Grow your business in 2024 with tenders

A comprehensive but readable guide for responding to tenders

How can tenders grow your business in 2023-24?

Government tenders – whether for local state or commonwealth government  – are often for significant volumes of products and services, not just within a city or state but across Australia.

For example, we just did a quick internet search and found a budget summary document from the Department of Finance showing that, in 2023-24, Australia’s Commonwealth government is focussing on funding projects to create growth in:

• Renewable energy generation ($10 billion)
• Healthcare reform
• National Reconstruction Fund in manufacturing
• Protecting our environment
• Opportunities for hard working Australians
• Childcare costs
• Welfare reforms in rent, electricity, childcare costs and domestic violence
• Digital safety – scams and data breaches
• Migration Strategy
• Vocational training sector

And that’s just the Commonwealth government. There are state government, local government, and large corporate buyers as well.

So, if your company’s products and services directly help grow these industries – or if you know about existing Government or large corporate projects driving growth in your particular industry not listed above – then the next step is to find some current tenders and have a good look at what these government agencies are looking for.

How do I find government tenders?

There are two ways to find government tenders:

• government tender sites like tenders.gov.au (also known as austender);

In general, government tender sites require you to create an account and regularly search through new tenders to identify those for which your products and services are most suited.

You can do this by brainstorming a list of words that Clients would search for if they wanted to buy your products and services, and then searching for those words in the tender sites. That will identify potential tenders for you to consider responding to.

• Search organisations.

An alternative way is to use search organisations. You can easily find these companies on the web: they often advertise on the same web pages that list tender sites. These organisations will do the searching for relevant tenders for you – obviously for a fee.

What about finding tenders for large Australian corporate companies? The same two alternatives apply for finding tenders from large Australian corporate companies (like the banks, mining companies, etc): you’ll find these tenders on tender sites and via search companies.

We’ve got a great blog – Tender Websites: Where To Find Or Source Tenders In Australia to help you get started

You can also directly find tenders for a specific corporate company by visiting their website and looking for ‘Procurement’ or ‘Contracting opportunities’ or similar.

What is the best way to get my company ready for tendering?

Step 1. Create a company capability statement.

This sounds like a brochure but it isn’t.

A company capability statement has proof statements of what your company has done: for example, Client testimonials and examples of successful projects or implementations of your company’s products and services.

You’ll want to list recent examples: generally, within the last 3 years. And you want small, medium and large examples, so that you maximise your readers’ interest (who may have in mind small, medium or large projects) in what you could do for them.

This is best presented by industry: in such-and-such an industry, your company has been recently successful in such-and-such projects or implementations.

Then you’ll want to edit this to be succinct and fairly brief – four or five well-written pages, with informative graphics, is about right.

What is a Capability Statement? – click here to learn how to write a capability statement

Step 2. Work out your win-strategy

As well as submitting this document with your tender response, you’ll use this to help your bid team (even if that’s just yourself and a writer) to work out your win-strategy. Your win-strategy is a set of carefully worded statements that you’ll include in all relevant sections of your tender response to reinforce the benefits of what you’re offering the Client in your tender response, and to help your Client’s evaluators understand that what you’re offing is different and better compared to what credible competitors are offering.

Step 3.  Create your bid team

Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to choose some good people to work on the tender response. Usually you’ll go for technical subject matter experts – people who know the details of the products and service that you’ll be offering the Client in your tender response – because this will ensure that what you’re offering your Client is correct and can be delivered.

How to build an amazing tender bid team

You’ll also need subject matter experts from commercial (to approve pricing), legal (to review and approve the Client’s draft contract – usually with proposed changes that are called Departures) and an executive manager (to formally sign-off on your tender response.

Sometimes you can’t get subject matter experts away from their day jobs: if that happens, what you can do is interview them using the questions in the tender, then write up your notes then your subject matter experts can edit them. Because that takes up a lot less time for your subject matter experts, they will usually be quite positive about that approach.

Step 4. Write an easy to read and understand Tender Response

You’ll want to consider how you’ll make your tender response easy for your Client’s evaluators to read. Pages of written text are extremely difficult for evaluators to read, so they tend to skim-read.

Skim-reading means they often miss key points. This is where you can use graphics to easily illustrate your key points.

Graphics are tables, lists, pictures, line drawings, call-out boxes, graphs and anything else you can think of that will illustrate your key points without pages of written texts.

Apart from finding an experienced graphics person or company, there’s an art to interpreting the graphics for the Evaluator: you literally tell the Evaluator what the graphic is explaining in the paragraph before, and use a Caption to reinforce what the benefits are to your Client.

Step 5. Prepare to send the tender document

Lastly, the production of tenders requires someone with higher-than-average skills in preparing and uploading electronic documents such as very large Word documents, .pdfs, and Powerpoint files.

Also, occasionally Clients will require a hard-copy of your tender response documents (or multiple hardcopies), rather than electronic. This involves indexing, printing and binding and is very time-consuming. Often you’ll find it better to outsource this to document production companies.

 So yes, responding to tenders are resource intensive, but we can help you: we know good bid writers, graphics companies and document production companies.

FAQs

We’ve got some frequently asked questions from our clients that we think will help you too when growing your business through tenders.

Is the best way just to respond to a tender and learn from the experience?

Definitely, not!

If your company does that, you can damage your company’s reputation with large buyers very easily.

Why?

Because your Client’s evaluators are carefully comparing your tender response to those of credible competitors. If your tender response comes last, that can obviously lead to a perception that your company is incapable of being considered for future work.

Instead, what you want to do is to find two documents in the ‘tender pack’ (the collection of tender documents issued by government or corporate companies). The first is the Terms and Conditions: read this carefully and decide if your company is willing and able to comply with these Terms and Conditions.

These Terms and Conditions can be quite onerous: for example, search for clauses relating to Liabilities and Intellectual Property. Also search for clauses relating to who must pay for future changes to products and services.

If you find that your company can’t accept the Terms and Conditions, you have an option: you can consider supporting the tender responses of larger companies that are submitting tender responses. This often means that you’ll make much lower margins but you are also avoiding a lot of risk – it’s a trade-off. And if your partner company wins, then you will be providing products and services to the end-user Client and demonstrating your credibility as a potential future supplier.

The second type of document you’ll want to find in the Client’s tender documents is the Evaluation Criteria: read this and decide if your company can demonstrate (with proof) that it complies with these requirements.

For example, there may be an Evaluation Criteria that every bidder has to be able to describe six similar projects – same volumes, same locations – in the last three years.

Need help to evaluate your tender?

Again, if your company can’t meet that Evaluation Criteria but can meet all the others, you have the option of partnering with a larger company.  

Once you’ve considered those two documents (Terms and Conditions and Evaluation Criteria), you’ll then be able to make an informed decision on what the likelihood is of winning and the resources (people, investment) you’re prepared to spend on trying to win the tender.

I’ve found a government or large corporate tender that suits our company, what do we do next?

Responding to tenders requires a huge effort in a relatively short time (typically 4-6 weeks), and this effort is needed from people in your company who are already busy with their day jobs!

As we mentioned above, you can interview your subject matter experts, write up your notes and then arrange for them to edit what you’ve written.

But it really help if you organise a tender response effort like a project: you create a project plan with key activities and deliverables, timeframes, and resources mapped out, and someone (it might be you!) acting in the role of project manager to co-ordinate your company’s tender response according to the project plan.

Often document reviews are built in to your project plan: in general, the industry calls these reviews Bronze, Silver and Gold –

• Bronze reviews: collecting and reading the first drafts responses to all tender questions; providing specific feedback that will improve the competitiveness of these first drafts. This is often done within 7-10 days of the tender documents coming from your Client;

• Silver reviews: collecting and reading second draft responses and providing specific feedback to improve the competitiveness of these second drafts; this is often done not later than 2 weeks before the tender submission date;

• Gold reviews: reading the final response before it is submitted to your Client and fixing any last minute errors or omissions; this is often done no later than 48 hours before the tender submission date.

You also have the option of getting outside help: bid writers and graphic designers are the most common external resources used by companies that are responding to large tenders, but you can also hire bid (project) managers.

What are mock-evaluations and why should we do them?

When you’re responding to a tender, you – and your subject matter experts – tend to get lost in the details and you start believing you’ve already won the tender.

This is often the cause of not winning!

The better option is to run a mock-evaluation with the team at Tender Evaluation.

Using the Evaluation Criteria, and your knowledge of what credible competitors will be offering, we evaluate what you’ve written as if we are your Client, and from your answers determine whether your company would likely make it through to the short-list of tenderers.

Then you’ll know precisely where to focus your attention and what you need to write to increase your chances of winning that tender.

Clearly, it will give you the maximum time to re-write if you conduct a mock-evaluation check as early as possible in your response period.

Our advice is to do this mock evaluation at the Bronze or latest at the Silver review: write summary answers – one or two paragraphs outlining what you would write to answer that requirement – then we will evaluate those draft answers and tell you precisely what you’d need to write in order to maximise your evaluation scores.

This can save you a huge amount of rewriting effort later, or an unpleasant surprise perhaps in being unsuccessful with your tender response.

Ready to grow your business through tendering? Here at Tender Evaluation we make it easy.  Our services are designed to save you up to 25% of time and increase your win rate.

Can your company win the tender?