1. Telepathy – Reading minds
Bid writers need to understand exactly what the buyer wants. They present their offering framed in the needs of the buyer, and the best ones redesign the solution to meet those needs.

When you’re trying to convince your partner to buy that new TV, or your child to stop drawing on the walls, you won’t do it by trying to explain what you want to happen. Instead you’ll tap into their minds and choose reasons which will resonate with their own desires.

So:
‘Darling, I just want to watch the Great British Bake Off in life size high definition’

Becomes:
‘Darling, isn’t the six nations coming up soon? You were complaining last year that it was hard to watch the games on our TV?’

2. Precognition – Seeing into the future
Great bids show the buyer exactly what the future will be like if they choose your company. To do that, a bid team needs to be able to craft a clear vision for that future. They do this by building links from one event to the next.

‘If we change this, then all these things will change too, so that means….’

Following those threads from now to then takes skill and vision, and can be used to predict all kinds of futures. I’m not talking about spotting early that your friend’s latest relationship will end in flames because their new partner is crazy. I’m talking about seeing the next step and beyond it to help yourself make better decisions. Here’s an example:

Your phone contract comes up for renewal, so you start looking at the latest smart phones…
Instead of picking the latest version of your current handset, you step back and think about what you want your phone to do in the next two years…

You remember that you’ve gotten into the habit of using your new contactless payment bank cards a lot, and like how easy that is…
You notice that some models are equipped with Near-Field Communication (NFC), which will do the same job for your phone…
You check your bank and notice that they’ve mentioned rolling out a new app next month…

So you buy the phone with NFC, knowing that in the next few months you can start using it just like you currently use your credit card. Future-You will be so pleased.

3. Time Travel
Bids operate in their own kind of phased version of spacetime. Time stretches and shrinks around specific points in the bid program. Great bidders use this flexibility, moulding time to fit their needs and producing thousands of words of carefully crafted content in the time it would take an amateur to read the ITT documents.

The ability to quickly accelerate your mind up to top speed and adopt new concepts is a crucial element of bid work, and when you combine that with the ability to brutally and efficiently shuffle your schedule to squeeze the most productivity out of every minute, you’re approaching super-human time control.

Need to fill out an application for a mortgage? Write up the minutes from your community meeting? Research holiday destinations? Knock out a tweet on the latest celebrity scandal? Make yourself a sandwich?

For a normal person, that’s a morning’s work.

For a proposal writer, that’s half an hour of focussed activity. Maybe 32 minutes if you want to toast the sandwich.

So that’s it. You’ve been a superhero all this time and you never realised. What other powers do you think you might have?

DISCLAIMER: Please remember to use these newfound abilities with caution, because with great power comes great responsibility.