If you’re not quite sure what a bid consultant does, it’s only natural that you may be hesitant to entrust one with winning your organisation’s most valuable contracts. Consultancy services are variable and intangible. This can make them hard to ‘pin down’. And when that obscurity is coupled with the “how hard can it be” and “we’ll just do it ourselves” attitudes commonly encountered in bidding, it’s easy to see why engaging external bid support can feel like a nervous leap of faith.
So what does “hire a bid consultant” really mean? What is a bid consultant? What do they do, and what value does a good one bring to your organisation? Let’s take a closer look.
What is a bid consultant?
A bid consultant (or tender consultant) is an external specialist who helps an organisation plan, manage and develop tender responses and other formal submissions requested through a competitive procurement process.
The fact we haven’t used the term ‘bid writer’ is telling. Writing a bid response is a critical task, but the scope of a bid consultant’s role extends well beyond writing.
What does a bid consultant do?
Bid consultants apply strategic expertise to the entire lifecycle of a competitive sourcing process. Their services can be valuable in the earliest stages of capture, opportunity assessment and bid/no-bid decisions. They then support everything from win theme development, persuasive writing, and content reviews, through to final production, submission, and post-submission presentations. Some even help with post-bid reviews and contract retention efforts. Ultimately, their goal is to help you win more work.
Here are six valuable attributes a good bid consultant will bring to your business. They:
1. Understand what really matters
A compelling tender response is entirely buyer centric. A good bid consultant arrives armed with experience gained from hundreds of bids and are familiar with interpreting even the most complex procurement documents. They work closely with you to understand what matters to your buyer’s decision-makers for the opportunity in question.
With that information, a consultant can assist you with important judgement calls early –including strategic bid/no-bid decisions. If your proposed solution isn’t likely to tick the evaluator’s boxes, they might recommend making a no-bid decision. However, if your solution aligns with what’s important to your buyer, their focus becomes framing it in ways that highlight this alignment to evaluators.
2. Tell your strongest story
Bid consultants are trained to write persuasively. A good one instinctively enhances the client-centricity of your response, structures your content around consistent win-themes, and applies persuasive elements such as BidWrite’s ISBP® technique.
An external bidding expert also brings a fresh perspective and can uncover important things that you may not realise matter to your buyer. You may have become overly accustomed to these details or simply hadn’t considered them significant. Think of bid consultants as miners, always digging for ‘gold’ – i.e. the inputs that enable them to tell a stronger story on your behalf. Their curiosity and independent perspective means their motivation is not just to write better, but to write about better things.
3. Identify and mitigate risk
Every tender response is a project, and every project carries risk. Having been involved in hundreds of bids, an experienced bid consultant knows where problems are likely to arise. They anticipate the potential impact of these problems and work to mitigate the ensuing risks before they escalate. This might mean identifying a compliance gap, flagging a looming deadline, chasing incomplete SME inputs, challenging weak evidence, or spotting a misalignment between the bid strategy and evaluation criteria.
Clients often only see consultants work this magic when a risk escalates into a real issue. But good bidding support works proactively to keep such crisis situations to a minimum. By remaining vigilant throughout the tender process, risks are identified and addressed early – keeping the bid compliant, persuasive, on track and under control.
4. Maximise the bid open period
Bidding is a race against the clock. Once a Request for Tender (RFT) or similar hits the market, the open period begins, and the submission date marches ever closer. There’s no time to waste – delays cost time, and time costs quality. Thankfully, bid consultants are well-versed in maintaining momentum and meeting deadlines.
Experienced tender consultants know which decisions need to be made, when they need to be made and who should make them. They’ll develop a writing plan/schedule and ensure all stakeholders stick to it – pressing subject matter experts for solution decisions, commercial teams for pricing inputs and C-suites for key strategy or content reviews. And when given the authority to make an independent decision, a confident consultant weighs up the options and makes a call. Wearing the informal title of ‘Chief Progress Officer (CPO)’, they maintain a relentless focus on keeping things moving towards submission day.
5. Protect and focus finite resources
Engaging a bid consultant costs time and money. You pay money for their services, and they call on your time, working alongside you to create your best response possible. Bid consultants understand they’re operating within a finite bidding budget and a limited timeframe, and therefore focus their efforts (and yours) accordingly.
Good consultants know how to bid efficiently. They use field tested processes to deal with the more administrative ‘must-have’ items of your bid (e.g. compliance) and steer you away from unimportant distractions that can slow progress. This enables them to spend more time on strategically important items, such as polishing your executive summary to perfection or re-working a complex transition plan into something a process-focused evaluator can understand more easily.
More time spent finessing the strategic and persuasive elements of your bid incrementally stacks things in your favour. This focus on the things that matter most ensures maximum stretch for your time, money and effort.
6. Improve your chance of winning
Ultimately, the success of a bid is measured by its outcome: did you win? The real value of the above attributes becomes clear when they combine to give your organisation the strongest possible chance of winning. With dozens of tasks competing for attention during the tender process, professional bid consultants continually ask themselves: “Will this improve my client’s probability of winning?”. If the answer is no, they deprioritise it. If yes, they focus their attention on getting it just right.
Bid consultants are competitive by nature, and they genuinely want your bid to come out on top. With experience spanning diverse clients, buyers, industries, and procurement processes, an external consultant brings together the buyer-centricity, persuasion, processes and focus needed to give your submission the best possible chance of success.
But we already have a bid team. Do we still need a bid consultant?
Yes! External bidding support doesn’t exist to tread on toes or replace your internal bid team – it complements it.
As well as giving your team additional capacity when workloads surge, an experienced bid consultant offers a fresh pair of eyes and specialised expertise for a complex or high-value tender.
For organisations with an established, but less experienced bid team, a consultant can also share knowledge – imparting new strategies and suggesting new processes or writing techniques which help strengthen your internal capability over time.
An in-house bid team knows its organisation inside out; an external bid consultant brings broader experience, objectivity and expertise. When combined, they can make a formidable bid team.
A good bid consultant is worth their weight in gold
A good bid consultant offers far more than proposal writing prowess. Their real value lies in bringing an experienced, external and specialised perspective. They’ll help you understand what matters to your buyer, tell a stronger story, manage risk, maintain momentum and focus your resources – all of which contribute to improve your likelihood of winning.
Whether you’re filling a gap or augmenting an existing team, you get someone who knows what to look for, what questions to ask, when to challenge and where to focus effort. To do this, they draw on years of diverse industry experience, tendering knowledge, and a track record of successful bids.
Being a bid consultancy is a badge that BidWrite wears with pride. Not only because we know what it entails, but because of the measurable difference our bid consultants make to organisations reliant on winning.
Tendering is a competitive and high-stakes pursuit, but you don’t have to face the challenge alone. BidWrite’s specialised bid support is available, delivering substantial time savings and increased tender win rates.
Check out our Bid Support page for more information on engaging with BidWrite.
FAQs
Have a question about bid consultants? Expand an answer below.
A bid writer primarily focuses on writing and refining the content of tender responses and other business proposals. A bid consultant takes a broader role, which can include bid strategy, planning, stakeholder management, risk management and content reviews, as well as bid writing. In short, bid writing is only one part of what an external bid consultant can offer you.
It’s worth hiring a bid consultant when their expertise, capacity or objectivity can make a meaningful difference to your bid. Consider engaging one when you have a complex or high-value tender, limited internal capacity, an inexperienced bid team or a must-win opportunity. External bid support can provide a valuable independent perspective when you want to challenge your strategy, strengthen your response or identify opportunities your team may have overlooked.
External bid support helps you understand what matters to the buyer, develop a stronger response, manage risk, keep the bid on track and focus your resources where they matter most. Their tendering experience and external perspective can also uncover opportunities and weaknesses that an internal bid team may overlook. While no bid consultant can guarantee a win, their strategic expertise can give your organisation its strongest possible chance of success.
At BidWrite, our team of bid consultants combine strategic thinking, persuasive writing, tendering expertise and strong project management skills. But just as importantly, they’re curious, commercially minded and genuinely invested in helping clients win. Our consultants bring experience across hundreds of bids, diverse industries and procurement processes – giving every client access to a deep pool of bidding expertise. Together, we share a commitment to you, your organisation and the quality of your submission.
