From compliant to compelling: 7 ways to elevate your tender response
Louise Ferguson, Principal Tender Specialist (Perth)
Developing a formal tender response is challenging. We know that demonstrating compliance and addressing the key evaluation criteria is essential to completing a successful tender submission, so how do you ensure your offer is both competitive and superior to others?
Here are seven tips to help you lift your tender response from compliant to compelling and hold the attention of evaluators.
1. Agree on a tender strategy and associated win themes prior to drafting responses Understanding your competitors will assist in determining your differentiators. Workshop what this looks like before putting pen to paper and produce three to five unique selling points. These form your tender strategy and can be woven throughout the response.
2. Develop a writing guide
A writing or style guide will provide one source of truth relevant to agreed writing conventions, problem words and tender specific terminology. It will also include your agreed win themes. This guide will steer not only authors when drafting tender responses, but also reviewers, to ensure a consistent approach throughout the entire tender submission.
3. Answer all parts of the question
This includes any requirements that may be listed in separate contract, scope, specification and/or evaluation criteria documents. The question may or may not specifically refer to other information provided in separate documents, so it is best to search for key words before commencing drafting. Once you understand all of the elements that need to be covered in the tender response, adding logical sub-headings will assist and ensure all parts of the question are addressed.
4. Use a consistent approach across all tender responses
Are you telling a consistent story and using consistent language across schedules? Look out for elements that are required to be repeated or mentioned in multiple schedules. Typically these may include project experience information, key personnel data, corporate information and specific statistics, such as HSE data and workforce numbers. Attention to detail here will improve consistency and reinforce the same messages across multiple schedules. Your writing guide will also assist with achieving consistency, as it is the guideline for agreed language and terms to use throughout the response.
5. Use graphics to help tell a story
Pages of text should ideally be broken up with graphics or images to keep the evaluator’s attention. Graphics must be associated with the content in some way and should always be referred to within the response. A good graphic can also replace sections of text or tabulated data, for example, a sequential bulleted list can usually become a flow chart and depending on the content, a table can easily become a matrix, generating more interest in the content.
6. Detail the proof
Once you have detailed your solution to the client’s objectives, needs and expectations, you need to be able to demonstrate that you can deliver. Provide evidence of your experience and detail any lessons learned to support selection of the solution is essential. Case studies highlighting successful outcomes with similar solutions and appropriate testimonials are helpful with this.
7. Articulate the benefits
Most importantly, the benefits to the client should be well-defined and explain where the solution is innovative or goes beyond business as usual, the extent to which the solution meets or exceeds specification and where the client will achieve value for money.
Whether you are new to tender writing or would just like to refresh your approach, we hope that these tips will help you to improve your tender writing skills and enhance your next tender submission.
Tender Plus is located in Brisbane, Sydney and Perth and operates nationally. If you’d like to learn more about how we can assist with tender writing, and more broadly, tender management, tender coordination, tender strategy and more, reach out for a chat, we’d love to help.