How To Win A Tender: Our 5 Top Tips

It can be costly for your company to respond to tenders, not to mention the amount of time your key staff will spend away from their jobs to complete the tenders.

We don’t want to see your company wasting its resources responding to tenders you probably won’t win, so besides stating the obvious, i.e. read the tender documents carefully, write easy-to-read response documents, submit your best price and don’t miss the tender deadline, you’ll need to understand winning tenders is so much more than meeting the tender criteria. 

This blog is about looking for ways to put your tender on the top of the evaluator’s short-list.  We get down to the nitty-gritty to give you some sage advice on what a winning tender looks like. And the information to include in your tender to win.

Let’s get straight into it, here are our top 5 tips you need to help your company win the tender.  

1. If you can’t provide a compliant tender response, don’t respond.

If you can’t comply with even just one mandatory or comparative evaluation criteria – don’t respond at all.  Your tender response is very unlikely to be evaluated by your client’s evaluators, let alone win against companies that are compliant with every requirement in the tender.

The tender evaluation criteria are specifically designed to be used as a quick evaluation tool for each tender response, to provide a shortlist for the evaluators to work from.  If you can’t comply with the evaluation criteria, it’s a little like asking a real estate agent to show you a four-bedroom house for your family and the agent shows you a one-bedroom studio.

It’s impossible to win from that position.

Regardless of how compelling your offer or proposal is, your client’s evaluators are time-poor and they are not going to evaluate a tender response – often hundreds of pages – if your tender response has not met the mandatory and comparative evaluation criteria.  They also have a wide choice of other proposals that meet the criteria, so can dismiss your proposal.

2. Write tender responses addressing the decision-maker’s concerns

(as well as influencers like procurement, technical, operational and commercial evaluators).

Before you begin to write your tender response, have a strategy session around what you think the concerns of the decision-makers are, and those involved in the evaluation of the tender (influencers and vetoers). 

Include and comprehensively address risk reduction as well as obvious benefits like cost savings.

Risks that Decision-makers are concerned about when evaluating tender proposals include:

• Company risks: what track record does your company have for successfully delivering the products and services required without delays like supply delays, installation delays, project start delays, staffing issues etc?
• Solution risks: what track record does your proposed solution have for successfully delivering the outcomes required without delays like product quality issues, installation quality issues, technical issues etc?
• Commercial risks: what track record does your company have for delivering products and services on a budget without requests to clients for additional money (‘variations’)?
• Operational risks: what track record does your company have for delivering products and services that deliver the operational outcomes like performance to required service levels, incidents of faults, fault rectification times etc.
• Brand risks: what track record does your company have for delivering products and services that enhance the brand and reputation of Buyers of those products and services?

It is important to note that these decision-maker concerns could very well be outside of the tender criteria, so your analysis of the key messages to include in your tender response should be thorough, and include what you know from meeting your client’s decision-makers as well as what is in your client’s tender request documents. 

It may be wise to bring in a tender evaluator who has experience in the industry to help you address these concerns.

3. Choose the right delivery and account management people for key roles

(and from the client’s perspective, not yours!)

Some clients require the right of veto to a person from your company that they do not think is right for roles like delivery manager, project manager and account managers.

This gives you an appreciation and understanding of the high degree of importance that clients place on getting the right people committed from your company as well as the right products and services!

Nominate your best people for the key positions in your tender response.   

Extra tip – Don’t forget to include backup people.  These are the people who are almost equally qualified and experienced. This shows that your company has a depth of resources, and this translates into less risk for your client.

4. Ensure your tender response can prove your company can mobilise and transition.

In your tender response, prove how your company will get ready to deliver products and services, such as sourcing and stocking products, and getting the key personnel to sites where they need to work. 

You will also need to prove the transition – how are you going to deliver products and services under the client’s proposed model?

Mobilisation and transitioning are always a big risk for client decision-makers, no matter who wins the tender:

• Even if you are an incumbent supplier, you often have significant changes to implement at the start of a new contract, so you should describe how you are going to make these changes in your tender response.
• Changes like different products, different services, different locations, different service levels, different processes (or methodologies) are risky for clients: how will your company reduce the risk of being different from the incumbent?
• These changes are real mobilisation (getting ready to deliver) and transition risks (start delivering products and services) for decision-makers.
• Carefully work out and explain how you will mitigate – or even better, mitigate – these risks.

5. Don’t bid for tenders you can’t win competitively.

If you have the same or largely similar products and services as one of your fiercest competitors, and they have a successful track record of delivering on-time and on-budget to clients, then apart from price, why would a client’s evaluators decide in your favour? How could they justify that to their stakeholders?

Yes of course a client’s procurement manager is going to beg you to bid, because they need to have at least 3 bids to justify a decision.

But that doesn’t mean your company should. Consider the alternative which is to meet with Decision-makers and explain what else you bring that would increase their revenue, decrease their costs and decrease their risks. From that meeting, evaluate if the new information gives you a compelling reason to go through the cost and time of bidding.

A little extra to help you win the tender…