Win more tenders – the secrets of smart bid managers           

Winning tenders is a crucial aspect of growing your business.

But as we all know, crafting compelling tender responses that stand out from the crowd can be a time-consuming challenge.

This is where smart bid managers streamline the tender response process and gain a competitive edge.

Even recently, tender response documents were being written in a 3 stage process:

* Bronze review – first draft, to what extent are the rough answers to all the questions/requirements aligned to the win strategy statements?

* Silver review – second draft, 80% of the writing done, including graphics (photos, graphs, tables, diagrams etc)

* Gold review – final draft, 100% complete.

Sounds logical, right?

Problem was – and still is – that just having a review date does not help the people writing tender responses – particularly if the section is hard to write. 

A tender question such as ‘Describe your proposed methodology in detail to do X’, is NOT easy to write!

What happened was that Bronze reviews were almost never completed on-time – and often not complete at all.

This meant that the first time the Bid Manager knew there was a problem with the workload required to finish the tender on time was at Silver review which meant long nights and a lot of stress.

Sound familiar?

So, what do the smart bid managers do in their tender response management that sets them apart?

Here’s a glimpse into their secret sauce –

The smart Bid Managers go in a different direction: they teach their tender writers who are responding to the tender to write ’smart’ instead. 

What is smart tender writing?

’Smart tender writing’ is when you design and write the response – once – to address the key points an evaluator is looking for.

The design process of smart tender writing includes features like:

* compliance – answering the question or requirement fully – no ‘buts’ or deliberate omissions

* competitive advantage – thinking and writing critically about what is different and better (cheaper, faster, less risky for the Client) about their solution to a particular requirement

* proof – making sure that every major point is backed by objective evidence

* readability – making sure that even evaluators who skim-read (which, by the way, is most of us) will understand the three points above.

And what this achieves for you as a smart Bid Manager is less surprises and less of a headlong rush to the tender deadline – with all the risks of making errors that entails.

And – most importantly – higher evaluation scores for your tender responses.

One review with plenty of time before the deadline.

Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?

How can Tender Evaluation help your bid managers?

Are you a smart bid manager?  Want to be a better smart bid manager? 

Because we are evaluators, this is how we write tenders. We offer a per hour paid service to read and critique your tender responses and provide feedback on what you could do to increase your evaluation scores. 

We can also teach your writers to be ’smart’ tender writers.