Views & think pieces

Nigel Dennis explores a curious paradox in the proposal profession: seasoned practitioners are focused on strategic influence, while newcomers seek connection and purpose. For Bidding Quarterly's 22nd issue, he argues that balancing Head’s logic with Heart’s passion is essential to shaping a thriving, united future.

Reflecting on three decades of bidding for Bidding Quarterly's 'Coming of Age' themed issue, this letter from Nigel Dennis to his profession charts bidding's growth from admin task to strategic powerhouse. It explores how bidding has evolved, the challenges ahead, and why bid professionals must embrace innovation, data, and AI to thrive.

Prompted by Bidding Quarterly's 'All I Want For Christmas' theme for Issue 20, Nigel Dennis spells out what the BidWrite team would like to see wrapped up and placed under their professional Christmas tree every year – creating a blueprint for a high performing ‘bid sleighing’ team!

At first glance, public relations and tendering seem worlds apart. But if you scratch the surface, you’ll quickly see some shared traits. These translate into advice that works equally well for public relations and tendering alike.

Setting an aspirational mindset and culture creates expectations, encourages action and aligns a workforce. But what then? In part 2 of 2, Peter Blunden looks deeper into how a left-shifted focus, aligned with your organisation's bidding function, leads to sustained business success.

BidWrite's GM Growth Peter Blunden explains how companies who adopt a left-shifting and customer-centric approach to tendering will reap substantial rewards – smarter investments, a strategically aligned pipeline of opportunities, an engaged and focused workforce, and of course, significant revenue growth.

While writing his father-of-the-bride speech recently, Principal Consultant Mark Riley also asked ChatGPT to write a version based on his prompts. But can a generative AI tool even begin to replicate the insight, context, emotion and soul of Mark’s own heartfelt speech? Or will humans and technology always need to work together for the best

Spooky season is upon us, and in the spirit of Halloween, we thought it’d be a bit of fun to ponder the dark side of bidding. Written by Bid Consultant and Halloween-fanatic Zoe Simpson, this tendering horror story is a fictitious, highly dramatized example of when everything that can go wrong, does go wrong during

After reading an article where a Labor party senator described 'power maps' as an attempt to “inappropriately influence the public service” during the tender process, Natalie Schroeder and Nigel Dennis explain why stakeholder mapping is actually a logical part of the standard pre-tender ‘positioning’ process – essential to building strong relationships and preparing persuasive bids.