Creating an excellent tender submission can be challenging and complex work. Small businesses especially seek to save money and prepare these submissions themselves. Quite like Uncle Harry deciding to renovate the bathroom during the Christmas break, the results of such a decision can differ significantly.
Professional tender companies like ProposalPro are designed to swiftly grasp the tender requirements and ask the right questions, streamlining the submission preparation process. The most significant contribution a business can make during this process is effective communication. Countless hours can be saved by avoiding the need to chase information.
The time spent on writing emails, making calls, and following up with clients can be better utilised, reducing the overall cost of the tender and making the process more efficient. A tender writer’s role is to learn your business enough to create a persuasive suite of documents that will compel an evaluator to choose your company. Your role is to provide good communication between you and your bid professionals.
Understanding your requirements
It is crucial that client expectations are fully understood and communicated clearly. You have just engaged this business to represent you during this process. You must adequately explain your expectations and the scope of services and understand your role in communicating that to your work-winning professional.
Access to accurate information
Having easy and reliable access to relevant company information is essential for bid writers. The most crucial communication you can undertake is providing the necessary information so staff can write about your company’s capabilities. The earlier and easier the access to this information, the better the final submission will be.
Assigning the right person
To facilitate this flow of information, it is an excellent idea to assign a dedicated contact person responsible for providing this information and responding to emails. Assign a staff member with excellent administrative skills and the time to respond. Assigning the warehouse manager, who is rarely at his desk but knows the most about the business, will only cause a hitch in communication.Providing QUALITY responses
Your bid staff better understand your tender’s requirements than you do. They are well-versed in reading a question and understanding what the evaluator is asking.
If you do not recognise why your bid staff is asking a specific question, then communicate with them.
Ask questions and always strive to answer the exact question they are answering. Answering in generic or vague terms will probably trigger another question. Although you have been embedded in your business for years, the evaluator hasn’t. Your bid staff must write your information in a way that is easy for evaluators to look at and disseminate.
Providing quick responses
While your bid staff prepares your submission, a sneaky email will undoubtedly appear in your inbox, asking for a clarifying detail or fact. Respond to such emails promptly. No one expects a rapid response of 4 seconds once it has been sent, but taking four days to respond can significantly delay the progress of your tender.Timelineness
Once you have received your tender documents, be thorough in your review but fast. A reasonable bid professional will give you a deadline by which you need to return the documents. Adhere to these deadlines. They are essential in the scope of the tender and support the on-time submission of your tender. If you are busy or become distracted, communicate that to your bid staff so they know there may be a delay and can work it into the submission timeline. Delays can sometimes be unavoidable and we’ve all been there.
Demand Best Practice
Your bid professional should advocate for best practices in their tender preparation and can demonstrate this easily by being accredited by the Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP).
All ProposalPro staff are required to have this accreditation or be actively working towards it. Bid staff with this accreditation will know how to support you in their needs and facilitate good communication guidelines.
Good communication seems like an easy or obvious path to take when engaging in your work-winning process. However, any experienced bid writer could provide an example of how they struggled to communicate with their client and its impact on the final submission.
Establish clear and robust communication channels early in the process, maintain regular updates, and ensure that all relevant information is shared promptly throughout the tender writing process. This will help align expectations, address concerns, and increase the chances of submitting a quality and successful work-winning piece.
For support on your tender, grant and proposal work, contact your friendly team at ProposalPro today. Your success is our success.
Find out more about ProposalPro>>
▪ Services
▪ Meet The Team
Keep an eye on ProposalPro Insights and follow us on LinkedIn for more great advice on winning grants, tenders and bids.
Learn More About Tenders >>
Your executive summary is the most important part of your bid. But are you getting it right?
Experts agree that executive summaries are the most important part of your bid. They’re the most widely read, and offer you a opportunity to showcase your unique value proposition; convince the tender evaluator(s) to recommend you; and make it easier for them to justify that decision.
And yet, so many executive summaries are haphazardly thrown together at the end of a bidding process.
Here’s how to do better, avoid common preventable mistakes, and write an executive summary that gets results.
Top 5 Tips for Better Tendering
Tendering (when done well) is a cornerstone of business growth; it’s not something that should be taken lightly. Learn how to reduce tendering headaches with ProposalPro!
To bid or not to bid? Bid Decisionmaking
Not every opportunity is right for your business. Learn about the 3-step process that can be applied to assist with your bid decisionmaking.
Working with weighted criteria
Business owners often express confusion about working with average weighted criteria – it’s not a framework that you’ll come across too often outside of tendering. But it can tell you a surprising amount about what’s important to the buyer, how to read between the lines and structure your tender response to maximise your chances of success, and even whether it’s worth putting together a bid in the first place…
