Bidding to Win

Publication Date: 01 December, 2021, 00:00

Many small businesses are run by people who are experts in their field, or who are driven by a love of their product or service and want to spend their working lives delivering a high-quality customer experience in that field.

However, becoming successful is not always the result of being good at what you do; it is in getting your message across clearly to potential customers/clients. All too often, it is easy to fall into the trap of giving people far more information than they want or need, or by making wrong assumptions about the level of knowledge that they already have, thereby missing out key details.

This is true when it comes to bidding for public sector work and for some commercial work, where it is usually not possible to enter into any form of negotiation – answers need to be provided to a set of prescribed questions, which can on occasions lead to dozens or even hundreds of responses being required. You need to get it right first time and ensure that nothing is overlooked or answered incorrectly.

There are two important aspects that need to be addressed when considering whether to invest the time required to tender for such contracts.

Firstly, is the cost of your time (or an employee’s time) spent on completing a complicated tender worth it at all, if it can take days to complete? Could that time have been spent more productively on other activities that generate income?

Secondly, and arguably more importantly, do you or your employee have the necessary knowledge, experience and skills to be certain of creating a high-quality tender? This is not the same as being good at your job, it is about being proficient in tender writing. Is there any value in spending days writing a tender if it will not hit the mark?

If you have a legal problem, you will not seriously consider giving the task to anyone other than a solicitor. If you have a financial issue, you will only use the services of a qualified accountant. It would seem to be sensible to take the same approach when bidding for large contracts – winning or losing will have an impact on your business, so why take the risk of trying to do it yourself when there are many professional companies that could help?

Such companies are experts in their field and understand the complexities of tendering. They will also know the level of detail that clients expect to see in submitted tenders.

The alternative is to employ someone in-house with those specific skills so that your bids are consistently of the highest standard.

Either way, they will be able to free up your time to concentrate on what you do best, which is probably why you set up the company on the first place.

The satisfaction of winning a valuable contract will far outweigh the cost of bidding for it. Losing a contract that you know you are capable of delivering is disappointing, but it is made worse if you know in your heart that the tender was simply not good enough.