9 principles to keep calm and carry on tendering
Tania Field, Principal Tender Specialist (Sydney)
New to bidding or a seasoned professional? Are you joining the bid team as a writer, subject matter expert, or leader?
Whatever your role or experience use these nine principles to ensure you remain focused and composed in a turbulent sea of tendering so you can, “keep calm and carry on” and win:
Bidding is a team sport and no single person is the hero on the bid – make good use of your time together to listen, challenge, and collaborate.
Delegate to avoid becoming a bottleneck and hold people accountable – if there is a framework in place, strategy on a page, agreed governance, and good people in the team then trust the process – empower people to get on with the job and own mistakes.
Bids are messy – there is always a fair degree of ‘grey’ as you uncover and learn more about the project and client, and then there’s just human dynamics – just know it will be ok and breathe.
Listen to the tendering experts that have done it before – and many times over – but only listen if it’s like one of our Tender Plus colleagues that proffer, “If you restructure the content in this way I think it will sell the benefits far more easily to the evaluators” versus someone that suggests, “But we’ve always done it this way”. You’ll start to recognise the good advice from the bad in no time.
If you’ve never led a bid before, please declare it in confidence to the tender consultants and your trusted advisors so we know when to leap into action to advise of potential blind spots – if you don’t, people might hold back some very well-meaning advice on the assumption that everything appears hunky dory, and this can be disastrous. Bids are weird beasts.
Follow the program and milestones in place and don’t complain or compete with it – the dates have most likely been well considered and have factored in time to get everything done with less stress.
Be judicious with reviews and feedback, and cautious to over engineering – the team has taken the time to provide content for review and is probably keen for support so please make the time to provide constructive comments and not formatting suggestions; it also takes a fair degree of maturity to recognise that a piece of work answers the question and demonstrates the strategy in action even if it’s not how you would say or write it, so consider it and let it go.
Prioritise where your efforts are best spent – sometimes your 80% perfect on a returnable schedule is in fact a wonderful 100% in a bidding context, and this will be perfectly acceptable. Perhaps your time is better spent on something higher value.
Technology and systems are good and can cut down on work but only if the data is good – utilising content libraries or AI tools to quickly aggregate information is worth considering and can save heaps of time. However, the underlying focus needs to remain on ensuring the data is up to date and appropriately used. Having a process where information is regularly reviewed and updated is ideal but if that is not available or time is not on your side, make sure you continue to review and sense check information before you blindly accept it.
Need some help embedding these principles in your team? Or perhaps you just need some of our tender support? Tender Plus offers tender strategy, tender management, tender coordination and other support in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Australia wide. Click here to learn about what we do.