#tenderwriting Archives » Tender Training College

Three tips for a client-focused submission

By Kate Burrows, Managing Director, Tender Training College

The fundamental principle to a winning bid, I believe, is writing a client-focused response.

Putting yourself in the client’s “shoes” at every stage of the bid process enables you to develop a more effective solution that’s going to meet the client’s requirements and objectives.

The ‘client’ is both the tender evaluation panel that reads and scores the submissions, as well as the entity itself that has released the tender i.e. the business or government agency.

There are a number of reasons why a client-focused tender response is important. Primarily, your proposal needs to show that you understand what the client wants to achieve with the procurement and how you can help them meet these goals.

This is even more important now that AI is helping many more companies submit a tender response – the result of which is a lot of generic and similar-sounding proposals.

We connect to the client, show alignment and build trust when we communicate the following when writing a tender:

An understanding of the client’s needs and expectations
A solution that meet its requirements and objectives, and addresses any problems or concerns it may have.
Provide value in areas that are important to them.
Here are my three tips for writing a client-focused tender response:

1. Understand what’s important to your client

Gaining a good understanding of what’s important or of value to your client early in the bid process will help shape your approach and overall bid narrative.

It is important to do a thorough client analysis to determine:

The client’s objectives for the contract.
How this contract fits with its broader business objectives and strategy.
Its key risks and concerns for this contract.
What the tender document tell us about what the client wants.
What does successful contract delivery look like for the client.
The outcomes from this are a number of client priorities or ‘hot buttons’ that we can use to build our bid strategy and approach.

When it comes to writing the tender, we want to tell the client how our approach will meet their objectives and/or solve a risk or concern.

2. Address the client directly

It is surprising how many tender responses I read that are generically written and don’t directly include the client’s name.

For example, the text appears something like this:

“We apply an integrated end-to-end service delivery solution for all of our clients to deliver them cost efficiencies.”

Consider these alternatives if the Australian Government is your client:

“We will apply an integrated end-to-end service delivery solution to the Australia Government to deliver it cost efficiencies”,

or,

“The Australian Government will receive cost efficiencies as a result of our integrated end-to-end service delivery solution.”

Refer to the client specifically in the tender response – make sure their name is in the introduction and throughout the document.

Secondly, if we can tell them the benefit of our approach as highlighted in the examples above that is even more compellingly.

3. Write to your audience

Our job in a tender response is to write the offer as clearly and simply to the audience (the tender evaluation panel). This will enable the evaluators to:

Easily find the answers to the questions they are looking for.
Understand your offer, and how it will meet the contract requirements and objectives and score us accordingly.

To achieve this, there are a number of tender writing tips we can apply:

A clear structure that reflects the questions and the sequencing as it appears in the client’s document.
Simple language and easy-to-read sentences.
Explain your offer thoroughly and simply.
Tell the client the benefits of your approach, and how it will help to meet or exceed its requirements and its objectives. Finally, make sure to tell the client throughout the response that you can meet and deliver on its requirements AND add value.

Counteract the common tender fears

By Kate Burrows, Managing Director, Tender Training College

Tenders can be daunting, especially if you are new to tendering and the future viability of your business hangs in the balance of a successful submission.

I am currently working with a small business owner who is bidding their first tender. The outcome of this tender will make an enormous difference to the long-term sustainability of their company and their future livelihoods.

It is completely understandable then that this business owner has fears of the tendering process and also about their chances of success.

Even the most experienced tenderers can find the tendering process overwhelming at the best of times. But, the good news is that you can counteract these commons fears.

Empowering yourself with a better understanding of the tendering process, and the skills and capabilities associated with this, will put you on the path to tender success.

Let’s apply some of the key steps in the tendering process to help beat the tender fears.

1. Conquer the tender document

Tender documents can be mind-boggling and downright confusing!

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the questions, language, number of pages, and the rules and the requirements (or sometimes, the lack thereof).

As the first step in the tendering process, take the time to read the tender document. Now read it again.

This will help you gain familiarity with the tender document and its content, which is key.
This is important because at the end of the tender period, you want to submit a client-focused response.

Every time you read the tender, you will pick up something different and gain a better understanding of what the client is looking for.

Highlight key sections, such as: the client’s objectives; the evaluation criteria; the due date and time; and how the tender needs to be submitted.

2. Ascertain your chances of success

Don’t write yourself off as a losing the bid before you even begin.

Another key step in the tendering process is to review the requirements of the tender. These are what the client has stated as the necessary requirements to deliver if you win the contract.

Carefully assess whether your company can meet the tender requirements and for the duration of the contract.

If your company can meet the requirements of the tender and can deliver a competitive price – you are in the running to win.

You should carefully consider whether or not you will proceed with the tender if you can’t meet the requirements, and/or how your business can change its approach to be compliant with the requirements.

Failure to properly consider your chances of winning can mean a lot of time and money wasted on bidding.

However, once you know you are in with a shot, it’s all action stations on preparing a winning bid!

3. Outshine the competition

It’s easy to be nervous of the competition, particularly if they are a larger, more experienced or a better equipped business.

However, use this competition as a motivator!

Another key step early in the tendering process is to understand your company’s points of difference – that is, what sets it apart from the competition.

The first step in doing so is to look at the competition’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of what needs to be delivered.

How can you counteract the competition’s strengths, or use their weaknesses as an advantage?

Now take a good look at your company – what are your strengths and weaknesses, and how are these different and/or unique to those of the competitors?

Once you have identified your competitive advantage, you can distil this into succinct key messages.

This will help define your approach to the questions, and enable you to write your response with much greater clarity.

Kate Burrows is the Founder of the Tender Training College. Kate was inspired to start the Tender Training College to help businesses and professionals secure their futures by providing quality tender training courses.d

How to avoid three fundamental tender writing mistakes

By Kate Burrows, Managing Director, Tender Training College

I was recently engaged by a small business to audit its past tender responses, and advise on how it could improve its written submissions and win rates. The key improvements I identified for this particular SME’s business are actually relevant to all companies, bid teams and professionals who write tender responses. They represent tips to counteract some of the fundamental mistakes professionals make when answering tender questions.

I see these tender writing mistakes time and time again, and they put companies at the lower end of the scoring scale when it comes to the evaluation and winning the bid.

Mistake 1: Failure to answer all parts of the question

Don’t give away marks by only partly answering the question. Let’s take an example tender question to demonstrate how to answer it in its entirety:
The Respondent is to provide its approach on how it will measure, monitor and report on its performance over the term of the Contract.

If your response only includes information on how your company will measure performance, then you will not score full marks.

You need to address all parts of the question to be eligible to score maximum points. That is, how you will separately measure, monitor and report on performance.

TIP: Before you start writing your response, identify the components of your question that need to be addressed. Failure to address each component means you are giving away valuable points.

Mistake 2: Poorly structured response

The basis of a strong tender response is in the structure. Too often, I see tender responses that are poorly structured.

By that, I mean the content is not presented in a format that clearly references and answers the question. This makes the evaluator’s job difficult to find the information it is looking for and to assess the response.

Let’s take our example tender question again: The Respondent is to provide its approach on how it will measure, monitor and report on its performance over the term of the Contract.

I would expect to see a structure with headings that clearly reference the elements of the question, such as:

1. Approach to measuring performance
2. Approach to monitoring performance
3. Approach to reporting performance.

TIP: Before you start writing, set up a structure for your response so you have a framework for answering the question in a clear and logical way that references the question.

The best way to do this is insert headings and sub-headings in your document that reflect each part of the question. Also, make sure the headings are in the same order as presented in the question, and contain the same or similar wording.

This enables the evaluator to easily identify, review and assess the information they are looking for.

Mistake 3: Of course we can, not how we can

In one of the SME’s tender I reviewed, it appeared as though content had been copied from a capability brochure or a website.

The response talked generically about how the company performed its business and provided its service offering. There was little or no reference to the contract it was aiming to win.

Evaluators do want assurance that your company has the capability to deliver the goods or services under offer. However, they are scoring your response on how your organisation will apply its skills and experience to meet the specific requirements of that particular contract.

Each client, each contract and each tender has unique requirements. Failure to identify these requirements and show how you will meet (and hopefully exceed) them, may result in a non-compliant bid and certainly a lower score.

TIP: Read the tender document carefully to identify the requirements that are relevant to your question. And then make sure your response addresses how your company will deliver upon the tender requirements over the term of the contract.

The Tender Training College offers Tender Writing Courses for professionals in small to medium sized businesses as well as those in larger corporations.

For professionals in SMBs: Tender Writing Certificate
For professionals in large companies: Develop & Write Winning Tender Content Certificate

To see if and how the Tender Training College can help your company improve its tender writing capabilities, contact kate@tendertrainingcollege.com.au

Dos and don’ts of tendering to avoid common mistakes

By Kate Burrows, Managing Director, Tender Training College

The lack of client feedback on tenders is a constant challenge for businesses bidding for work.

Why did your company lose? What could it have done differently or better?

Often the silence after submitting a tender can be deafening, given the hard work that goes into responding and the stakes at hand.

Even if your company isn’t the successful proponent, it would be good to know where it went wrong.

According to according to the Federal Government, which awards around 60,000 contracts annually, there are commonly avoidable mistakes all bidders make.

It released its dos and don’ts of tendering* to help tenderers avoid some of the mistakes that may impact on their success.

The dos of tendering are:

- Prepare responses against the evaluation criteria and address all elements of each criterion
- Seek to understand the mandatory requirements and terms and conditions
- Demonstrate your organisation’s ability to provide the required services and provide factual and focused responses using examples
- Provide sufficient detail on any assumptions being made
- Quantify and qualify responses, eg:
  - ‘up to 24 hours’ – this could actually be only five minutes
  - ‘we will save you 50%’ – of what, when and how
- Ask questions if unsure of the meaning of something, ask the tender team for clarification. They are there to help
- Leave sufficient time to lodge your bid on AusTender.

The don’ts include:

Assume that the tender evaluation team knows about your organisation and its capabilities – this is particularly relevant to incumbent suppliers. Tender teams can only evaluate what is submitted in written responses and obtained through verification activities
Submit broad, vague or repetitious statements, or irrelevant marketing information
Cut and paste information from previous tender responses without checking if the information is relevant to the current tender
Assume there will be a second opportunity to provide pricing -submit the best offer the first time.

I recommend keeping the dos and don’ts handy as a checklist when preparing your next tender.

Alternatively, we can provide a review of your next draft tender against these key criteria. Find out more here: https://tendertrainingcollege.com.au/review-my-tender-online/

*https://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2016/02/11/common-mistakes-in-tender-response