Bids, tenders and proposals | Learn to Write Proposals

If you need a book that covers every angle and aspect of proposal and bid development, then this book by Harold Lewis is it. One of the reasons why this is a leading source of information is that the book is updated regularly so you not only benefit from Lewis's years of best practice, but also his knowledge of the current status of play in the tendering and proposal development world.

This is the new third edition of Bids, Tenders and Proposals and it doesn't just bring the content up-to-date, but adds relevant content for today's bid manager, such as e-tendering and even a section on Olympic contracts (I guess we'll be getting the fourth edition somewhere around 2012 then!).

What is it that makes this book a must have? It's the fact that if you need to familiarise yourself with virtually any aspect of proposal development, then you will find something to help you in this book. It is a great "how to" guide for bid managers and anyone looking to understand almost any aspect of the bid development process.

Some sections are where the experience Lewis has as a leading consultant in his field really shine through. For instance the information on central government and EU contract types, procedures and thresholds are a black hole to most business people who want to sell their services. What they want is to know where are the contracts advertised and how do we get to them?

This information is available on the Office of Government Commerce website and Tenders Electronic Daily, but the layers of complexity and bureaucracy it carries tends to explain why the numbers of public sector procurement professionals aren't affected by the credit crunch. Lewis manages to explain the various processes in a few pages which in itself saves you hours of trying to figure it out yourself.

Bids, Tenders & Proposals is a structured guide to the anatomy not just of the proposal, but how to develop your proposal strategy and people. It helps you solve technical problems that you may have in your proposal production. That in a nutshell is its strength and its weakness - it's a very technical guide to bid production. This could be useful if you are leading a bid team and you want to develop your proposal management team members - this book is the handbook for them.

If you need to know what you should include when you are including your project costs and you want to put some cost assumptions in, then you have that information to hand. If you want to understand the technical structure of your proposal, then there's a section for that too. It's all in there apart from how to write sales content. Yes, there is a chapter on "Developing and writing the bid", but that's not what I mean. I'm talking about writing a persuasive sales document.

But it doesn't matter, because that is available in Tom Sant's"Persuasive Business Proposals" which is the only book to have in this area. And Sant's book doesn't cover the nuts and bolts of bid production like Lewis so these two books make a great companion set.

I also feel that the book could be more visual. One of the things that the Shipley Proposal Guide does well is include a lot of graphics - and though proposals are written by wordsmiths (I hope) and we may have a reading/writing learning style (if you believe that kind of thing!) - it's good practice for proposal writers to develop visual representations of ideas as we know that they help to rapidly transmit ideas and aid retention.

That said, Lewis includes a lot of useful examples in tables and worksheets - though it might be nice if these had a downloadable version available from the web (though why not just get all the Learn to Write Proposals tools instead with a membership?).

I'd recommend that any bid professional, whether starting out or managing a bid team has a copy of this and Sant's book on their bookshelf.