What does it take to be successful when tendering?

1. Be strategic and select the right contract

The first stage when potentially bidding for a contract is to analyse it. There is much more to this than ‘Can we deliver the work?’ Your organisation must understand the buyer, the procurement process, potential competition and whether the opportunity fits in with your strategy and your current business situation.

One idea is to create bid/no bid decision criteria, and if the contract meets most of those criteria then you are ok to go ahead and bid for the work. If it doesn’t meet your criteria, it should be a ‘no bid’. Failing to identify your strategy and approach early on and just bidding for any opportunity that remotely fits your business model is unlikely to result in a successful outcome.

2.Take an inward look at the business

Once you have identified the opportunity and confirmed that it meets all your criteria to bid, look at your business and your business model. How do they compare to those of your main competitors and the incumbent of the contract? If there is something that stands out about your organisation and something you do differently, this is the time to identify it and make sure it is a win theme in your bid submission.

If there are certain areas where you feel you might not score as strongly, it may take some creative thinking to ensure you can score the most marks available. This may mean revisiting company ideas and policies and introducing new innovations that you know are important to the buyer.

3. Spend time writing a high-quality bid

Bid writing can be a specialist skill and requires dedicated time and effort. It is important to put your strategy and win themes into action and ensure you have a well-written, persuasive tender submission. Take your time to deconstruct the questions, answer the questions and utilise the word or page limits effectively.

The premise of a PQQ and tender process is to exclude bidders that are not suitable and award the contract to the highest qualifying bidder. Don’t give the authority a reason to exclude your company from the competition, and ensure you are focusing on the specification and meeting this as closely as possible so you provide the buyer with what they are looking for.

If you are concerned about your team’s bid writing ability, a professional bid writing firm can provide both writing and review services to support you.

4. Review and continuously improve

To be successful, it is important to dedicate time to reviewing and improvement. After each tender is submitted try to have a debrief on what went well, and what might not have gone so well. Once any feedback is received from the authority, use this to inform your future submissions – for instance if you have scored particularly well on social value, your responses might be a good basis for future questions based on social value, which you can then adapt to fit the particular buyer and their aims.

To discuss how the Executive Compass team can support you throughout the bid writing process, contact us today.