Benefits of Auditing Your Past Tender Performance

Are you too busy submitting one tender after another to take stock of your company’s bidding performance?

Unfortunately, many of us fall into this trap. It can be a vicious cycle that doesn’t leave sufficient time for effective reflection on your performance.

This can lead to bad habits in your tender process, poor quality submissions and unskilled bid team members. Not to mention, it can also be downright exhausting!

Pressing the pause button to review your past tender performance can lead to big benefits:

I recently undertook an audit of a client’s non-successful tender to help them identify areas of improvement, and ultimately win more business.

The client wanted to check if its tendering performance was in line with industry best practice as they look to compete in more sophisticated tenders and grow their business.

I helped them to identify the gaps between their existing tender performance and best practice, and how these shortfalls could be addressed.

This included updating templates for core documents to encourage the authors to really consider what the client was asking when writing their tender responses.

During a tender, most of us are focused on submitting a compelling and competitive bid on time.

So, after you press the send button, it’s worthwhile considering whether your tendering process enabled your performance, or disabled it.

The aforementioned client knew something was wrong with their process as they had forgotten to include a response to a key question in their final submission.

I reviewed their tendering approach to identify where the link in the chain broke. Somewhere along the line, their process let them down.

The client now has a step-by-step process for planning, managing and delivering future tenders that includes a more rigorous bid review and finalisation stage.

A tender team can be made up of any number of individuals with a great range of skills.

However, many of these people don’t have official tender qualifications. They have, like many of us, learnt from doing bids over and over again.

An audit of your company’s tender performance can identify the skills and capability shortfall is in your team, and what you can do to address this.

Tenders can be stressful due to their very nature – don’t make them harder on your people by not giving them the tools of the trade to succeed.

A well-trained team will drive up the quality of your submissions and put your performance back on track.

Kate Burrows is the Founder of the Tender Training College. Kate was inspired to start the Tender Training College to help businesses and professionals secure their futures by providing quality tender training courses.

To see how the Tender Training College can help you or your company improve its tendering capabilities, contact [email protected] or visit https://tendertrainingcollege.com.au/review-my-tender-online/