Dr Karen Croshaw, one of Bidding Limited’s experienced Bid Directors, has spent over two decades leading bids for both SMEs and large corporates across the UK and internationally, including at Babcock, Pearson, and many others. She knows the effort it takes to deliver high-quality submissions, and for years, she’s faced the same challenge: how to efficiently organise and re-use existing bid content without spending hours searching through old responses.
With the introduction of BidVault’s Virtual Bid Team (VBT), Karen has found the solution she’s been waiting for.
Eliminating Time-Consuming Searches
“Honestly, VBT saves me hours of trawling back through old responses to find quality material,” says Karen. “It’s really straightforward – you just upload your documents and enter some key words in a simple box. The VBT magic looks through your documents and pulls out words and phrases that match the key words. The tool even puts those words in context and shows you where they came from in the original document.”
This means no more wasted hours manually searching through archives. Instead, Karen and the team can instantly surface the best content for a new bid, making the drafting process significantly faster and more structured.
Innovative Handwriting Recognition
One of the unexpected benefits Karen discovered was VBT’s ability to process handwritten notes.
“I use my iPad, Apple Pencil, and a drawing program to create hand-drawn mind maps during storyboarding sessions, bid kickoffs, and client interviews. If I upload these as a PDF to VBT and then enter a keyword – ‘risk,’ for example – the bot reads what I’ve written and allows me to pinpoint exactly where in my mind map I wrote about risk.”
For Karen, this feature alone is a game changer, allowing her to bridge the gap between her creative, freehand planning process and a structured, searchable bid content library.
Transforming Bid Preparation for Large Content Libraries
“If you are like me and have a massive client library that you search through at the start of a new bid to map and gap existing content, do yourself a favour and use VBT to do it for you. You’ll save yourself days.”
Conclusion
For our internal teams at Bidding Limited, BidVault’s Virtual Bid Team has fundamentally changed how bids are developed. By automating content retrieval, ensuring easy access to past responses, and even incorporating handwritten notes into the searchable library, VBT enables our team to focus on strategy and quality rather than administrative legwork.
For bid professionals like Karen, it’s not just a tool – it’s the bid assistant she’s been waiting for.
Virtual Bid Team © 2025
