Having a thorough understanding of the tendering process and knowing how to produce an effective tender that stands out from the rest is crucial for securing the contracts your business needs in the highly competitive public sector tendering environment.
To ensure you are winning more work through competitive tendering and you are maximising the return from the time and resources you have invested in the tendering process, the following tips are essential.
Plan Effectively
Unfortunately, tendering does not happen overnight; it is often a lengthy process that requires ongoing attention. To ensure you have sufficient time and resources to fulfil all stages of the tender, effective planning is vital. Failing to plan for every stage could result in your company not having adequate time to finish all sections of your tender, resulting in an unsuccessful submission. Instead, each stage of the tender should be carefully planned, with all available resources being allocated in advance.
Know Your Competition
You should make it a priority to develop a thorough understanding of your competitors, knowing what their strengths and weakness are, and how your company compares. In areas where you are aware of a blatant weakness, you should be tailoring your tender to emphasise your company’s capabilities in that area. Similarly, if your competitor has a clear strength, then it is critical to identify how your company has a different, more innovative approach that sets you apart from them.
Although you will not always know who you are competing against for a tender, there will be certain circumstances where this information is available and getting to know your competitors can help you identify areas where your company has an edge.
Avoid Over Bidding
Although may companies assume responding to all tendering requests will result in a win, this is not always the case. Instead, you are simply wearing your resources thin, depleting your team’s energy, and not putting your all into your tenders. This will result in poor tender submissions, which do not reflect the capabilities of your company.
Alternatively, you should only be tendering for the most suitable contracts for your business, and focusing all of your energy into creating the highest possible standard of tenders for those relevant contracts
Show Evidence
Rather than simply describing what your company plans to do and your experience in similar contracts, you should be backing all claims up with evidence. Show what your company is capable of in your tender.
Adding Value
Social value is typically broken into three core categories: economic, social, and environmental, and the majority of public tenders will require you to identify how your business will add social value to surrounding communities if you are chosen to conduct the contract.
You are likely to stand out from competitors if your company stands to add greater social value to a contract than other companies who have submitted tenders. Added social value can be the difference between you winning or loosing a contract.
Review
It is important that you always leave an adequate amount of time to review your tender for spelling and grammar errors, and for potential non-compliance errors, which could impact the success of your tender submission. It is also advised that you have others review the tender who have had no prior involvement with the tendering process, as they will have a fresh pair of eyes to identify any errors.
Request Feedback
It is important to use failed tender submissions as an opportunity to learn and improve your future tendering efforts. Where possible, you should request feedback on your unsuccessful tender submissions. This will allow you to identify your strengths and weaknesses, which can be worked on and ironed out before your next submission.
Whilst the tender process is complex and time consuming, the potential value that can be added to a company from successfully tendering a contract is phenomenal, and definitely worth it in the end. There is no one size fits all for tendering, but if you ensure you answer the questions effectively and follow the discussed tips, will significantly increase your company’s chances of success in the competitive tendering landscape.
As every tender is essentially a competition, it is imperative that your company invests the necessary time and resources into creating tenders, and if you are unable to commit to the tender process, then outsourcing to bid and tender specialists, such as Executive Compass, is advised.
Interesting Related Article: “The ways in which contract management automation is used to scale up sales“
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