Introducing notes to Bidhive: Quickly share and disseminate information to all stakeholders on a bid opportunity

Information dissemination tools are critical to success in fast-paced organisations striving to win new business from the competition. Once you’re in the thick of a time-sensitive bid, the purpose of bid team communication is to quickly provide valuable new information, clarify goals, strengthen accountability, and prevent misunderstandings.

But where do you keep track of industry briefing details, all the Addendum, clarification questions, and even interactions with the procurement department? 

Team meetings, water cooler chats or scattered emails are no longer the only or best way of communicating urgent information to bid teams.

Now’s there’s a faster and more efficient way to communicate on the fly: a note-taking feature built directly into your central bid system, making your notes easily accessible to all your teammates.

Establishing a formal communication chain

Email and Microsoft Teams is still a mainstay of office communication, but important bid information can easily be overlooked in the clutter.

A formal communication chain is the foundation of a successful bid or proposal, and it’s all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time. It’s also important to have one central location where bid and proposal communication can be found.  The Bidhive platform makes it easier for bid managers, writers and subject matter experts to access the latest bid details and updates. Examples include communicating:

  • Extensions or changes in bid requirements
  • Clarification questions and answers
  • Addenda, bid decisions and debrief follow-ups
  • Post-bid customer feedback.

While the Bid Manager is typically the main point of contact for bid updates, collaboration tools now make it possible to centrally record, automatically notify, and share bid-related notes in real time. Additionally, while bid planning ensures you’re on track to meet set milestones and the hard deadline, keeping running notes against a bid also ensures compliance with the seemingly never-ending influx of updates, changes and requests that occur. Centrally recording notes against your bid also shows your team that you’re willing to have open dialogue, while making team members feel informed, respected and appreciated.

Now keeping Notes in Bidhive can reduce risks

By analyzing historical bid data and trends, a central bid system like Bidhive can provide valuable insights that can be used to improve future bids and increase your company’s win rate. Recording notes against bids and making this sharable across the team also helps to:

  1. Improve clarity: Notes can provide additional context, clarification, or elaboration on specific aspects of the bid.
  2. Better collaboration: Notes can facilitate communication and collaboration among team members involved in the bidding process, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.
  3. Increased transparency: Notes can make the bid more transparent by providing insight into the thought process and decision-making at each stage or phase of a bid.
  4. Better record-keeping: Notes can serve as a record of the bid preparation process, providing a history of the bid that can be referred to in the future.
  5. Enhanced accountability: Notes can help hold team members accountable by providing a time and date-stamped record of their contributions and actions during the bidding process.
  6. Improved proposal quality: Notes can help ensure that the bid is complete and accurate, leading to a higher-quality proposal and reducing non-compliance.

Just as a sales CRM can attach notes to a specific lead, opportunity or deal, Bidhive can also attach notes and messages at the bid, activity, tasks and collaborative editing level, helping to make bidding more organised, effective and compliant. And as most bidders can attest – if your communication flows smoothly, so will your bid.