A tender bid writing company, Snap Edition Ltd, discusses the top ten tips for small businesses looking to win public sector contracts. If you are a business looking to win public sector business and have either been unsuccessful in the past or are completely new to tendering, here are ten top tips to help guide you through the potential minefield that is public sector procurement.
1.Know Your Acronyms
Council and government tenders can be complicated, confusing and difficult to understand. As well as generic tendering terms and acronyms, there may also be some specific to your industry. As you read through the tender document, highlight any acronyms or terms that you don’t understand, look them up and make a note for your colleagues to save time in the future. To get you started, here are a few that you are likely to need to know:
•APL – Approved Providers List (or Approved List of Suppliers)
•ITT – Invitation To Tender
•EOI – Expressions Of Interest
•MEAT – Most Economically Advantageous Tender
•PQQ – Pre- Qualification Questionnaire
2.Make sure your company meets the minimum requirements
Most tendering opportunities will specify the minimum requirements in the tender documents. Make sure you identify these to ensure that your company will be considered. You don’t want to waste time and resources on an activity that will not bring any benefit to your company.
3.Understand the scoring system
Many tender documents will set out how your answers will be scored – this will help you to identify how in-depth your responses need to be. If there is no indication of score weighting, it can be helpful to contact the organisation and ask if they can provide this or give you any guidance.
4.Be prepared
Considerable time and effort from multiple people within your organisation can go into creating a tender so it’s imperative that you plan your time to ensure that deadlines are met. Everyone involved in the process should have access to your planning document and it should be reviewed regularly.
You also need to ensure that you have all supporting documentation in place. Gather together everything that you can at the very beginning (staff CVs, financial information, quality statements, policies and procedures) to identify anything that needs to be created, updated or found.
5.Identify colleagues who can help
Rather than do everything yourself, utilising the skills available in your organisation to create a better bid. Get input from sales, marketing, operations and customer service. Allocate questions to the most suitable person and ask all involved to read through each other’s work to see they can add anything.
6.Match your answers to the tender documentation
It sounds simple, but it’s surprising how easy it is to go off point. Make sure you’ve addressed all of the requirements for each question; you should make a checklist to help with this. Don’t forget to provide evidence of recent experience which demonstrates the capabilities that you’ve discussed and give extra attention to criteria with higher scores available (as discussed in point 3). Finally, try to consider how you are in a better position than your competitors to fulfil the requirements of each question and don’t be afraid of repetition.
7.Identify your USPs – be innovative and add value
Whilst it is essential that you stick to the question in hand, think about what will make you stand out and how you can bring added value (and that doesn’t mean by being the cheapest). This could be in the areas of quality, experience, service or anything else that you consider is the unique selling point of your business.
8.Presentation – spelling, grammar, style and format
How you present your bid is a reflection on your company. Make sure it’s grammatically correct with no spelling errors. You can use diagrams and photographs to explain and reinforce your points, but consider that your bid is likely to be photocopied for everyone on the decision making panel. In most instances, diagrams don’t count towards a word limit so you can use them to utilise the space available. Most bids are now submitted electronically, but always check for any specific requirements. If it is a paper submission, how it should be bound, how many copies are required etc. and ensure that your bid is well packaged when it is submitted.
9.Get a second opinion
It’s always worth getting feedback before submitting your bid. It could be from other people within your organisation (ideally who have not been involved in the bid writing process), a mentor or a professional tender writing company.
10.Always ask for feedback
Whether you are successful or not, you should ask for feedback. If it comes down to cost, ask what the difference was and use any criticism to improve your next bid. It could also be valuable to learn who was awarded the contract as there may be a sub-contractor opportunity open to you.
Visit http://www.snap-edition.co.uk.
