Bids, Tenders and Proposals: Winning Business Through Best Practice

Winning bids with structure, clarity, and commercial focus

Bids, Tenders and Proposals: Winning Business Through Best Practice is a practical handbook for anyone responsible for turning an opportunity into a winning bid. Harold Lewis takes the reader through the realities of competitive tendering step by step, from the decision to bid through to submission, client presentations, and post-bid review.

This revised second edition is especially strong on process. It does not treat bid writing as a matter of clever phrasing alone; instead, it shows how planning, risk awareness, specification analysis, document control, and team coordination all shape the quality of a proposal. That makes it a useful title for business development teams, consultants, contractors, and anyone who needs to produce clear, persuasive responses to public or private sector opportunities.

What the book covers

• Public sector procurement and tendering
• Private sector bidding
• Research and funding opportunities
• Pre-qualification and bid decision-making
• Bid management, version control, and quality checking
• Writing the response, including methodology and added value
• CVs, project experience, and supporting graphics
• Pricing, submission, evaluation, and client presentations

A practical guide for real bid teams

The chapter structure makes the book easy to use as a working reference. Readers move from the early stages of identifying an opportunity into the practical work of shaping a response, presenting evidence, and preparing a submission that is both readable and commercially sound. The later chapters on evaluation, presentations, and tender auditing add a useful feedback loop for teams that want to improve their hit rate over time.

Why it stands out

Many books on proposal writing stay at the level of general advice. This one is more grounded: it pays close attention to the mechanics of bid preparation and to the pressures of producing competitive material under deadline. The result is a title that reads like a working manual for bid professionals rather than a high-level overview.

Ideal for

It is a strong fit for proposal writers, bid managers, consultants, contractors, and professionals involved in procurement or business development who want a disciplined approach to bids, tenders, and proposals.