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Bid Check

A review of your enterprise bid before you press send.

I read your bid and tell you the lines that will not hold under procurement scrutiny. Before the buyer does.

Get a Bid Check What you get
Dan Ilett, founder of The Proposition
Start with the playbook

Want it on paper first?

The playbook the Bid Check uses against your live deal. How to land the room when the buyer sits at the top. ~30 pages.

Start with the playbook

Selling to the C-Suite. Free.

PDF arrives by email. You will also start getting The Executive Summary — Dan's weekly briefing for CEOs. Unsubscribe anytime.

The challenge

Most enterprise bids lose on the same three lines the team never wanted to write. You can see them once someone else points them out. Better me than the procurement panel.

The diagnosis

The bid sounds confident to the people who wrote it. The buyer reads something else.

Procurement teams read bids for a living. They know what an evasive sentence looks like, what an unprovable number reads like and where a team has skipped the question the panel actually cares about.

I read bids the way a buyer reads them, with the operator scars of a commercial director who has run the budget on the other side, and the journalist habit of finding the line that does not hold. You see where the bid breaks before it lands on a desk that decides whether you make the shortlist.

You walk away with a marked-up document, a short call walking you through the changes, and a clear answer on whether to press send.

What I check

Seven angles on your bid.

  • The opening. Does it answer the question the buyer is actually asking.
  • The proof. Every claim, every number, every reference. What will hold and what will not.
  • The risk you have not named. The thing procurement will spot in thirty seconds.
  • The commercials. Whether the price story is coherent or whether the panel will read it as confused.
  • The references. What your case studies actually say to a sceptical reader.
  • The voice. Where the document sounds like marketing and not a serious enterprise reply.
  • The close. Whether the last page leaves the panel ready to vote for you.
What you get back

Three deliverables you can act on the same day.

  • A marked-up version of the bid with comments and suggested rewrites.
  • A short summary call walking you through what to change before you send.
  • A pass or fail recommendation. Honest. If the bid is not ready I will say so.
Who it is for

Enterprise sales and bid teams about to submit something they cannot un-send.

If the deal is big enough that losing it would hurt, a Bid Check is the cheap insurance.

Who it is not for

One group should book a different room.

  • Anyone wanting copyediting on a public-sector tender. This is a commercial review by someone who has been the buyer and the operator, not a tender-writing service.
Format

Remote review. London follow-up call if you want it.

Send the bid. I read it. You get the marked-up version and a call inside five working days.

Format

Document review

Turnaround

5 working days

Follow-up

30-minute call

Booking

One bid at a time

Book a Bid Check

Tell me about the bid.

A twenty-minute call before anyone pays anything, then a clear price and turnaround. Start the conversation →

Dan Ilett, founder of The Proposition
Who runs the room

From asking CEOs the hard questions to running the transformation programmes inside FTSE companies.

I have worked every side of the commercial table. I spent years interviewing CEOs as a journalist for the Financial Times, newspapers and online media. I founded Greenbang (50,000 readers, quoted by the UN and European Commission) and was the founding editor and investor in CoinDesk.

Inside FTSE companies I served as Commercial Director at Virgin Money and at Thomas Cook, where I ran transformation programmes that changed how big organisations sell, grow and prove their numbers.

That work has unlocked over $1bn in revenue for clients, and I have advised teams at IBM, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Cognizant along the way.

Dan Ilett · Founder, The Proposition · Editor, The Executive Summary