We often work with companies that have put serious amounts of time and effort into tender responses, but they simply aren’t converting the blood, sweat and tears into successful outcomes.
In our experience, there’s 5 major reasons that stand out as to why companies don’t win …
1. Poor qualification.
This is the obvious first question that you have to ask when you’ve just found out that you were unsuccessful – “Did you ever really have a chance in the first place?”. Before kicking off a response you need to have a bit of a brutal truth session and assess your chances. Are there incumbents that are in the box seat? Are there technical show-stoppers where your solution just won’t be right for your client? Do you understand the client and their requirements deeply enough to submit a quality response? If tendering is important to your business, developing a systematic approach to qualification can save you a lot of heartache and improve your chances of submitting a winning response.
2. The response is plain hard work for the reader.
Ever read one of those books that you had to battle through the first three chapters, but because of your resilience you actually made it through the initial hard work to find that it was a great read. If your tender is a ‘battle’ in any way for your reader, there’s a good chance that it will be discarded from the process – even if there’s a lot of good stuff in there. The key thing that I try to tell our clients is that you have to get someone external to the primary bid team to have a read of the document a few days before submitting it. Readability is very, very important.
3. Focusing on the features, and not the benefits.
When responding to a tender, it’s easy to get so focused on the features of your products and services, that you forget to address what the client is asking for. The client might not care that your product is shinier than everyone else’s, unless it is directly addressing one of their business needs. This ‘feature focus’ is a really easy trap to fall into.
4. Overcomplicating the solution and the pricing.
Time and time again we have seen clever products and solutions ruined by over-complexity. Try to keep it simple. If detail is required, sometimes it’s better to extract the key points for the body of the main response and then include serious detail as an attachment. Tenders will be assessed by a panel of people with varying degrees of technical understanding and also with different business drivers. The issue of over-complexity also applies to pricing. Too many options, or too many pricing combinations may result in confusion.
5. Spit and polish.
Submitting a tender for a piece of work is just like submitting your Curriculum Vitae for a job application. If your CV looks shabby, do you expect to get the job? The format and look and feel of your tender is a reflection of the way you do business. If it’s poorly organised, has heaps of spelling mistakes and formatting issues, or just looks rushed, you are making it really hard for someone to choose your organisation for the work. We have found that on most occasions, the root of these issues is often a case of time management. Try to get your final draft done at least a couple of days before the response is due so that you can spend some time cleaning everything up and increasing the quality of the response.
5 Reasons Why You’re Not Winning More Tenders
We often work with companies that have put serious amounts of time and effort into tender responses, but they simply aren’t converting the blood, sweat and tears into successful outcomes.
In our experience, there’s 5 major reasons that stand out as to why companies don’t win …
1. Poor qualification.
This is the obvious first question that you have to ask when you’ve just found out that you were unsuccessful – “Did you ever really have a chance in the first place?”. Before kicking off a response you need to have a bit of a brutal truth session and assess your chances. Are there incumbents that are in the box seat? Are there technical show-stoppers where your solution just won’t be right for your client? Do you understand the client and their requirements deeply enough to submit a quality response? If tendering is important to your business, developing a systematic approach to qualification can save you a lot of heartache and improve your chances of submitting a winning response.
2. The response is plain hard work for the reader.
Ever read one of those books that you had to battle through the first three chapters, but because of your resilience you actually made it through the initial hard work to find that it was a great read. If your tender is a ‘battle’ in any way for your reader, there’s a good chance that it will be discarded from the process – even if there’s a lot of good stuff in there. The key thing that I try to tell our clients is that you have to get someone external to the primary bid team to have a read of the document a few days before submitting it. Readability is very, very important.
3. Focusing on the features, and not the benefits.
When responding to a tender, it’s easy to get so focused on the features of your products and services, that you forget to address what the client is asking for. The client might not care that your product is shinier than everyone else’s, unless it is directly addressing one of their business needs. This ‘feature focus’ is a really easy trap to fall into.
4. Overcomplicating the solution and the pricing.
Time and time again we have seen clever products and solutions ruined by over-complexity. Try to keep it simple. If detail is required, sometimes it’s better to extract the key points for the body of the main response and then include serious detail as an attachment. Tenders will be assessed by a panel of people with varying degrees of technical understanding and also with different business drivers. The issue of over-complexity also applies to pricing. Too many options, or too many pricing combinations may result in confusion.
5. Spit and polish.
Submitting a tender for a piece of work is just like submitting your Curriculum Vitae for a job application. If your CV looks shabby, do you expect to get the job? The format and look and feel of your tender is a reflection of the way you do business. If it’s poorly organised, has heaps of spelling mistakes and formatting issues, or just looks rushed, you are making it really hard for someone to choose your organisation for the work. We have found that on most occasions, the root of these issues is often a case of time management. Try to get your final draft done at least a couple of days before the response is due so that you can spend some time cleaning everything up and increasing the quality of the response.