Five tender writing tips to help you win more contracts

Winning a new contract or retaining an existing contract can be a game-changer for many businesses. It often provides an opportunity to expand, increase resources and purchase new equipment. Sometimes it can open the floodgates to new opportunities by providing the critical experience needed to win more tenders. Here are five tips our team have put together to help you win more bids and tenders. With time and effort, you can create exemplary proposals that deliver you results.

Stay Focused

Remaining focused is important for writing tenders primarily due to the nature of tenders as being long and wide-reaching. By wide-reaching, we mean the way in which a tender requires information from all aspects of your business or organisation. It is important to remain focused and project manage the entire process. Make sure you follow up with critical internal stakeholders to ensure you deliver a quality result. Remaining focused extends to focusing on the client. When putting a major bid together, it’s easy to focus on yourself and your own business rather than the client.

• Stay client-focused.
• Focus on the clients needs.
• Focus on delivering value to the client.

This will help your proposal stand out from the crowd and will set the basis from a long and productive relationship.

Project Manage the Response

Management of information, as well as personnel, is crucial to the completion of a bid. Therefore proper and efficient management systems but be in place in order to best answer the criteria and questions that are posed by the tender.

It’s important to get it right from the start. Remember to:

• Put together a checklist for each question / response in excel to track your progress
• Allocate and monitor key personnel and respective accountabilities
• Conduct meetings to ensure you get the buy-in of key personnel and management
• Put in alerts in place to follow up SMEs and others for their input.

Although the management of information may not be a crucial obstacle for small to medium businesses, much larger businesses with far more operations on-going may face trouble in procuring the required information in a quick and efficient manner. This is of course unless they have adequate management systems in place.

Win themes

Incorporating win themes into your tender response may greatly increase your organisation or businesses win rate. Win themes or a win strategy refers to a strategy that not only addresses the tender criteria but goes beyond it in order to alleviate some burden from the procurer. The goal of a win them is to demonstrate your businesses potential benefits to the procurer in addition to fulfilling the tender criteria. Through the incorporation of win themes, you are able to separate yourself from the completion and give your business or organisation a distinctive advantage.

Graphics and infographics

Graphics and infographics are a useful tool in putting together any tender response. Sometimes, as they say, perception is reality and large companies often like to communicate with other companies that have consistent branding in place. It’s important to take the time put together images that have real meaning and compliment your writing. Remember to keep those images on file, as they will be useful in future tenders.

Detail

This is one is important and involves the most work. The reality with putting together a quality bid, tender or proposal is that you need to put the work in. Go into detail when drafting a response to each question and ensure you answer all of the questions comprehensively. You need to read between the lines and deliver them a convincing argument about why you should be selected. It’s important to provide evidence, statistics and testimonials to convince the reader that you are the right company to appoint and award the contract to.

About our team

We love helping businesses across Australia win more bids and tenders. Our tender writing services bring over 25 years of combined experience to help businesses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Canberra, Perth and across Australia win more contracts. We help you write, manage and deliver quality submissions.

We pride ourselves on adding value to businesses and helping businesses win and retain contracts. Our experience extends across all industries including defence, healthcare, construction, logistics and many others. If you liked these five tender writing tips, and want help putting them into practice, give us a call and we’ll quote your next tender on 0410 448 770.

For any organisation, answering challenging tender questions can be the difference between a tender proposal that is short-listed and one that is not. Listed below are three examples of how challenging tender questions can damage a tender proposal before it has even been submitted.

Ongoing legal actions or investigations

While many companies will be currently clear of any contentious and long-lasting litigation when applying for tenders other tenderers may find themselves subject to ongoing legal action. In this scenario, we encourage our clients to fully disclose the nature of any ongoing litigation or investigations by government departments. We firmly believe that an ‘honesty is the best policy’ approach is the best one. It is also apt to recognise that many tenders are issued by government departments who are more than capable of reviewing a tenderer’s legal history as a natural part of the tendering process if required.

In many cases, some tenderers may find themselves the respondents to legal action by competitors, suppliers, or other parties that may have an agenda derived from some past slight against them. It is critical to provide accurate responses to legal inquiries that position your organisation responsibly.

When it comes to investigations, details provided for each question must also be 100% accurate and must be provided succinctly in order to answer the question. At heart, these matters are mostly confidential but the procuring team/selection panel must be able to grasp the manner of a tenderer’s current legal actions and investigations completely in order to assess the proposal. Our team of proposal and bid writers is ready to help you navigate this area.

Health, Safety and Environmental Violations

Many companies will already have in place HSE requirements incorporated into their WHS and other safety management plans. This helps prevent hazards from occurring in the workplace. However, incidents of this nature are not always preventable and accidents do occur where someone gets hurt.

We generally advise our clients to respond truthfully to each question asking for details of these HSE violations, usually within a certain time period (ie. 5 years). What is most important in responding to these questions is not only disclosing the details of each event where HSE guidelines and regulations were breached but also the steps taken to prevent them from occurring again. For many of our large organisational clients, we are readily able to address one or two HSE violations with adequate safety measures and a proactive plan for any future incidents that may occur.

Ultimately, we strongly encourage our clients to implement new hazard prevention methods in their workplace (if they haven’t already done so) so that we counterbalance past incidents by demonstrating our clients’ initiative through enforced safety management plans.

We are able to assist in these areas by reviewing current safety procedures and how they adequately respond to hazards whenever they occur. our tender preparation services including providing this supporting documentation, which is increasingly becoming necessary for private as well as government bids and is critical to winning new contracts.

Contract Non-Compliance

Certain tenderers may find issue with questions or sections within a tender asking to state any non-compliances with any of the contract’s clauses or other requirements. We advise in these circumstances to provide as many details as requested as to why a tenderer fails to comply with a certain clause and proposes an amendment to be made on their behalf or an alternative action be completed in order to satisfy the tender criteria.

In these respects, the selection panel/procuring team’s task of choosing the winning bid will be made simpler by being able to assess whether the non-compliance or alternative action proposed is enough in comparison to the other bids.

How inductive reasoning can help you

In a competitive tender, you don’t always have all the information you require. Many RFQ or RFP documents aren’t detailed enough and you need to read between the lines. Often an addendum are issued, but sometimes they do not provide clarity. You will often need to conduct a fair bit of background work to deliver a quality response.

When we complete a tender response, we often overlook key points such as “safety”, “quality” or “methodology”. Because of this, it can be easy to miss the subtext behind these questions. But these questions will give us clues about what the buyer is hoping to achieve.

When you’re not sure of a fact in the document, then you can ask a question and try and get an answer.

But part of the art of winning competitive tenders is in trying to work out “what is not included in the facts”. That means that you have to work with information you believe to be correct, or have found to be correct most of the time, to come to a specific solution (“Inductive Reasoning”).

It may come to a point that you’re not sure what a tender question means. More than likely you may not want to ask because your embarrassed. So what you can do instead is deduce and infer the buyer’s meaning by closely investigating the way the question is asked.

Think about the “question behind the question”:

• Why are they asking this question?
• What do they really want to know?
• How important is this answer in their decision-making process as a whole?

You have to realise that in a face to face meeting you can ask questions and get a response from your potential buyer. In a competitive tender the positions are reversed. Buyers use tender documents to ask questions.

Like we stated, when planning your answer always think about “the question behind the question”. Remember that this could mean the difference between a convincing proposal and one that falls short of the customer’s high expectations.

We’re ready to help

Our team is ready to help you understand any tender questions you may have. We can help you understand “the question behind the question” and give your tender response the detail that’s needed. Give our Director, Jason Cooney, a call on 0410 448 770. We’re based in Sydney, but we love helping clients in regional and remote Australia.