Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2003. Winning significant business on the right terms is an increasingly complex, challenging and time-consuming task, and a successful bid is a vital part of any business offering its services or products to another. This book aims to help you to enhance the probability of success in winning bids at the desired margins and to set-up and run effectively a bid management team. Aimed at two main groups of readers (sales staff managing multi-disciplinary bid teams and project and technical managers who find themselves managing a bid to support a sales campaign) it's a resource for the battle to win new business. Taking an extremely practical approach and using real life examples David Nickson leads the reader through every stage of planning for, producing and delivering a bid: knowing what needs to be done; knowing how to present the information to the prospective client effectively; gaining the writing and editorial skills needed to put a sales case across; identifying the skills that are needed to manage a bid. It also shows how to save time - the most important commodity in any bid as it is always a scarce resource - without affecting quality.