Tender Victory offers a professional tender review service to its clients, which is where we provide a very thorough review of written submissions, and offer feedback on how a draft tender can be strengthened to give our clients the very best chance of winning work.
With this in mind, we thought it would be helpful to share our tips on how to thoroughly and properly review a tender, and where to start the process once your draft is written.
Tender Victory’s Top Tips for Reviewing a Tender:
- Before reviewing the draft responses, read all the full question more than once, so you can make sure that each response provides an answer to that question. Ask yourself “Does the response answer all aspects of all the question raised?”. If the question has multiple parts, the response should mirror this.
- Make sure you are familiar with key points from the Specification and Requirements. When reviewing, this will help you identify the more ‘responsive’ answers for each question. Remember, it’s not just about complying with their requirements, but demonstrating that your business is responsive to what the buyer needs – their requirements, values and organisational goals.
- Make sure the responses are easy to read, easy to understand and easy to digest. It is important that your responses engage the evaluators that are not subject matter experts – as well as those that are. Responses should clearly set out how you are fulfilling the requirements within each question.
- Pay attention to the scoring criteria when reviewing the responses to ensure your drafts give due weighting to important areas. If you understand in detail how your response will be scored, this will help you to structure it correctly. For example, the buyer may be seeking evidence or innovation in responses and including clear examples of this will get you higher marks.
- Provide evidence to back-up your points wherever you can. This can be challenging with strict word counts, but if you can evidence with data, testimonials or case studies how you have achieved great results for similar clients, then this is going to be a great addition to your tender response.
Where imagery is permitted, use graphics and visuals to provide evidence and make the responses easier on the eye. This will help you get your evidence across clearly and, if they are done well, will make you stand out as a business that can be taken seriously.
When reviewing your draft tender submission, make sure to avoid the following pitfalls:
- Pitfall 1: Generalising your answers
Be specific. For example, don’t use terms such as “regularly” or “often”:
“We regularly update our XYZ…” should be “We update our XYZ every day/week/month/quarter, this is the responsibility of….”.
- Pitfall 2: Assuming the reader knows the acronyms
Make sure you explain your acronyms. Ideally at the first mention in each response.
Remember some tender submissions are split into sections for evaluation, so only parts of your submission and answers may be read by some evaluators. This means you need to explain your acronym at the first mention in each response.
- Pitfall 3: Cross referencing between responses
As noted in Pitfall 2, tender submissions may be split into sections and sent to different evaluators. Therefore, don’t assume knowledge across responses and don’t cross reference to other responses elsewhere in your submission. Make sure you approach every response as a standalone answer to that question.
- Pitfall 4: Inconsistent spellings
Check for consistent spellings, particularly of software/systems/names/job titles – across all responses.
Make sure you reference the client in the same way throughout the tender. A lack of consistency will show confusion and make the tender responses seem less professional. It is important that you present something that is easy to read, understand and score.
- Pitfall 5: Long sentences!
Make sure your sentences are not too long! If you need to take a breath when reading out loud, you need better grammar and punctuation. The better your responses read, the easier it is for them to be assessed and scored.
- Pitfall 6: Breaching the word count
If there is a word count for each question, ensure you don’t go over it. Do your best to use all (or most) of the word count available to you – whilst keeping your content relevant to the question. The word count can be a hint to the weighting the buyer is giving to certain questions.
- Pitfall 7: Reviewing on style, not substance
When you write and subsequently review your draft tender, you need to make sure that all responses read well. However, most importantly, review what your content is actually saying. Reviews need assess the substance of your responses and whether you have accurately answered each question, including whether evidence has been included. Impactful language counts for little if it is not backed up by evidence from within your business and the experience of your team. Always think about how you can demonstrate your service offer in the best possible way.
- Pitfall 8: relying on your IT software to spell check
A risk of relying on the spell and grammar checking functionality in your software, is that you submit a tender in American English, rather than UK English. Whilst you may not perceive this as a fundamental issue, incorrect grammar and spelling can sometimes trigger a negative viewpoint in an evaluator – which risks impacting their approach to scoring your responses.