powered by

Tag: mobile apps tenders

Questions to ask before responding to a tender

Posted on by John Hudson

Jill’s top seven questions to ask before responding to a tender

We all know the term ‘busy fools’!  The term definitely comes into play when tendering for new business.  Seeing all those tenders coming through, is like candy in a sweet shop.  But, knowing that you could deliver the work well is one thing, on paper you have to sound great too.

The best tip we can give you is to create a Tender Checklist.  This Tender Checklist will keep you on track when bidding for new work and should include a set of questions which are essential to knowing what to tender for, and what to walk away from.

Here are some sample questions that our Growth Director, Jill asks before submitting tenders on behalf of her clients.

1. Do you have 3 strong case studies from the industry you want to work in?

Most tenders require sector specific experience, and usually require a minimum of three case studies.  Think carefully before submitting a response if you’re struggling to get the right level of experience from your bank of case studies.

2. Do you have a solid foundation of experience, developing systems or creating visuals that are similar to those in the Invitation to Tender?

Look at the work you’ve done in the last three years and ask yourself, ‘is it relevant to the business project?’  If it isn’t it’s unlikely you’ll be successful, as another bidding organisation will specialise in this area and will be able to produce a winning submission.

3. Is the tender more than half of your annual turnover?

It’s hard to know the cut off point for organisations when bid writing for work, but the general rule of thumb is that you are unlikely to win any projects as an SME that are more than 50% of your turnover.

4. Do you meet the terms of the tender i.e. three years required accounts?

If you’ve only been trading for 2 years but it is an essential requirement of the tender to have a minimum of 3 years.  Disregard the tender and don’t give it another thought.

5.How strong is your teams experience against what they’re asking for?

Think of your current and previous experience, if the management team are strong, with a proven track record, you could have a strong chance of winning the work.

6. Can you meet the deadlines required for the project?

Think about the size of your team and the number of man hours needed to complete the work.  If it looks like 100% of your team will be working on the project 100% of the time, you’re unlikely to win it, it’s too risky for the client to give you the work.

7. Is it possible to make a profit, based on the budget allocated?

Many organisations bid for work not thinking of the profit margins should they win the work.  Look at the man hours needed for the project, and add 20%.  If you’re still making a decent profit, go ahead and submit the response.

10 Stages of Tendering

Posted on by John Hudson

10 Stages of Tendering

Our Growth Director Jill, has been writing bids for over a decade, and she is often asked what makes her so successful.  It’s important to understand that when she first started tendering, she also made the common mistakes made by all, but she soon realised she had to create a process and stick to it.  Creating consistency and building knowledge.

She developed her 10 stage process which she still uses to this day.  Here goes…

1. Develop a checklist

Don’t just assume that every project is right for your business.  If you are clutching at straws for suitable experience, it’s probably not for you.  Create a checklist with 5-10 questions to ask yourself when deciding if to bid for a project.  Mark these questions between 10-20% depending on the number of questions developed.

2. Searching for suitable tenders

Searching for suitable tenders takes time and commitment.  Did you know, we scrape over 1,000 websites every day to populate our portal with suitable public and private sector opportunities?  No agency has the resource or time in-house to do this.  Searching for tenders is critical for agency growth and a great source of new business, so make this process as streamlined as possible by signing up to Creative Tenders or another suitable portal.

3. Review against your checklist

Once you have sourced relevant tenders, score them against your checklist.  If you don’t score 80% or above, don’t tender for the work, put your sales efforts into other activities.

4. Roles and responsibilities

For those tenders that score 80% or above, agree roles, responsibilities and deadlines between the sales team, ensuring you’re not leaving things till the last minute.

5. Research

Research really is king when it comes to tendering.  You need to look into the tendering organisations business, look at what they’ve done in the past, read the tender document from front to back, and compile a thorough understanding of what they are trying to achieve, who their key buyers/audience are and who they are competing with.

6. Complete draft one of the tender

Draft one is critical as its about putting all of your thoughts down onto paper.  It’s important to see this as the first draft as you’re bound to think of additional/relevant knowledge and experience as you’re producing the response.  Make sure that during this stage you’re answering the information that is being asked of you, and make it 100% relevant to the company your bidding to.

7. Amend, edit, review

The review process should take a while, it’s not about proof reading at this stage, it’s about ensuring you’re answering the right questions, that the response has been correctly levelled against the scoring criteria of the tender and that you’re happy with the message the tender response gives about your business.

8. Sleep on it

Once you’ve edited the response, sleep on it.  We’ve all been there when we’ve submitted our tender response and instantly thought ‘I should have included XYZ’.  It’s important to plan your time ahead to give you this important down time before the response is due.

9. Proof read

Only then should you proof read your response for spelling and grammatical errors.  During this stage you should also ensure you’ve kept to any word count or font suggestions from the Invitation to Tender document.  After you’re happy with the response, ask someone else to read it, it’s hard to see mistakes with our own content when you’ve read it so many times before.

10. Submit

Submit your response, giving yourself plenty of time before the deadline is due.  Consider how long this might take when using online public sector tendering platforms, as they are not always as straightforward as they may first appear.

 

 

 

 

 

Can we have your feedback on how you currently tender for new business?

Posted on by John Hudson

Can we have your feedback on how you currently tender for new business?

Before we started developing our product we took a selection of creative agencies feedback on the systems they use and how they tender for work. This ranged quite a bit but a few usual culprits appeared. Usually the ones that people knew about were from their local authorities, but there are so many opportunities out there, you just need to be able to find them.

If we understand how people currently tender, we will be able to improve our tendering system. We believe Creative Tenders should be a constantly evolving product and we believe with more ideas up our sleeve that we can change the way business is done globally – a big statement to live up to, right?

So which tendering websites do you use? Do you pay for tendering access or do you only use the free websites that you have found by accident as and when they appear?

What do you like about these tendering sites? Do you find any of them particularly easy or hard to use? If so we need to know, we need to make sure that our system is the best on the market. As we only have sector relevant tenders and we are industry experts, we know with the right feedback from our clients we can create a system that will have huge impact on the sector, and a huge impact on each and every one of our clients businesses.

If you want to send us your feedback so that we can shape a system that is right for you and your business, email Jill on jill@creativetenders.co.uk.