How to Bid

How to Bid: Where to Start When You’re New to Public Tenders

Winning public contracts starts with a map, not a tender document. Ross McCarthy and Donnacha Phelan, go back to first principles: map your market and target your top five buyers, build a bid library, understand the real cost of a bid, and find your way around the UK’s patchwork of tender portals.

Your first tender shouldn’t be the first one you find. 🎧

https://keystoneprocurement.eu

https://keystoneprocurement.trainercentralsite.eu/course/what-is-bid-management

One file to upload. One deadline to meet. And a very bad ten to twenty minutes...

Fifteen years into his bid writing career, Donnacha Phelan, director at Keystone Procurement, found out the hard way what an unfamiliar tendering platform can do. The platform was built for Windows, it needed an app to be downloaded and registered, and his laptop's administrator controls wouldn't allow it, all in the final hour before the deadline.

His story leads to a bigger point: bid management is about getting the document to the buyer, on time and in the right form. The five rights of procurement apply to suppliers just as much as to buyers.

In this episode:

• Why the public sector is worth targeting, especially in uncertain economic times
• Why small and micro businesses so often think bidding isn't for them
• What bid management means in one phrase: strategic winning
• What How to Bid will cover: the fundamentals, how public tendering really works, strategy and planning, writing, compliance, AI, consortia and more

How to Bid is for bid writers, bid managers, project managers, business owners and anyone with a stake in winning tendered work. Expect practical tips, real examples and as little jargon as possible...

More from Keystone Procurement: https://keystoneprocurement.eu