Building upon our recent newsletter, we thought our July blog post would be a great time to share some tips on how to get your bid management process in shape!
We have created the following six-step ‘fitness’ guide to getting your business ready and fit to tender, giving you the best chance of submitting a winning bid.
Step 1: Nutrition
First up is nutrition, or in this case it’s the building blocks of all great bids: your bid library.
A good bid library includes a wide range of evidence, including policy documents, company accreditations and certificates, H&S certification, insurance documents, employee CVs and client testimonials (to name but a few). Additionally, a good image bank is an important resource in your bid library. This can be photographs of your team, your service delivery, screenshots of systems used, infographics and visuals of key stats and KPIs. It is also especially useful to keep a wide range of case studies, examples of work and client testimonials which will really bring your answers to life and evidence how well you operate.
Here at Tender Victory, we also maintain a topic specific content library for our retained clients so that we have a range of previous answers to review when we respond to tender questions. We include the different iterations of answers to similar questions, so that we can continuously analyse and improve on how we are responding to each tender, ensuring that this content is current, organised, easy to follow and searchable with keywords. This is a great resource to build into your bid library.
Step 2: Training Plan
Train your business to be ready for every tender by staying on top of what’s coming up, and make sure you regularly check tender notifications and update portals.
For public sector tenders, relevant portals include ‘Find a Tender’ and other online tendering systems (see our eSourcing Directory to search our current list). There are additional portals for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Staying abreast of what’s in the pipeline means you can be well-prepared and won’t start any tender process on the backfoot: giving your bids the time they really need to enable you to gain the competitive edge. It also means you can track the progress of tenders that are most important to your business.
In terms of how regularly you should be checking these, at Tender Victory we check these daily and we recommend a similar level of commitment. Being prepared and engaging early will give you a great time advantage over competitors.
So that tender opportunities are not missed, we offer a Tender Alerts Service to help clients manage portal registrations and notifications. The clients that subscribe to this service benefit from early notification of all tendering stages (market engagement as well as live tenders); in addition to having their portal registrations managed and kept up to date. Please check out our website or contact us for more information on this service.
Step 3: Warm Up
Warm up your bidding approach by preparing a bid management model, so all your project planning is ‘on point’ and you’re ready to develop writing plans and tender completion schedules as soon as possible after the tender goes live.
Planning is key. In the background of every tender is a robust bid management process that includes task lists, time allocation for tasks, planned review times, responsibilities across the team and writing plans for every question. Tender Victory can advise on how to develop writing plans that will support you to deliver bids successfully, and we have a range of templates that we use for our clients. We recommend that all businesses develop an approach that ensures they are well prepared and well organised, providing a robust administrative framework throughout the tender project. As an example, our project plans include tasks lists for the planning phase, drafting phase (including the storyboarding / writing plan), clarifications, review stages, and preparations for the final upload/submission.
An organised approach will also help you fully understand the requirements of the bid: as you comb through the detail and plan out your time meticulously, you’ll know what needs priority actions or more time required to craft responses. This really is fundamental to success.
Step 4: Compete
Now it’s the bit we’ve been preparing for: writing the submission.
If you’ve followed Steps 1 to 3 then you’re ready to get to work. You’ll have your Bid Library prepared, and a wide range of evidence to include in your tender responses. You will also have templates for bid/project management (see Step 3), and you will have arranged to receive notification of the tender as early as possible (as per Step 2). So, the first thing to do is really get into the detail of the tender with the aim of being completely au fait with the timeframes (site visits, clarification questions deadline, submission deadline etc). An essential part of writing a good response is in understanding what the requirements of the tender are, including the specification, and then making sure you illustrate how you will meet these requirements in your responses.
As part of your writing plan, give yourself time to review and amend/edit your draft bid. If possible, get a second pair of eyes to look over it all. At Tender Victory, every bid we write is reviewed by one of our experienced senior team members, ensuring we have further opportunity to enhance the bid as much as possible.
It’s vital to never rinse and repeat your answers, but to take the time respond meaningfully to each question, using their specified requirements as your guide. Every bid is different. Evaluators read and score each bid individually.
Step 5: The Finish Line
Getting the right result is the whole purpose of the exercise, it’s about winning new business.
We fully appreciate that having worked so hard to demonstrate the value that your business can bring to this potential client, the results day is a big deal.
Tenders can be won or lost on a fraction of a score, so making sure you have done everything to get the bid right will have been key. When the outcome is notified, whether you secure the win, or not, take some time to digest the news before you crack open the champagne OR send any emails. Remember, there is the standstill period to get through too.
Step 6: Recovery
The recovery phase is a time of reflection; whether you won or lost, there are always improvements that you can make and lessons you can learn.
In bids and in business, recovery is often referred to as ‘continuous development’. In this instance, what we mean is that it’s not a case of winning and thinking “Great, we’re the best!”, but it’s about measuring yourself and your scores (whether you’ve won or not) against the scores of other businesses (as provided in buyer evaluation debriefs).
Gather as much feedback as you can, scrutinise your score and understand where you got high marks and where you were lower than others. Ask yourself:
• Did you answer all the questions well?
• Was there any evidence lacking?
• Was your strategy for the delivery of the contract absolutely clear?
• Do you need to be more innovative in some of your systems and processes?
• How do your scores for quality and price align with others?
Your competitors will be doing the same, and refining their approach for the next tender, so don’t get left behind. It’s really important to stay ahead of the game and know where and how you can make improvements to maintain a competitive edge.
How we can help train your bid team
If you would like to learn from our bid team as to how we can train your team and business processes to become fit to tender for and win public sector contracts, please do get in touch by email or reach out on 07971 526587.
Do also remember our programme of workshops designed to help navigate both understanding procurement and also how to write winning bid submissions.
Our sessions are easy to book, via Eventbrite, and attend via Microsoft Teams.
The Tender Victory blog is also full of useful tips and insights relating to tenders.