How to Organise a Successful Tender Responses

Interview with Katy Berrill, Director of Bid & Tender Support

Katy Berrill is the Director of Bid & Tender Support. She and her team offer a range of bid and tender support services to their clients, including a bid search service, bid strategy reviews and bid writing and review support. Katy shared with us some top tips on getting a bid strategy right.

Please can you tell me a little about your company and expertise?

Bid & Tender Support has been in business for just over three years. We support companies who are tendering for work in both the public and private sector, working predominantly around construction, technology, education and the NHS. As well as helping companies write tender responses, we also provide a search service to help companies use systems like OpenOpps to ensure they have access to all new opportunities in the market place. Our Bid Strategy Review service was introduced to help companies stay on track when bidding for work and continually improve the approach to delivering winning bids. Our services offer an end-to-end solution for clients looking to win work in both the public and private sectors.

Can you give an example of the sort of tender response strategy planning work you do?

In relation to a single tender, it starts with having a really good approach to shortlisting which tenders you should be going for. The tenders are going to have to be relevant and meet your criteria, in terms of size, location and type of work. This will give you a really good foundation for the work that follows, making it worthwhile investing time and resources in preparing good, relevant content. If you go for tenders that aren’t well matched to you, you’ll find it hard to get references and case studies, and to write content.

From there, look at your existing relationship or knowledge of the buyer. If it is extensive, use the bid kick off and planning stages to capture everything you know about them. If you do not have a relationship and little knowledge of them, either work out how you can organise your team to research these things to include in the response or this could be a no-bid deciding factor.

In the first stages of coordinating your response, gather all relevant parties from your company who need to contribute to this bid. By sitting around a table and discussing ideas, inputs and solutions to the client needs you will build a high scoring response. During this meeting, agree a timetable for input of information to allow your bid writers time to draft responses and coordinate internal bid reviews.

By doing this, everyone will be working to the same brief, deadlines and win themes throughout the bid.

Do you also look more broadly at the overall strategy for bidding within an organisation?

Absolutely. People and information are the two biggest areas in terms of strategy. We help our clients get organised as a team, looking at who you will need, how they should be managed, and how the team should communicate. A lot of time can be wasted during a bid process on this nitty gritty stuff. This also helps you to understand what your capacity is not just for delivering the work but the actual bid response.

The other critical resource is information. You need a library containing things like up to date case studies, policies, accounts and insurance policies. When a bid comes in, with a good library you can quickly go through it and work out what you’ve already got and what needs to be a priority in terms of content creation and research.

You also need to build a wider strategy around contract goals. There needs to be a good understanding here of your market, likely win rate and ability to deliver to ensure you plan a sensible but sufficient amount of bids per month to achieve overall business growth objectives for the company.

When you look at win rate, what kind of things do you get companies to focus in?

It’s really good to understand what your win rate is and how that’s broken down. Always get a breakdown of the scoring and feedback, because that will give you an idea of your strengths and weaknesses. We’ve had clients before who win everything they go for, due to a high weighting on price and their ability to be competitive and they’ve never been tested on the quality side. However, if they’re ever in a situation where price is only 30% of the weighting, they have to be ready for when price isn’t going to win them the job.

Another common cause for falling win rates is lack of strong, contactable references. This is often pass/fail and without sufficient relevant references and case studies the whole response could fail.

A lot of public sector buyers have learnt the hard way a low price does not always result in a good service with corners cut. The quality response is there to support the proposal you have put forward, giving the client confidence not only that you will deliver on budget but that you will provide value for money in terms of quality.

Thank you very much for your time. Is there anything in particular that you are organising at the moment that you’d like us to promote?

We are currently offering our Monthly Bid Search Service combined with our Quarterly Bid Strategy Reviews for only £145.00 per month. For more information on these two services or this offer please contact me on katy@bidandtendersupport.co.uk.

Read Katy’s full interview here: https://openopps.com/blog/post/60/how-to-organise-a-successful-tender-responses-interview-with-katy-berrill/