.webp)
Christina West has spent over 13 years leading public sector bids across technology, healthcare, cyber security and national infrastructure. She's managed bids worth hundreds of millions of pounds, built bid functions from scratch, and at Oxford Innovation Advice, she took win rates from 40% to over 70%. She’s seen what happens when organisations get it right and when they don't.
Bid teams sit at the centre of some of the most complex, high-pressure work in public sector sales. They coordinate stakeholders across the business, interpret dense procurement documents, manage competing deadlines, and ultimately carry the responsibility for whether a submission gets over the line. According to research by AutogenAI, the average RFP takes about 90 hours. Only 35% of that is spent writing.
We asked Christina what the bid process actually looks like day to day, where it breaks down and what the best teams do differently.
A day in the life of a bid writer rarely involves just one bid at a time. Bid team sizes vary wildly, depending on the size and maturity of the organisation and the sectors it operates in. For smaller businesses, founders are often writing bids solo, yet competing for the same contract as a larger company with a dedicated team of five, ten or more. For most businesses with an established bid function, the reality is similar: multiple live bids, always.
The average bid manager is often in the final stages of submitting one bid while simultaneously kicking off another. Each with a different project team, different working styles, and different levels of commitment. And don’t forget all the other tasks a bid manager is continuously juggling alongside bid development, they’re completing Expressions of Interest and Market Engagement Questionnaires, as well as reporting on bid performance, updating bid libraries and tracking the competition.
The bid managers who handle this well are resilient and organised, and in my experience they are the ones who purposefully build internal relationships early, so that when support is needed, the right people are already bought in and willing to help.
The barriers to scalable bid management tend to show up at both extremes. On one side, a lack of commitment: missed meetings, late contributions, and a blanket assumption that the bid team will pick up the slack. On the other, too much involvement at the wrong time. Sales teams can see the proposal as a chance to showcase everything they're excited about, adding extra content, pushing upsell angles, or focusing on elements of the offer that aren't actually being evaluated. Word count gets spent in the wrong places, and the natural flow of the response starts to unravel.
Then there's late-stage intervention from senior stakeholders. Though often well-intentioned, this can be the riskiest of all. Coming in at the final hour to reshape the strategy can undo weeks of structured thinking, leaving the team scrambling and the submission disjointed.
The best-performing bid teams don’t sit at either extreme. They create a culture where the right kind of involvement is provided at the right time, bringing stakeholders in early to shape strategy, then protecting the integrity of the response as it’s built.
Beyond the people dynamics, there are structural problems that compound over time:
There are a few assumptions that come up repeatedly.
Subject matter experts (SMEs) have their own priorities and deadlines, and many don't want to work on bids. The relationship can often feel one-sided, the bid manager needs something from them, usually at short notice, with little obvious benefit in return. It’s easy to be seen as a drain on time rather than an enabler.
Collaboration gets easier when SMEs understand the bigger picture and how they fit into it… but that takes groundwork. It also means bid managers need to actively build and nurture those relationships, not just show up when they need input, but look for ways to support SMEs in return.
Bid managers often need expertise at short notice, sometimes from someone they don't have a strong relationship with yet. Building internal visibility early is critical so that when support is needed, the right people already know who you are and why it matters. Among bid manager key skills, relationship-building sits alongside technical interpretation and writing craft.
What makes the difference:
Burnout in bid teams is one of the most visible consequences of deadline pressure, and it rarely stays contained to one bid. There's a knock-on effect to the next, and the next one after that. A constant feeling of never quite catching up. Bid managers are responsible for meeting the deadline even when they're reliant on the contributions of others.
The 5pm phone call
Earlier in my career, our tender searching tool missed an opportunity we'd been waiting for for months. Even the Account Manager who owned the client relationship had missed it. We finally picked up on it the day before the submission deadline. The Ops Director called me at 5pm. "We need to bid for this, even if it means we stay up all night. There are jobs on the line here."
It was physically impossible. Everyone was looking at me to fix a problem I wasn't responsible for. We didn't proceed, but the situation highlights the accountability in bid teams, even when circumstances are completely outside their control.
This happens when opportunities aren't tracked consistently and client relationships aren't as strong as you thought they were.
In a well-run process, sign-off happens before the final 24-hour mark. The last day should be about re-reading from start to finish. Spotting inconsistencies, checking spelling, grammar, headings, fonts, wordcount creep. Making sure all attachments are uploaded to the portal and that they actually work when you download them.
That's when bid paranoia really sets in. You know that you've done everything, but can't help but check, re-check and re-re-check everything one last time.
Even the sharpest processes can’t fully protect against every eventuality in those final days and hours. When things don't go to plan, I’ve seen leadership teams scrap their diaries for the day and get involved to get a bid over the line. It’s in those high-pressured moments that true appreciation for the complexity of bidding is recognised within an organisation. But those instances rarely produce the strongest submissions.
I've been involved in a bid where a new CTO walked in in the final 24 hours, ripped up the bid and rewrote the whole thing, despite my advice and challenge. The team rose to the occasion and worked solidly to get the re-drafted bid tidied up and over the line. They did not win.
They need the confidence to refuse any further changes. But most importantly, they need to be well-positioned in their organisation as the respected authority on bidding, so that when things get crunchy and opinions differ, the leadership team trusts and respects their judgement.
For many companies, just having any kind of bid process in place is a win. Without one, teams tend to default to being reactive and executional, responding to what's in front of them without the structure to do it well.
A good process gives the team time to think, not just react. It starts with:
Content follows the same discipline. Storyboard before drafting. Gather evidence before making claims. Review iteratively rather than scrambling to fix strategy in the final hours.
Review processes vary by team and resource. I'd always recommend two:
New opportunity. New deadline. No extra time. Bid managers are rarely waiting around for work, they’re already in the middle of multiple other high priorities. But when a tender lands, priorities shift fast, because the first few hours spent dissecting the opportunity often determine everything that follows. Here are some of the key things I’m doing and looking out for when I’m picking up a new tender pack:
1. Capture the key facts
Review ITT and specification documents. Submission deadline, clarification question deadline, contract value, term, evaluation methodology. Feed these into your bid kick-off template.
2. Scan for risk
Pass/fail criteria, contract terms, insurance requirements, accreditations, delivery constraints. Flag anything that could kill the bid before it starts.
3. Assess the effort
Review quality questions, pricing documents and completion documents. How much work is this going to take to respond well?
4. Identify who needs to be involved
Which SMEs, which delivery leads, which stakeholders need to contribute? Start mapping this early.
5. Factor in how well you know the buyer
Familiar buyers mean faster assessment. You anticipated the procurement, you know what they’re looking for. Unknown opportunities immediately drop down the pecking order as surprise procurements are rarely a good thing. They’re likely already shaped by a competitor.
Before writing, before developing solutions, before pricing conversations, there’s a critical decision that needs to be made: should we be bidding at all? Qualification is potentially the most commercially important decision in the entire bid lifecycle.
Qualification works best when it's structured. In many organisations, sales and delivery teams disagree on whether to bid. Sales are usually the optimists, delivery the pessimists. Data-driven qualification tools help make the decision more objective and less emotionally driven.
Experience plays a role too. The more seasoned the bid manager, the earlier they identify whether something is worth pursuing.
I once led a cyber security bid where there was a mandatory requirement for an accreditation that we didn't hold. The sales manager wanted to ask the client a clarification question, if they would consider an alternative accreditation instead. I knew instinctively that we shouldn't be bidding. Even if they came back with a 'yes', it demonstrated an immediate weakness in our credibility and a clear indication that the client didn't have us in mind when they wrote the spec.
Most bid managers can probably recall an occasion where they have felt pressured to pursue an opportunity they knew they wouldn’t win simply to keep the sales or leadership team happy. The more experienced and established bid managers are comfortable to stand up to these pressures, and the organisations who ‘get’ bidding and listen to the bid professional are the organisations with better success rates.
The core job is still planning, interpreting, coordinating, writing, reviewing and submitting. The expectation now is that teams do this faster, with fewer resources, at a higher standard.
AI is helping bid teams get there. Faster qualification, better first drafts. But it's also raising a new problem. If everyone's output standard starts to look the same, how do evaluators decide between them? Certifications, partnerships, social value commitments and strong case studies are now the levers being pulled to distinguish between bids that, on the surface, look increasingly similar.
AI adds the most value around the writing. Organising the process, extracting requirements, surfacing relevant evidence, storyboarding, guiding SMEs toward better first drafts, and reviewing for alignment and compliance.
The mistake is using AI as a shortcut to produce generic content. The better use is to make the human team faster and sharper at the things that actually drive winnability: buyer focus, evidence, structure, consistency, and compliance.
If I could fix one thing, it would be how organisations perceive and treat bid teams:
When bid teams have the authority to challenge, the backing to say no, and recognition for the work they do, success follows.
Give your bid team the tools to qualify better, write faster, and win more
Bid Studio brings qualification, content and submission into one workflow. Buyer history, incumbent data and framework status in one place, so your team can challenge weak opportunities early and spend more time on the bids you can actually win.
Rarely just one. Most bid managers are juggling multiple live bids at different stages, often with overlapping deadlines and different project teams on each. This varies sector to sector. In some sectors the norm will be a high volume of low value bids (e.g. Cyber Security). In other sectors, a low volume of high value, high complexity bids (e.g. Construction).
The assumption that the bid team will just "sort it out." Whether that's late contributions, unclear briefs, or pressure to bid on unwinnable opportunities, bid managers spend a lot of time compensating for problems they didn't create.
Increasingly, yes. AI is helping with qualifying opportunities, requirement extraction, and document review. But the biggest value is in the work around writing: storyboarding, surfacing evidence, and reviewing for compliance. Before AI, writing would take up so much time that bid teams would feel under pressure to start writing too early in order to meet the deadline. With AI now speeding up the writing process, bid teams are able to spend more time on qualification and strategy development before they write a single word. AI is most effective when it makes the human team faster, not when it replaces their judgement.
A clear qualification process, structured kick-offs, excellent communication, defined win themes, clear instructions and disciplined reviews. The teams that perform best are the ones treated as strategic partners, not a downstream service.
Christina West
Founder & Director, BidQuest
Christina is the founder and director of BidQuest and an APMP Accredited bid professional with over 13 years of experience leading complex public sector bids. Before founding BidQuest in 2025, she was Acting Head of Bids and Contracts at Oxford Innovation Advice, where she built the bid function from scratch and improved win rates from around 40% to over 70%. She specialises in helping ambitious smaller businesses compete and win in public sector markets.
.webp)
