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.