By Anna Cornwall, Senior Tender Specialist, Sydney

One of the most overlooked aspects of tendering is the importance of providing evaluators with the information they need to assess and score your response. In the frenzy of the bid room, teams are often seduced by their own rhetoric of superiority – ‘best in class’, ‘award winning’, ‘global leader’, and neglect to address basic compliance and document requirements. To enable an evaluator to comprehensively assess and score your response:

• Make your content accessible

• Respond to all the criteria

• Know your audience and speak to their priorities.

Make your content accessible

As far as it’s practical to do so, structure your response using the criteria stipulated. Use numbered headings to provide document wayfinding and assist evaluators to easily locate the information they’ve asked for. It’s never a good idea to send your evaluators on the hunt for the relevant response. They won’t be impressed, and your response is likely to be ranked low against the evaluation criteria.

If it doesn’t make sense to align your document structure directly to the criteria, provide a table with cross references to the stated requirements so the evaluator can quickly locate the associated response.

Respond to all the criteria

Always respond to all of the stated criteria, even when it doesn’t seem relevant. And provide a meaningful answer to the question. This demonstrates you’ve paid careful attention to the tender documents, and you respect the process. For example, if you can’t provide certain details because the final scope and methodology are still to be developed, seek clarification through the RFI process, and if that fails, explain when you anticipate this information will become available.

Know your audience

Always get to know your audience. Identifying who will be assessing your tender enables you to speak to the particular needs or bias of the tender evaluation panel members.

While it’s not always possible to know who’s on the panel, it’s helpful to create evaluator personas based on who’s likely to be undertaking the evaluation. Understanding the lens each person will bring to their assessment of your tender enables you to identify the different priorities of the evaluation panel.

By providing your bid writers with an audience profile based on personas, they can develop a compliant response that also articulates and addresses those priorities in the relevant section of the response.

Conclusion

Give your evaluators what they need, and in the way they asked for it, so they can provide sound justification for selecting your offer.