Underrated tender tips: simple techniques to boost your next bid’s success

When it comes to tenders, bids, and proposals, most people focus on the obvious strategies: having a strong offering, understanding the client’s needs, and ensuring compliance with the RFT.

But what about the less obvious tips that can make all the difference?

Here are a few of my favourite underrated tender tips that could give you an edge in your next bid.

1. Overestimate the time required for writing, reviewing, and finalising

Anyone who’s ever been involved in a tender, bid, or proposal knows it’s often surprising just how many key decisions are required along the way.

It’s not just about deciding who will draft various components of your bid. Often, it’s the first time your business has had to document its service plan or project methodology in detail. Or, a bid might request information on a new area, throwing up questions and requiring more decisions that hadn’t been previously contemplated.

Your business needs time to ‘get its story straight’- to figure out how it will actually deliver on the promises made in the bid. Don’t underestimate how long this process can take.

Overestimating the time needed for writing, reviewing, refining, and settling your responses allows for unexpected delays and ensures that you’re not rushing at the last minute, which can lead to costly mistakes.

Recommendation: Depending on the complexity of the bid – add 25% or 50% more time than you initially estimate for writing and reviews.

See Bidtique’s resource on an ‘ideal’ bid timetable to help you gauge where your bid should be up to at any point in time.

2. Tight version control: avoiding document chaos

One of the greatest challenges in bid management is keeping track of multiple versions of documents, especially when several (remote) contributors are involved. Poor version control can lead to confusion, missed updates, and even the submission of the wrong version of a document.

Simple boundaries around who is accessing what and when can head off ‘confusion.’

If you have document management software that locks documents when someone is editing them, make sure everyone knows how to use it. If not, clear communication is key. A quick email or a note in your project plan indicating who is working on which section can prevent version control issues.

Meaningful naming conventions like adding “V1,” “V2,” with the time and date to filenames can also help ensure everyone is working on the correct version. And always save your work frequently - autosave is your friend! Make sure it is enabled.

Recommendation: For complex bids, consider developing text-heavy sections in separate plain Word documents, allowing for easy tracking of changes and feedback, before dropping the final content into your formatted document, the RFP spreadsheet or etender portal.

Consider too using a central repository such as SharePoint integrated with MS 365 apps such as Teams or Google Docs to work ‘live’ in the documents collectively and also coordinate and manage comms.

3. Bid less often: the power of saying no

It might seem counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to improve your tender success rate is to bid less often. Not every opportunity is worth pursuing, and sometimes the best business development decision you can make is to say no.

Bidding on fewer ‘opportunities’ allows you to focus your resources on the tenders that you have the best chance of winning, ensuring that you can put in the time and effort required to submit a high-quality response.

Recommendation: Implement a consistent bid or no bid process and record the business case for bidding (or not). Bidtique’s ‘Bid or no bid’ checklist is a good place to start.

4. Use Word templates to streamline formatting

Microsoft Word is a tool that just about everyone already has, but it has some lesser-known features that can really power your tender writing. While it might be nice to have your tender beautifully laid out in a graphics program like Adobe InDesign, most bids don’t allow for that level of design polish.

Instead, make the most of Word’s capabilities by using templates with built-in ‘Styles.’ Templates that have your firm’s branding baked in allow you to focus on writing while ensuring visual consistency across your document. This is particularly important for long tenders, where manual formatting can be a nightmare and lead to buggy, unstable and visually jarring documents.

Recommendation: Using templates not only saves time but also helps create a professional, easy-to-read bid that evaluators will appreciate. If you don’t have a nicely branded proposal ‘look’ already consider investing in professionally designed and set up Word templates.

5. Don’t get caught short on compliance - delegate simple tasks early

Leaving simple tasks until the last minute is a common mistake in tender preparation. Basic compliance requirements - such as filling out contact forms, gathering business stats, and addressing compliance aspects such as insurance cover or data security - are often seen as ‘quick’n’easy five minute jobs’, and therefore not worth focusing on early in the process.

Often these elements can uncover ‘new’ issues – ‘do we have separate cyber insurance in place?’ and you will need time to investigate and formulate a position and response per point 1 above.

Also, many compliance elements can easily be delegated to non-specialist staff, freeing up your key team contributors to concentrate on the more complex parts of the bid.

Recommendation: Prioritising identification, delegation and completion of these ‘simple’ tasks early reduces stress and last-minute panic, allowing you to focus on the elements of the bid that really matter and spend the necessary time really tailoring your proposal.

If you are bidding frequently on similar opportunities consider a standard ‘compliance’ checklist for the team to reference or even delegate a team member to coordinate bid compliance elements.

Remember…

Successful tendering isn’t just about having the best team, service, or solution; it’s also about managing the process effectively so you can get a compliant bid in on time.

By overestimating the time required, maintaining tight version control, bidding less often, using Word templates, and delegating simple tasks early, you can significantly increase your chances of success.

Sometimes it’s by paying attention to the overlooked or underrated tips that can make the biggest difference (especially to your team’s sanity and stress levels).

Which of these tips could you integrate into your tender, bid and proposal processes for next time?

Let us know, and if you need help with bid process improvement or a specific bid, why not get in touch, Bidtique can help.

Happy bidding!