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.
