12 May 2013

Doing it the tender way

Successfully tendering for a contract is a dream for many companies. But it is also time consuming. Now BPIF can help you do it.

Every sales trainer will remind you that there are always two ways of increasing sales in your business: you can encourage existing customers to buy more, or you can search for new customers.

Of the two, improving regular commitments from existing major clients can be key to ensuring the ongoing stability of your business. But you do need to find and nurture new customers as well, and that can often be frustrating - and costly. It’s often frustrating because of the time involved with resourcing the search for potential customers.

You can always try and reduce this cost and frustration by bidding for tender work. In this way, the requirements of the job have already been identified and quantified.

The trouble is, few companies have the specialist resources needed to create tender responses which can often be extremely time consuming in themselves, especially when it comes to spelling out your company’s in-depth experience so that you can create a compelling tender response strategy that will present your company most effectively.

That is why there is such a high rejection rate among companies who first start trying to tender.

They usually fail because they do not meet all the requirements of pre-qualification questionnaires (PQQs) and invitations to tender (ITTs). Or even if they make it past there, they fail to sell their company’s strengths, or they don’t address the buyer’s needs properly. They also might not demonstrate their ability to meet contract requirements, or to show robust processes at the inspection stage.

All of this is really crucial, because to establish a foothold within either the public or private sector, you really need to achieve ‘preferred supplier’ status – the ultimate goal of many tendering processes. But this depends on your ability to manage such a process efficiently.

There are ways of reducing the time involved by creating templates that carry all the required information rather than responding from scratch every time, but often even these templates could be more effective.

At BPIF, we can help you. Our tender specialists have the experience and expertise to create a strong strategy for you. They can assist with tender responses and help ensure that your business is correctly placed to bid. And they can significantly improve your chances of winning.

They will also be able to train up your staff, either as a company, or with open courses that individuals would be able to attend. These courses can be introductory, covering the basics of what a tender document is and how to approach it, or they can be advanced, introducing tools and techniques that will dramatically improve the success rate.

Because yes, the price you ultimately quote is important, but it is just one of the elements scored in a tender assessment. We can make sure that your bid stands out on every measure, and so is a winning entry.