Bid Strategy

Posted by kiran sheth on January 22nd, 2020

Target everyone involved in the decision making process

Corporate decision-making involves people at strategic levels as well as technical and operational staff

M-U-S-I-C is a powerful tool to ensure winning the bids, proposals, tenders or pitches which successfully target everyone involved.

    Movers and Shakers
    Users
    Scrutineers
    Investors
    Consultants

Movers and Shakers:

The senior people who hold the purse strings. You may never meet them, but your proposal must win them over by highlighting how you alone will deliver their vision, strategy and business objectives.

Movers and Shakers are focused on their customers, so to win them over your bid must explain benefits for your client’s customers.

Users:

The client’s operational staff; very risk adverse; you fail and they feel the pain. Give them confidence that you will deliver on cost, quality and programme. Users are our main point of contact but often are not aware of high-level objectives.

Scrutineers:

Scrutineers come in all shapes and sizes; sustainability, diversity and equality, compliance and legal to name just a few. They have the power to kick you into the long grass, so you need to put ticks in all the right boxes.

Investors:

They are after value for money or best value. So talk their language using £ and % rather than discussing your technical innovations or continuous improvement. If you don’t they will make a simple calculation: Value for Money = the Cheapest.

Consultants:

The client’s advisers. They want repeat business and so need to look good in front of the client. Criticise anything they suggested and you’ve made an implacable enemy. Support anything they suggested and you have an advocate.

Tenders and bids are used to award very high value contracts in both public and private sectors. The client’s Invitation To Tender (ITT) consisting of many questions often with a detailed scoring scheme.

Industries where the submission of tenders or bids are common include, construction, management consultancy, facilities management, health and social care, information technology, nuclear, outsourcing, rail, telecommunications, utilities and waste management.

There are three critical elements to writing a winning tender or bid

    Answer the questions in the Invitation To Tender (ITT)
    Make it simple for the assessor to follow and easy to understand
    Plan your response around the scoring scheme

Put yourself in the place of the person assessing the bid or tender, BidAssist is a right place for tendering and bidding.

Putting yourself in the assessor’s place. Where would you start? You’d read the question and highlight the key words and phrases, and do the same for the scoring scheme.

You would then skim-read the response looking for those words and phrases. If you found them you would assume it answered the question and a high score was in order. You would then read more carefully the text beneath the key words and phrases to decide how high a score.

If you didn’t find those words and phrases you would assume the question hadn’t been answered and a low score was appropriate. Remember the assessor will have a big workload with lots to read over and above their day job. So if it’s hard for them to find the answers they are looking for they will move quickly on to your competitor’s tender or bid.

4 steps to creating a perfect answer plan

    Carefully read the question and the scoring scheme, several times, from the assessor’s perspective
    Using a highlighter pen pick out the key words and phrases within the question and the scoring scheme
    Use the highlighted words and phrases to create the sections and sub-sections within the writing plan
    Allocate a word count to each section, this is particularly important if there is a tight word or page limit

You now have a writing plan that answers the question in a way that will quickly lead the assessors to the key information they want.

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