Tender Ready
Tender Ready
As mentioned, time and time again, by our Consultancy Team, tendering can be quite daunting, especially if you have never responded or even seen what a tender looks like.
Here at Tender VLE, we want to give you the key tools to help you on your way, ensuring you understand the basics and progressing through to more advanced knowledge of how best to understand the tendering and procurement world.
The first stages of tendering are crucial in ensuring you get it right, and this is part of what we call being “Tender Ready.”
Indeed, before you even decide on a contract to go for, there are a few things that you can have prepared in advance that will make your life much easier when it comes to developing tenders. We have provided our Top 4 things that you need to consider when being Tender Ready:
1 – Experience and technical capabilities
Firstly, buyers need to see past experience of your delivery. To provide the buyer with confidence in your ability to undergo the work involved, you need to demonstrate you can actually deliver the work you’re bidding for. You can do this by providing thorough, detailed and robust examples of where you have delivered similar work in the past.
Be organised and prepare at least 3 good case studies for each service you offer, detailing the timescale and value, achievements, outcomes, challenges and lessons learned.
For more information about writing a great case study that will showcase your credentials, please click here to go straight to our dedicated “Case studies” video.
2 – Policies and procedures
Secondly, make sure your organisation possesses the relevant policies and procedures in which you actively implement and use every single day. This may vary depending on the sector, but the most important ones consist of the following:
- Health and Safety policy
- Equality and Diversity policy
- Quality Policy
- Environmental Policy
- Customer Service / Complaints policy etc.
For more information about policies and procedures, please click here to go straight to our dedicated video on this topic.
3 – Organisational structure
Thirdly, we recommend you have a clear team structure with a chain of command, clearly defined roles and responsibilities and deputising and reporting procedures.
Using an organogram, or organisation chart can be a useful, simple and visually appealing way of presenting your organisation structure to the buyer. It lets them see who does what and who manages each area. Such information can be backed up by detailed and clear team profiles and CVs.
4 – Boilerplate responses and generic content
Fourthly, it is a great idea to have a bank of pre-prepared “boilerplate responses.” These are templates for responses to questions or topics which often come up, or which can be reasonably anticipated.
These save you precious time and resources, meaning your work on a given response might only be a few tweaks here and there to tailor it to the question being asked. This then allows you to divert your energies to more specific, technical and in-depth questions.
Being Tender Ready involves demonstrating to buyers that you understand how your organisation operates, what it is you offer, your resources and experience and what your ethos is.
It’s hard to convince a buyer to choose you if it looks like you yourself don’t know what you’re talking about and you have multiple inconsistencies across your brand, as well as having little to no evidence of previous delivery.
Getting the necessary information together and producing high-quality literature that is detailed and clear is a mammoth task, but an important first step.
Here at Tender VLE and our sister company, Hudson Succeed, we are here to help.
If you’re feeling confused by the tendering process, or daunted, or are needing that all important first step in the right direction, then our Tender Ready service, carried out by the Tender Consultants team, is the one for you.
Click here to speak to our Bid Writing Consultants Team today and find out more about how we can help your business lay solid foundations for tendering.
