Chapter 1: Tender Tips
The Australian construction industry is a competitive market. If your business is to succeed in winning valuable projects, your tender response must be watertight. However, responding to a request for tender can be time consuming.
Businesses that don’t have the internal resources to prepare a carefully considered tender application, or the budget to outsource this job to suppliers, can find themselves losing out to their competitors because of simple errors.
In this chapter of the Building a Better Trade Business eCourse, we outline how your business can avoid common tender mistakes, formulate a better response, and win more work.
Pre-response Checklist
As mentioned, preparing a tender response is rarely a quick and easy process. Before you even begin to write your response, it’s important that you read the request for tender carefully and decide whether you satisfy its requirements.
When gauging whether or not to invest your time in a tender response, ask:
- Does your business have the resources to complete the project?
- Do you have the financial means to deliver the tender requirements?
- Do you have the capacity to complete the work on time, budget and to quality?
- Is there any conflict of interest in you submitting your tender response?
- Do you meet pre-qualification requirements?
- Do you meet qualitative requirements?
- Do you meet compliance requirements, e.g certification to industry standards like ISO 9001?
- Have you considered any associated payment conditions and retentions?
How to Plan Your Tender Response
Once you are confident that your business is in a competitive position to respond to the tender request, you may begin planning your submission. These documents are often complex and lengthy, so it’s essential that you put them under the microscope to avoid overlooking information that is vital to a successful response.
Before beginning your response, check to see whether the tender request includes a response template or format. Submitting a tender response that doesn’t follow the provided response template is a sure way to end up at the bottom of the pile.
Things to consider in the planning phase of your tender response include:
- Word limits for each response section.
- File formats required in the response.
- Do you have all of the required information, like a company profile and references, at hand?
- Are you able to address all selection criteria
The selection requirements section of the request will outline the information you will need to demonstrate within your response. Selection requirements are commonly divided into three sections: pre-qualification, compliance, and qualitative. Within each of these sections, you will be asked to elaborate on how your business satisfies these requirements.
How to Stand Out in Your Tender Response
In a sea of competitive submissions, it’s important that you don’t only satisfy all of the request requirements, but that you also stand out from the crowd. Your business should go above and beyond in demonstrating your unquestioned capacity to complete the project. Thankfully, there are a few simple ways that you can differentiate your response.
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Write a Strong Tender Response Cover Letter
Like in any job application, the cover letter is your opportunity to make a good first impression. Tender requests often require that you include a cover letter, however even for those that don’t, including one is a good idea (unless specifically instructed otherwise).
The fundamental ingredients of a tender cover letter include:
- A good quality logo or letterhead. Consider saving your logo in PNG format for the best resolution.
- Stick to one page in length.
- Addressed to the correct person.
- Signed by a senior member of your organisation.
Your tender response cover letter may follow a structure similar to:
- Introduction: A brief sentence to introduce your business and your response. You may also wish to thank them for inviting you to tender, if applicable.
- Your point of difference: After your introduction, clearly and confidently state why your business is a strong candidate for the project.
- Your commitment: Following your point of difference, you may state your commitment to the success of the project, and refer to any similar projects that you have completed.
If your tender response includes supplementary information, like a supporting video in DVD format, you may also wish to highlight this in your cover letter.
Use Styling to Make Your Response Stand Out
Your tender response should not be a showcase of design, however it should be easy to understand. Using bullet points to break up large blocks of text is friendly on the reader, and using diagrams, charts and graphs provides visual interest.
Remember that styling like this should support the information in your response, not make it more difficult to understand.
How to Avoid Common Mistakes in Your Tender Response
Your tender response should stand out for the right reasons. Consistent spelling and grammatical errors do not demonstrate a commitment to quality; they communicate carelessness and poor attention to detail, which is far from the impression you wish to make in your tender response.
Using what is called ‘active voice’ over ‘passive voice’ is an easy way to improve the readability of your tender response. Consider the following example:
Passive voice: “This project was completed by XYZ.”
Active voice: “XYZ completed this project.”
While it may not seem like a substantial difference, documents written entirely in passive voice can be tiring to read.
However, spelling and grammar are not the only common mistakes that businesses make when submitting their tender response. Others include:
- Providing inaccurate pricing.
- Not addressing the selection criteria.
- Including a large volume of unnecessary information.
- Failing to attach the required documents.
- Referring to documents that have not been attached.
- Forgetting to sign the tender response where required.
- Failing to use the response template provided.
- Including poor quality or fraudulent testimonials.
- Failing to submit the response on time.
In conclusion, your tender response should be given the attention it deserves. However, we understand that many construction businesses simply don’t have the time or resources to outsource this job to expensive consultants. Using the simple strategies outlined above, your business should have a fighting chance in creating a great tender submission and winning more work.
In the next chapter of the Building a Better Trade Business eCourse, we dive into how builders can use online marketing techniques to grow their business.