10 Tips for Tender Management Success

10 Tips for Tender Management Success

It’s deadline day, you have to upload by 12.00 and you still have 2 ‘relevant experience’ contracts to add, a Health and Safety questionnaire to complete and a programme chart to produce…sound familiar?

With an increasing amount of procurement now being tendered, bid management is becoming almost impossible to avoid, so we have put together a list of useful pointers using our bid management expertise, which will help you avoid the pre-submission chaos.

1. Be The First – Make sure you check the bid opportunities daily to ensure you are giving yourself the maximum time to assemble the bids that you want to go for.
2. Don’t Delay the Download – Don’t put off downloading all of the tender documentation and dissecting it, this saves valuable time, trust us!
3. Check Exclusions – The first thing to do is always thoroughly read through all of the documentation to ensure that there are no exclusions that could prohibit your company from bidding for the contract. There’s nothing worse than spending time on writing the bid before learning that your turnover, resources or level of cover actually exclude you from entering.
4. Assign Responsibilities – Make it clear ‘who’ has to contribute ‘what’ and instruct the team early giving them as much time to complete their tasks as possible. Remember, for those with operational responsibilities keeping them busy, it can be difficult to accommodate additional tender tasks (HINT:- it can sometimes be useful to be creative with the submission date!).
5. Get the Easy Stuff Done – Get your uploads of standard documents up early where possible, (your certificates and policies etc.) This is one less thing to worry about nearer submission.
6. Do Get Help – Even if you have an in-house team writing tenders, an external bid consultant can often score you valuable extra points which will make all the difference, or sometimes just ease pressure when resource is low (Delego are here to help).
7. Be Creative – Often tender formatting restrictions will prohibit creative design and formatting, so look for the loopholes to exploit. This can sometimes be adding images to your org chart, or even presenting your case studies in an editorial style that’s engaging.
8. Use the Specification – When writing methodologies, it can be difficult to know where to start, but so often the inspiration you need is right in front of you. Using the specification as a basis for your delivery plan is helpful and will show that you understand what the client wants.
9. Don’t Recycle – Procurement teams don’t want to see a question response which has been regurgitated from another client’s bid (especially if the other organisation’s name has been accidentally left in!). By all means use previous responses for inspiration, but always keep your tender answers unique and fresh for the bid at hand.
10. READ THE QUESTION – Lastly, we know it seems obvious, but as they said in school, read the question properly. Don’t miss out on marks because you skim read the question and skipped important requirements.

For more tendering advice, or for a free quote for our bid support services, contact Delego today www.delegobusiness.co.uk/contact/