You’ll notice that – in all relevant Pursuits Academy content – I take the opportunity to remind business development operatives, bid strategists and bid managers of the absolute criticality, of producing a formal, detailed and comprehensive  bid strategy document to inform the content of the submission and to guide the individual section authors.

I’m often asked, “Should this be a ‘big picture’ thematic document, or a join-the-dots, able-to-be-cut-and-pasted-into-the-response type of resource?”

My answer:  Ideally, it will be both.

Certainly, though, it will be the former. While it is acknowledged that some team members would like such a document to comprise fully self-contained, “cut and paste-able” components, it often serves a better purpose to simply lay out the document under headings likely to align with the client’s required response format.

This allows each contributing author to pluck and paste in support of his or her own section/case-being-made. This way the author is not steamrolled into following what may be a too-narrow content outline.

Additionally, a bid strategy must first be grasped holistically, so that its component parts can be communicated with full impact and relevance to the client’s all-important “big picture”.