Whether tendering for work is a major source of income for your organisation, or writing bids and business proposals is an activity that is undertaken only occasionally, you want to make sure that you get the best possible outcome from the time and money invested. The more you can plan a tender in advance, understand your win themes and assess how your competitors are likely to be viewed by the client, the better the position you will be in.
While government agencies have long used tender processes to decide who is awarded upcoming contracts, we are seeing more an more mid to large size businesses following the same approach. Expression of Interest (EOI), Registration of Interest (ROI) and Request for Tender (RFT) processes are increasingly becoming the norm.
With this in mind, it's well worth making sure you do everything you can do to improve your tender win rate. More importantly, for the vast majority of organisations it's also critical to do this by maximising how well your submissions score on non-price attributes. Winning tenders on price might be a strategy to enter a market or provide long-term base sales or workload, but writing audience-targeted and well crafted submissions that score high on quality attributes, is the best way to make sure you maximise the benefits to your organisation.
Planning on tendering or bidding on an important project or contract? If it's important that you win, then contact us. From running tender strategy sessions, and then helping teams pull together winning proposals, through to simply producing the submission on your behalf, we can significantly improve your win rate. Our main suggestion, start planning early as high win rates aren't simply down to good luck!
Our experience has shown that the earlier you can hold tender capture planning sessions and the more structured pre-tender workshop are, the more likely you are to be successful. Our facilitated workshops will drill down on what it is your team knows about the client, the project and the competitors in order to establish proposal critical activities and determine your next steps. We then help you make sure these valuable outputs are flow into tender submissions.
When clients call for business proposals or tenders, they are often quite prescriptive in terms of what information is sought and the sections to be completed. And while tender evaluation is methodical and structured, the reality is that different organisations, teams and individuals will have different priorities. We can help plan a tender and build a proposal strategy that clearly identifies your win themes that not only allow you to tick the tender compliance boxes but lets you tell the story you need to. Read more in our top 7 Tips for Tender Success article.
Writing influential and persuasive business proposals requires clear and ordered content. It builds on what you believe your strengths are, particularly in areas that are most important to the client. It also pro-actively deals with areas that may not be seen as strengths by the client. Our writers are skilled at crafting informative and highly readable content, targeted to what evaluators want to read.
From the way that charts, tables and graphs are shown in business proposals, to the use of images, dividers and cover pages, we have design suggestions that will make your proposal stand out from those of your competitors. Whether you need something that fits with already established brand guidelines, or need something that is new, we can help.
Sometimes the best decision in a tender process is not to proceed. This may be because it allows you to focus on other clients that are more important or on other tenders which could provide a better chance for success. It can also be the start of a longer term conversation with a client about the types of projects you feel most suited to. A structured and robust go-no go decision making process provides for deeper understanding about where to put your efforts.
You've made the short list, congratulations! The final step is a presentation to the client followed by a Q&A session. The time and effort spent on the submission so far now comes down to how your team performs over the space of a few hours. Our presentation coaching will provide you with the preparation and imagination that can be the difference between presentation disasters and winning tenders.
Knowing the terminology used in tender processes, and understanding the tender methodologies available to clients, gives you an insight into their motivators and areas of focus. Useful to think about before committing the time and resource that goes into mid to large sized proposals.
It's often a fine line between a winning tender and a losing tender, so understanding how to maximise your success at every stage of the tender process puts you and your organisation in a position to win when it counts.