What percentage of your work comes from tendering? Do you think you maximise this sales channel?
After me moaning last week about what people find difficult about tendering for the creative sector, I thought I best discuss something a little more lighthearted. Success rates!
As I have worked in all size agencies in my career, tendering success rates have been different. Mainly because there was no standard format in place, they were usually rushed due to studio time not being available and sometimes winging it a little with the hope that we might be in with a chance.
If I look at the most recent agency I supported, we can see that around 50% of the overall business we won came from public tendering, which for an agency of only 5 people is quite high.
Design is a very personal thing
Obviously it helped that I know how to write bids and more importantly how to write a winning tender so our success rate stood at about 80% for those projects we did bid for, but we never included creative artwork. This is a bugbear of mine. How can we actually develop creative material when we haven’t even met the client, haven’t discussed the brief properly, don’t really understand their client base or even their core objectives. Design is a very personal thing and we don’t believe that a tender should be put to one side based on a tiny fraction of the information provided.
Many people probably don’t maximise tendering as a channel to winning new business because of the studio time needed to produce the tender. I am pleased to say though that fewer tenders these days actually ask for artwork to be created, something we will also advise for those clients we work with on Creative Finder.
We’ve all sorts of standard templates to help our clients be more successful with tendering, one being a tender checklist, if you don’t tick all the boxes, don’t waste the time submitting the tender. Be ruthless.
If you want to access the standard documents we have in place, or even want me to take a look at one of your tenders, send it over, we are happy to help.
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