As businesses of all sizes double down on increasingly competitive markets, many are discovering tendering can provide a stable revenue stream and potential growth avenues. But success in winning more proposals requires a well-structured and well-executed tender management process.
From the challenges of understanding the requirements of the tender to developing the response the client is looking for, effective management of your bid can be the difference between success and failure, so let’s look at the key components of proactive tender management, and how you can use it to help your company submit better proposals, and ultimately, win more projects!
What is tender management?
Tender management is the process of managing all aspects of your tendering strategy, from
With so many moving parts, you can see why staying on top of the bid management process is essential in helping you navigate what can be a complex process, in helping you to win more tenders!
Why is effective tender management crucial?
Effective tender management is a key component of the entire bid process and can make the difference between success and failure in winning new business. When adding tenders to your business growth strategy, it’s crucial to understand this.
A clearly defined management process allows you to carefully consider all aspects of the tender and develop a strategy tailored to its specific business requirements. So ensure that your proposal is of the highest quality, meets all the evaluation criteria and, most importantly (!), is submitted before the deadline.
So if you are ready to start winning more contracts, increase your revenue, and improve your company’s reputation and credibility such that clients come to you, dive in!
Should your business invest in tender management tools?
Businesses should invest in tender management tools when they want to increase their chances of winning new tenders and contracts through a more efficient identification and selection process, tender proposals and presentations.
If this is your company, and you can answer yes to any of these questions, it may be time for you to investigate this area:
Now that you have established your company needs to better manage your tender bids and deadlines, how do you do it?
How to effectively manage your tenders
The tender management process can be broken down into the following steps.
Step 1 – Identify the opportunity
Identifying potential tender opportunities and assessing their suitability for the business and its capabilities.
If you are integrating or establishing tender proposals as a mainstay of your business’s revenue generation, this is where a good bid manager will save you a lot of time and effort.
Step 2 – The bid/no-bid decision
Selected tender opportunities must be carefully evaluated to determine whether they align with the strategic objectives business and if it is worth pursuing.
This is also an area where bid managers are useful to have on your team. They can help you save time by reviewing your previous bids, highlighting areas your company may have already prepared and creating assets you can reuse.
Step 3 – Plan your proposal strategy
It’s time to create a strategy for the tender. This includes understanding the requirements of the project under tender, identifying your key stakeholders and clients, and developing a plan for delivering the proposal.
Matt says:
Be prepared for lots of discovery work during this stage – and potentially unearthing the needs and wants that your client may not have made clear in the evaluation criteria! Remember, it could be the deciding factor in your securing the contract.
Step 4 – Prepare your proposal
From your planning, it’s now time to pull everything together into the tender proposal. This involves writing and editing the proposal, designing graphics and visuals, and writing and gathering any supporting documents, such as a capability statement.
Step 5 – Submit your proposal
Ensure you allow plenty of time to create, complete and submit the tender proposal before the deadline, ensuring compliance with all the evaluation criteria in the tender document.
The 5 key points of successful tender bid management
1) Understanding the client’s needs
What are the needs and objectives of the project and the client? Read the contract and tender documents carefully and conduct research on the project and the client’s business and industry.
2) Developing your unique value proposition
A winning bid strategy should focus on developing a unique value proposition that sets the business apart from its competitors. This could include highlighting the business’s experience, expertise, or innovative approach.
3) Maintaining a cohesive team
A successful bid process requires a team effort. Assemble a bid team that has the right skills and experience for the job. This could include bid writers, designers, subject matter experts, and project managers.
4) Sufficient time and resource allocation
Allocate sufficient time and resources to the entire process, by setting clear deadlines and milestones, have teams make deadlines, track progress and ensure that team members have the support they need to complete their tasks.
5) Review and refine the proposal
Review and refine your proposal continually during the process. This can ensure it meets the criteria of the tender and is of the highest quality. This could involve regular meetings, getting feedback from senior management, and other team members, or engaging a third-party reviewer (like the Tender Evaluation team!).
Successful bid management sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?
Luckily there’s someone that can help! If your team is stuck developing your tender strategy, from response to submission, and through to client presentation, we can help with every stage of the process to help increase your chance of winning the tender!
Pros and cons of proactive tender management
Should you actively manage your tender bids? Let’s weigh the advantages and disadvantages of your business.
Pros:
Cons:
Striking a balance between these pros and cons to fit your company’s capabilities and align with its growth strategy is crucial, so review them closely.
Strengthening your tender bid management operations
Now that you’ve read the what, why, when and how, along with the pros and cons of tender management let’s look at two additional factors your company can leverage, and even compound the benefits of when using tendering as part of your growth strategy:
Integrating tender management software
What is tender management software?
Tender management software is a specialised tool designed to streamline and automate the management of business tenders and bidding processes and can be a great asset for businesses regularly undertaking tendering activities.
Platforms such as ProCore or Tenderlink offer numerous benefits towards a more efficient bidding process, making it easier to manage multiple bids from start to finish, especially if you have a large team in place.
When you’re managing many different bids, these automated, purpose-built platforms can help streamline your bid management process, taking care of the many day-to-day duties of your bid managers, and freeing up time they may need to spend on other more productive tasks.
What are its strengths?
Three strengths you’ll find across these platforms include:
Like anything in the business world though, you need to assess the negatives along with the positives, and bid management software is no different.
What are its weaknesses?
Three potential drawbacks to rolling out these solutions in your company include:
Hiring a full-time bid manager
Should I hire a bid manager?
If your company is serious about scaling to make tendering a cornerstone of its operations, yes. Bringing on board a dedicated tender bid manager can truly be a turning point, especially if who you hire is already experienced and can hit the ground running.
What a bid manager can bring
With unique expertise and skillset, a dedicated bid manager can successfully identify and navigate complex tenders you may otherwise look past. They’ll oversee the entire proposal management process and their experience can help your teams create tender bid responses that resonate with the decision-makers.
Hiring a bid manager can be a strategic move for businesses keen on succeeding in the tendering process. Their focused attention ensures each step receives the necessary attention, resulting in improved bid quality and higher success rates.
What are their drawbacks?
As with any staff hire, you’ll need to look seriously at whether hiring someone specifically for this role is right for your business. While the costs of staff are universal to any organisation, there are two potential drawbacks of a dedicated bid manager that we’ll look at here: dependency and perspective.
If your company is growing and you’re taking on a new hire, it’s essential to ensure the knowledge they accrue in their role is kept not in their head but is documented and shared. While this is the same across any specialised staff members, if you are building a growth strategy on tendering and your sole bid manager staff member becomes sick or moves on it could be highly disruptive to your plans and operations.
Alongside this, it’s all too easy for a specialised staff member to be so entirely focused on their role that they do not see the broader picture of the company’s goals and objectives, causing them to misidentify potential opportunities, again disrupting operations and the status of your company.
Conclusion: Is proactive tender management right for you?
We say yes!
Actively managing tender bids is a crucial component of a successful tendering-based growth strategy. So if you want to grow your business through tenders, be it for government projects or private sector contracts, ensure you implement a clearly defined bid management system and follow best practices.
Do this, and you’ll stand to greatly increase your chances of improving your tendering win rates!
Ready to take your tendering game to the next level?
Tender Evaluation are the experts in the entire tender management process. If you need help with any aspect of bid management from identifying and evaluating opportunities to crafting winning tender responses to sharpening your presentations, get in touch today and discover how we can help!