing learning style
(if you believe that kind of thing!) - it's good practice for proposal
writers to develop visual representations of ideas as we know that they
help to rapidly transmit ideas and aid retension.
That said, Lewis includes a lot of useful examples in tables and
worksheets - though it might be nice if these had a downloadable
version from the web (though why not just get all the Learn to Write
Proposals tools with a membership?).
To me this volume is a great complement to Tom Sant's Persuasive Business Proposals which
looks at the use of language and persuasion in your proposal, whereas
this book gives you more of the nuts and bolts of how to put it all
together. I'd recommend that any aspiring or current bid writer has a
copy of this on their bookshelf. |
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Rating: |
***** |
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