Winning more bids

bidworker™ is a tool that automates the process of creating bids, tenders, and proposals using your own library of in-house documents. As Impact Training found out, bidworker not only saves you time and effort, it also helps to increase your win ratio.

Impact Training is a provider of training for people who work in health and social care. Director Shelley Wills investigated ways to improve Impact’s competitiveness in the tendering process and decided that bidworker fitted the bill. But even she was surprised when they achieved their best win rate ever – and in a recession.

The bad old days

Impact used to get work via word of mouth, through contacts or from conferences. Now competitive tendering means there are many more opportunities. Unfortunately, bids took weeks to compile and so Impact was limited in the number of contracts for which they could tender.

Shelley, despite being the company director, used to feel more like a secretary stuck with the tedium and repetitiveness that is a large part of compiling the necessary information for a bid.

Massively increased productivity

Shelley found that with bidworker this repetitive element is gone – it let her create a library of clean documents that she can compile to create the basis of a bid. She can now delegate parts of the process as other staff have also become expert users of bidworker.

They no longer need to check documents minutely for things like out of date content, references to other clients or incomplete values because bidworker handles this automatically.

With bids that used to take weeks now being turned around in days, Impact has been able to grow and expand its offering.

Shelley says, “It means that we can bid for more marginal work as well. Before, because of the time it took, it was not worth putting in the time for bids for contracts we thought we were less likely to get.”

87% win rate

Impact started using bidworker in August 2008. In 2009 they submitted 23 bids and won 20 of them – their best year ever. This was during a period when many businesses saw their profits shrinking, not growing.

This success is due not only to the greater number of proposals submitted, but also to the straightforward, jargon-free nature of Impact’s bids. This is something that clients appreciate. Having a library of all the information she needs in a format that allows easy updating and customising means that Shelley’s bids are what Impact’s customers want.

Easy to learn

A single user licence for Shelley herself was enough to get Impact up and running. The software was installed by Peter Meherne of Plain Words, who also set up a template and began to structure their bid library. He also gave Shelley one-to-one training, covering just the things she needed to know. She was then able pass this on to other team members, and Impact bought more licences. With several people now using the software, Shelley’s time is freed to fine-tune the more customised sections of Impact’s bids.

Where next?

Shelley plans to grow the business further. She also sees the value of bidworker as a document management system, and plans to use it to streamline Impact’s large collection of training documentation.