Responding to formal procurement tenders is hard. Responding well is harder still. Responding well whilst maximising your scores and actually winning is a whole other level of difficult.
I’ve been doing this since 2003, when I walked into an office at Keele University to start my first proper sales job. The business was a pioneer in developing regional networks for Local Government and education. Bidding and winning multimillion-pound Government tenders was their game, and they were very good at it.
Before I’d even seen my desk, the Finance Director told me I had to pass a Cisco Certified Network Consultant exam before I could speak to any of his customers. A week of classroom training and 120 hours of solo study later, I had my CCNA. Can I IP subnet now? No. But I did learn something more useful: how to extract accurate, well-written tender responses from very clever people who had no instinct for how to write them.
Sadly, no training was provided for that part of the job.
Twenty Years. A Few Hundred Million Pounds. Some Rules.
In the intervening twenty-plus years, I’ve led or co-led several hundred million pounds worth of tenders across the Public Sector, Third Sector, and large enterprises. I’ve worked in front-line sales roles for two fast-growth, award-winning, Sunday Times Tech Track 100 SMEs and one FTSE100. The contributions of the bid teams I led helped those two SMEs exit through a combination of private equity and trade sale, for a combined enterprise value in excess of £100m.
From all of that, I’ve distilled some tender-winning rules.
The Rules
Qualify hard and qualify repeatably — with an audit trail. Use a recognised sales qualification methodology. Not a gut feel. An actual process with a score.
If your first engagement with the tendering organisation is a Request for Proposal, don’t bother responding. See rule one.
Use a clear, repeatable methodology for responding — and make sure every member of your team understands and follows it. Not just reads it. Follows it.
Read everything. More than once. The thing that disqualifies bids is almost always in the document that nobody finished reading.
Plan to do twice as much work as you think there is, in half the time you think you have. This is not pessimism. It is experience.
The Part Nobody Talks About
If you’re new to tendering, the above is worth taking seriously. If you’ve been doing it for a while, you know all of it already.
And that’s the uncomfortable bit.
It never ceases to amaze me that regardless of how much we think we know all of this, in the heat of a new opportunity or the melee of a tender response battle, it is easy to let best practice slide and just do our best work.
It doesn’t surprise me that just doing your best work typically doesn’t result in a winning letter from the tendering organisation.
And that’s sad on both counts — for the organisation that lost, and for the buyer who never got to experience what they could have delivered.
Methodology isn’t a constraint on good work. It’s what makes good work repeatable.