6 Tips To Optimise Tender Submission

Tips to write good editorial, win bids, and keep everyone sane.

When you’re working on a must-win tender submission under a time-crush and within tight budget and resource conditions, it’s easy for the last few weeks to become a frenzy of cut and paste, late nights, and colourful rants aimed at whoever invented Adobe.

It doesn’t need to be like this though. While there are many elements of putting a tender together that aren’t in your control, below are a few that are. Make your life a little easier during tender time with some simple yet resoundingly helpful steps to bring order to the chaos.

DEEP DIVE THE RFT

This is a no-brainer, but when faced with rolling tenders and a morass of cut and paste client criteria, it is easy to forgo client document review and simply crack on with the job.

It is never a waste of time to set aside a quiet window of time for the RFT documentation. While it may feel counter-intuitive to spend time reading and reviewing when a deadline looms, remaining unfamiliar with an RFT’s finer points can cost you in the long run. Usually realised at about 8 o’clock at night when a contractor (who promised a polished draft was practically finished and most definitely en route), comes knocking to say a major component has been wildly misunderstood and not only are you not getting a draft, but it’s back to the drawing board.

They can be downright similar, but no two RFT’s are the same. Make time to review the RFT and contract documents (or better yet, hire a tender writer to do it), so you don’t get caught out at the eleventh hour.

IDENTIFY CHALLENGING RESPONSES EARLY

Not all RFT schedules are made equal – some require more resources, the attention of a notoriously time poor Subject Matter Expert, or are so sizable and complex they require dedicated project managing.

Identifying problem child responses ensures they get the attention, budget and oversight they deserve, while highlighting to the wider team that this section can’t be pumped out in the final hours.

PLAN FOR CVs

Some tenders require significant information about your key staff. While not necessarily challenging in itself, getting CVs completed can be a cumbersome task. Include ever-changing organisational charts, out-of-date CVs and candidates who are harder to find than a 24 hour printers, and they can take up significant bandwidth at the tail end of a bid. The final days and weeks of a tender is often when strategy and key messaging becomes refined, and resources should be focused on the strategic sections of your tender; the Executive Summary, key deliverables and differentiators, not rewriting two-page CVs.

While it is difficult to predict the shifting sands of staff placement on major projects, having a vigorous, sensible strategy to get this often-overlooked section complete ensures CVs don’t eat more than their fair share of resources.  

Consider having a dedicated writing resource on-board to complete the task of updating, collating, and compiling this work. This ensures CVs are of high quality, are tailored to the project, and show off your project team, without sacrificing the rest of your content.

USE TEMPLATES

For some of us, there is nothing scarier than a blank page. Getting started is often the hardest part, and using document templates can ease start-up stress and guide focus to the response question.

A template with a header, footer, with RFT schedule and question inserted, can do wonders to ease blank page jitters and saves time when it comes to eventual formatting. This also helps authors answer the right question – when in the thick of back-to-back tenders, it’s easy to get stuck on autopilot and provide generic, run-of-the-mill responses that do everything but provide high-value detail and strategy – the death knell for good tender editorial. This kind of writing is generally picked up during review processes, and soon you’re back at the drawing board when you should be well on your way.

Engage a good graphic designer to create robust, user-friendly templates to avoid double handling, and ensure document owners start on the best possible footing.

CREATE A DOCUMENT LIBRARY

Once a tender response has been complied and submitted, it’s easy to move onto the next one without much thought for the documents created. Over the course of a few busy months, an extensive amount of work can be lost in email attachments and buried in layers and layers of folders.

Creating a purpose-built document library is a brilliant way to leverage existing content. Far from encouraging mindless copy and paste, document libraries help time-poor submission teams to avoid re-work, while promoting knowledge-share across departments and team turnover.

Developing content such as CVs, Project Data Sheets, and organisational information, requires research and collating, eating into team resources and schedule during the already tight tender window. Devoting time and energy to creating a content library outside of tense tender conditions return ample benefits across the submission calendar.

ENGAGE A GOOD TENDER WRITER

A good tender writer reduces stress on tender teams, creates clarity around key messaging, and threads your core strategy throughout your submission. The tenders that win bids, from an editorial perspective, are ones that fully respond to criteria, and have a strong cohesive voice that presents technical information in a concise and clear manner.

Writing is a skill, and while we can all do it, the best thing you can do for you bid is let specialists do their specialisms - let engineers solve the problem, the strategists develop strategy, builders build, and the writer do the writing.

 STRESS FREE TENDER SUBMISSION

Burnout costs the Australian business sector over $14 billion dollars a year.  As budgets tighten, submission teams shrink, and markets become more competitive, it’s more important than ever to find efficiencies to reduce stress on already burdened tender teams. These simple steps can significantly reduce undue pressure by removing double-handling, leveraging the skills of your team in the most efficient and effective manner, and ensuring complex tasks have the resources they deserve.