Does your bid process need some attention?

Avoid unnecessary and unavoidable situations

By Kate Burrows, Founder and Managing Director, Tender Training College

The tender is due at 2pm and the team is still compiling the response at 1.50pm. Stress levels are high as weeks (or months) of hard work could all be for nothing.

This is mostly an unnecessary and unavoidable situation – particularly, if your company regularly tenders to win new work, or bidding is part of your core business.

I understand why this occurs – we work in fast-paced, lean and cross-functional environments where tendering competes with the day-to-day running of the business. There might also be multiple tenders happening at once.

You can appreciate this increases the risk of a generic and sub-standard response that reflects badly on your business and reduces your chances of success.

It also significant increases the stress of your team with last-minute panic.

Using a structured and systematic approach is key to more consistent high-quality and winning outcomes, and greater organisation engagement and retention.

Let’s look at three key overarching elements to rework your bid process.

1. Allow sufficient time – have a plan 

What makes tenders challenging (and I think, interesting) is the multiple layers and elements that you need to consider and include for a top-scoring and high-quality response.

You can’t have all the answers or the price after the first read of the client’s tender document.

The approach to how your business will deliver the contract needs to develop and evolve with greater understanding of the document, the client’s requirements and through team discussions.

Similarly, understanding what the questions are asking and how you are going to answer them takes consideration and planning. Otherwise, you run the risk of not answering them properly.

To combat this, identify the key activities required over the tender period with set milestones in a program. This will help to continually mature and improve the response, and ultimately meet the submission date with less panic and stress.

2. Right people, and clear responsibilities and timelines

Tenders are a commercial, compliance and sales and marketing document. As such, you need people with a range of skill sets to meet these requirements – project management, strategy, sales, marketing, commercial, legal, writing and editing, and formatting.

Today, many people are involved in coordinating the bid and writing it – and are doing a great job. But it has to be considered that these jobs involve very different skill sets, and both require extensive time, effort and attention to produce a high-quality outcome.

Consider what roles are required in your tender process. Allocate people with the right skills who will efficiently support the team and take pressure off individuals at key points in the process.

These functional specialists need to understand the process to engage and succeed.

Importantly, the tender team needs the support of management so that others within the organisation understand the demands and the importance of timely responses. 

3. Support mechanisms and defined outcomes

Templates, document libraries, checklists and document management systems are all part of the support mechanisms that will make the tendering process run more smoothly and provide better quality outcomes.

You might have different divisions within an organisation all writing tenders. They can potentially be saying different things about your business, quoting difference prices, or generating new content which already exists.

Stop people from reinventing the wheel with a good document library of company information, including strong case studies, and benchmark pricing.

Also, ensure the team knows what ‘good’ look like in terms or price, content and quality. A winning submission will help to define this. Many organisations set targets for their draft and review process to help achieve consistent improvement in price and content.

It can be difficult for an organisation to know what best practice looks like. Ensuring your team is trained to understand these standards will always help.

We see hundreds of bids each year and have worked extensively across government and private sector tenders with other bid management professionals.

For more information about how the Tender Training College can support your bid process, email us at [email protected] or call on 1300 414 000.