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How to Respond to a Tender
By Cheryl Smith
28 min read
The Invitation to Tender (ITT) arrives like a treasure map from Middle-earth; X marks the spot for new business. But complex technical requirements, tight deadlines, and the pressure to stand-out is enough to send even the most seasoned tender professional into a panic.
Contents
About the author
Cheryl Smith
Senior Content Writer
Cheryl Smith has been writing and managing proposals since 1998. Shipley trained, she has helped establish proposal centers and advised on capture strategy, coached orals teams and lead marketing, communications and knowledge management programs. Cheryl is a graduate of The George Washington University with degrees in Theatre, Communications and Literature.
Between defining strategy and drafting content to coordinating resources and reviews, teams invest a great deal of time and resources in responding to a Tender. In highly competitive sectors, like construction and government contracting, competition is fierce. With large companies investing time and resources into approximately 150+ Tenders a year, averaging about 5,184+ resource hours, it’s crucial to invest your time wisely.
150+
Tenders a year invested in by large companies
5184
Resource hours spent on tenders in large companies
Fear not! This ebook is your trusty guide through the Tender labyrinth. Forget scrambling in the dark; we will equip you with the strategies and tools you need to forge a Tender response so powerful, it will leave your competition weeping into their spreadsheets.
Understanding the Tender Landscape
The effort companies invest in responding to Tenders underscores the importance of understanding its purpose as a business sales strategy and client procurement vehicle.
What is an Tender?
A Tender, or Invitation to Tender (ITT) is a formal, open request for bids to complete a new project proposed by a government, agency or company. Some countries make a distinction between public and private tenders. The former are issued by public bodies, such as the State, defense, health, administration, local authorities and town halls, and require far more formalities than the latter.
The ITT document outlines the tendering authority’s proposed project requirements. The Tender process secures bids from vendors. An ITT response is referred to as a Tender Proposal or proposal.
It’s basically a procurement vehicle; a pre-established process that allows organizations to acquire goods or services efficiently.
Is a Tender the same as an RFP?
While often used interchangeably, there are some distinct differences between a Tender and a Request for Proposal (RFP). Both are formal, open requests for bids to complete a new project proposed by a government, agency or company. Both outline the tendering authority’s proposed project requirements. Both processes secure bids from vendors. Both responses are referred to as a proposal.
However, RFPs focus more on how the vendor would approach the project, While Tenders offer little wiggle room regarding the solution. RFPs emphasize technical capabilities, compliance, and qualifications. Where Tenders emphasize price and strict adherence to pre-defined specifications.
Public entities must be as open with their practices as possible to ensure transparency with tax dollar funding. While many private companies are not held to the same practices, many have adopted the Tender process for its perceived ethical “best practices.”
Are there other types of Tenders?
Yes, there are other Tender-related procurement vehicles you should be aware of, including the ITQ and RFQ. These are also formal documents issued by an organization that is looking to procure goods and services, sometimes in conjunction with the ITT.
This ebook focuses on your Tender response, or proposal, however, many of these best practices and tactics are easily applied to your RFP process as well.
|
EOI (Expression of Interest) |
ITT (Invitation to Tender) |
ITQ (Invitation to Quote) |
RFQ (Request for Quotation) |
|
|
Focus |
Gage vendor interest |
Evaluate requirements at price |
Shorter, less detailed ITT |
Gather price quotes |
|
Level of Detail |
Briefly outlines requirements |
Well-defined requirements |
Specific requirements at specific timelines |
Well-defined requirements |
|
Evaluation Criteria |
Background, experience, capabilities, qualifications |
Price, technical compliance, ability to deliver |
Typically pre-selected vendors, Price, expertise, delivery |
Quality, technical capabilities, warranty |
|
Example |
IT Infrastructure Upgrade |
Construction |
Lower value goods and services |
Goods and services |
Who Issues an ITT?
Any organization seeking to procure goods or services from external vendors can issue an ITT or Tender. Tendering authority’s include a wide range of entities, for example:
- National and Local Governments: This could include ministries, departments, or local authorities procuring infrastructure projects, office supplies or IT services.
- Public Institutions: Hospitals, universities, or public transportation authorities might use Tenders to acquire medical equipment, construction services, or maintenance contracts.
- State-Owned Enterprises: Government-controlled companies may issue Tenders for materials, equipment or services needed for their operations.
In essence, any organization funded by or accountable to the public often resorts to Tenders to ensure a fair and transparent selection process when awarding contracts. A private company might also use a Tender to solicit proposals from vendors, for example for a marketing campaign or a software development process.
Who responds to an ITT?
When it comes to seeking opportunities to provide goods and services, companies of all sizes and across all industries respond to Tenders. Responding to a specific Tender is a team effort, drawing resources from across your organization. Depending on the size and scope of the Tender, your proposal team will typically involve:
- Proposal Writer: Takes the lead in writing the bulk of the tender response document, ensuring it adheres to the format and addresses all evaluation criteria outlined in the Tender Invitation. They weave information provided by other team members into a cohesive and persuasive narrative.
- Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): Depending on the complexity of the Tender, technical specialists or industry experts might be consulted to provide specific details related to the project requirements For example, an engineer on the team might contribute technical specifications for a construction project.
- Project Manager: Oversees the overall tender response process, ensuring tasks are delegated, deadlines are met and the final submission is complete, compliant and error-free.
- Pricing Team: Responsible for calculating accurate cost estimates and developing a competitive pricing strategy for the Tender response.
- Legal Department: Might review the Tender response to ensure it complies with all legal requirements and avoids any ambiguity that could disqualify the bid or threaten the project agreement.
The specific team structure can vary depending on the size and resources of the company. Smaller companies might have a single person handle most aspects of the response, while larger companies can dedicate entire departments to proposal development.
Who reads your Tender response?
Who reads your proposal once it’s submitted? Who wields the power to turn your proposal into a paying project? A committee comprising of several individuals, often including a mix of the following:
- Technical Experts: These individuals process the technical knowledge and expertise required to evaluate whether the proposed solution meets the technical specifications outlined in the Tender. For example, an engineer might be part of the committee assessing construction tenders.
- Procurement Specialist: These professionals understand the procurement regulations and ensure the Tender evaluation process follows established guidelines.
- Project Manager: They represent the client and provide insights into the projects’ needs and goals.
Based on the evaluation, the committee shortlists the most qualified bidders. Further discussions or presentations might be conducted before a final decision is made and the tender is awarded to the winning bidder.
Contract Award
The Contract Award is the point in the procurement process when the tendering authority officially selects you as the winning bidder. Think of it as crossing the finish line after careful evaluation, negotiation and deliberation. Both parties sign the contract, and the project or service can officially commence.
The Contract Award is a significant milestone for both parties, signifying trust and confidence in the chosen approach to delivering the desired outcomes.
But first, you and your team must respond to the ITT.
Decoding the Tender’s Requirements
Reading a large, complex Tender is a little intimidating. However, when you know what to look for you can proceed strategically. Start by familiarizing yourself with the documents and their structure. Then analyze the tender using a standard list of steps and goals, for example:
- Skim the Tender documents to locate key sections and information details.
- Read each document in detail, and take notes on key points.
- Dissect each document and ensure you understand the requirements and selection criteria.
- Clarify as you dissect, taking note of ambiguous requirements that might require interpretation or clarification with the client.
ITT Structure
While there is no universally mandated outline, most ITT’s follow a similar structure to ensure clarity and consistency. Clients may also require a format, for example a Table of Contents with precise terms for each Heading.
Introduction:
Briefly describes the project and includes key information such as submission deadlines, inquiry contacts, and submission instructions. Look for the customer’s needs, project expectations, and their intended path to success.
Instructions:
Detailed instructions governing your response creation, including required format, number of submission copies, evaluation criteria, and any specific requirements or exclusions. Look for anything out of the ordinary that might need to be added to your process.
Background:
Offers context about the project, client organization and their needs, for example, project objective, target audience, clients background and experience. Look for context and intent that might influence your narrative.
Requirements:
Details the specific project requirements, specifically technical specifications for goods or services, deliverables expected and timeline for project completion. Look for the specific tasks, activities, and deliverables expected from the selected vendor.
Selection Criteria:
Criteria used for evaluation, for example, specification compliance, technical expertise and qualifications, quality of proposed solution, and pricing and cost structure. Look for the weight assigned to each requirement or section and what is most important to the customer.
Submission Requirements:
Specifically what bidders must include with their submission, for example, company profile and experience, technical specifications of the proposed solution, financial information and pricing details, and references from previous relevant projects. Look for proposal outline, schedule, and submission procedure.
Additional Documents:
Some Tenders also might include standard terms and conditions to govern the contract, contract templates and questionnaires for bidders to complete. Look for clauses that may expose you to financial risks or legal liabilities.
Clarification Process:
This section might outline the process for bidders to submit clarification questions regarding the tender documents. Look for deadlines that might shut you out of the clarification process.
How to evaluate the ITT
Evaluating a Tender request as a vendor requires careful consideration. Thoroughly analyze the documents and don’t hesitate to clarify any doubts.
- Skim. Skim the Tender documents and locate key information.
- Dive. Read each section thoroughly, taking notes of key points.
- Dissect. Dissect the documents to ensure you understand the requirements and selection criteria.
- Clarify. As you dissect the documents, take note of any ambiguously worded requirements. These might require interpretation for your team, or clarification with the issuing agency.
How to Respond to an ITT
Your response to an ITT is a proposal, or communication vehicle that outlines your proposed solution and plan of action. For the tendering authority, your proposal must adhere to the rules and engage interest. For you the vendor, your proposal must address the organization's need, demonstrate your experience, and persuade evaluators to accept your thinking.
ITT Response Process
The Tender response process, also known as the bidding process, is the series of steps vendors take to submit a formal offer in response to an ITT, or Invitation to Tender.
The goal of your process is to efficiently align your time and resources behind your common goal. With clear, easy to understand and follow steps. Your goal as a proposal manager, or the one who manages the process, is to shepherd your team of contributors through the process.
Your process should also be aimed at optimizing time and scaling to opportunity size and value. Large businesses take on larger opportunities, so they deploy more process steps. Smaller opportunities typically require fewer steps.
Planning
Don’t let lack of time and organization hold you back from winning. While you can’t control the calendar, you can control how you approach your team and tender response development. Planning up-front helps you establish goals, responsibilities, and expectations, as well as adapt your process. It also helps you prepare to respond to questions as your team creates your response.
Compliance Matrix
Today’s tenders are highly competitive. Organizations follow strict compliance rules and selection criteria. Missing even a single requirement can lower your score, or worse, mean disqualification.
A compliance matrix helps you cross-reference tender requirements with your response. This could be a table or a spreadsheet, as long as it displays each requirement side-by-side with the location of your response in the proposal.
A compliance matrix works so well, it often becomes a part of the tender submission to help evaluators understand exactly how your proposed solution aligns with their project requirements.
Outline
Proposal outlines are typically defined by the ITT. (See Tender Submission Guidelines.) This ensures a logical organization that helps evaluators find what they need to score. If your tender does not include outline guidelines, consider mimicking a standard proposal outline, such as:
- Executive Summary
- Introduction
- Understanding of Requirements
- Proposed Solution
- Methodology and Implementation Plan
- Qualifications and Experience
- Pricing and Cost Breakdown
- Conclusion
- Appendix (Optional)
Above all, stick to the required format, and arrange your content within that format in a logical manner.
The key to a winning outline is making your proposal easy to read and score. A typical outline will include each requirement, followed by your response. And use headings and subheadings to make your differentiators and discriminators stand out.
Writers Package
The goal of the writer’s package is to communicate your pursuit, or win, strategy to your team. This ensures your team understands your value proposition, how you compare to the competition, and how to optimize your evaluation score.
Tip! Want to reduce revisions? Before your team begins writing, annotate your outline with a great opening statement, relevant evidence, and a great closing statement.
Teams who begin development with a writer’s package are more likely to deliver on expectations without repetitive revisions. Your Win Strategy includes what you know about the organization and how you position against the competition. It typically includes:
- Customer’s needs, challenges, decision makers and decision-making process.
- Customer’s existing solutions and providers.
- Competition’s strengths and weaknesses..
- Value proposition, or your compelling delivery promise.
- Your differentiators and discriminators, or what are your unique strengths.
Use this information to articulate key informative and persuasive writing tools for your team. For example:
- Win Themes. Strategic messaging that is used as headers or subheaders to guide evaluators and remind them of your value.
- Differentiators. Your features that differ from your competition.
- Discriminators. Your features that differ from your competition, and are also acknowledged as significant by the customer.
- Ghosting. Competitors' weaknesses inferred by highlighting your strengths. (Without mentioning any names, of course.)
- Evidence. Support your claims and build credibility using relevant quotes, case studies and figures.
- Requirements. Guide your team with section and/or requirement annotations that help them get started and meet your expectations.
- Style. Before writing begins, agree on a writing style, which is typically active, short sentences, and no jargon to boost readability.
Remember, clarifications and amendments may impact your Win Strategy. We recommend centralizing it to avoid version control issues and confusion as it evolves.
Kick-Off
The kick-off meeting typically occurs within two to three days of receiving the tender. Its goal is to get your team on the same page when it comes to strategy, responsibilities, and deadlines. It is also an opportunity to get your team excited about the project. A typical agenda includes:
- Pursuit Strategy: Describe how you plan to win the business, and how the writer’s package will help meet response development expectations.
- Tasks and Deadlines: Step through the timeline, and discuss key milestones and deadlines as well as any missing skills and content dependencies.
- Ambiguity: Identify any vague or ambiguous requirements, and define how to interpret them. Identify which questions should be submitted for clarification.
- Conflicts: Identify scheduling conflicts that impact tasks and deadlines and plan to either reallocate resources or adjust the schedule.
- Follow-Up: Communicate to confirm what was discussed, especially if any information has changed as a result of the meeting.
Writing
Quality tender proposals use persuasive writing techniques to engage readers. Once engaged, you'll have the opportunity to persuade them to consider accepting your solution. Here are some tips to engage and persuade your readers:
- Tell a Story: Anecdotes and scenarios go a long way to boosting understanding by adding relevant context the reader can understand.
- A Touch of Empathy: An empathetic perspective demonstrates you understand why the organization needs the project, not just what the project involves.
- Focus on the Benefits: Show, don't tell. When you show how you solve the problem, you demonstrate your expertise and build understanding and credibility.
- Counter Objections: Anticipate objections and counter them with your perspective and expertise to position your team as a problem-solver with foresight.
Reusable Content
There’s no doubt about it, leveraging existing content is a time-saver. However, we advise caution. Evaluators can spot it a mile away. So, leverage your reusable content, but use these tricks to tailor and remove the taint of reuse:
- Start by splitting the reusable content’s context from the required response.
- Replace the context with the “what’s in it for me” for this client.
- Realign for evaluation scoring and fold in your win themes.
- Infuse each with a relevant, real-life detail to leave a lasting impression.
Still slicing and dicing your tenders so different experts can write at the same time? Your competition is saving time with co-authoring. They’re skipping the slice and dice and document compilation, and investing more time in quality to optimize their evaluation scores..
Reviewing
Reviewing is a critical development milestone. It ensures accuracy and compliance as well as readability. Reviewing feedback also provides a “roadmap” for revisions where you have the opportunity to strengthen the quality of your tender proposal. Set your team up for success by:
- Assemble your Team: Include experts and management, as well as independent reviewers who are unfamiliar with the opportunity.
- Define Expectations: Communicate what you are looking for. In other words, improvements as well as corrections. And, please, no formatting notes.
- Define Feedback: Ask for instructions, not opinions. Explain that the result should be a “roadmap” for how to revise and take your proposal to the next quality level.
- Embrace the Feedback Loop: Hold collaborative reviews where people can question, clarify, and come to consensus on improvements.
The number of reviewers you involve will typically depend on the size and contract value of the tender. For example, large, complex tenders tend to have more reviews and more types of reviewers. On the other hand, smaller, more standard tenders, tend to deploy less reviews and reviewers.
Revising
Some reviewer feedback may involve compliance and accuracy - always double-check your facts, figures and references. However, the bulk of your revisions should focus on improvements. Think of this as a fine-tuning process for elevating your proposal from good to exceptional.
As you take action on review comments:
- Sharpen Content. Focus on a logical flow of information and concise communication. Revisit each section, Strengthen your arguments, eliminate redundancies, shorten your sentences, and support your claims.
- Polish Language. Refine language by eliminating jargon and technical terms, unless it is essential for the reader. Scrutinize for typos, grammatical errors and punctuation. Aim for a confident and persuasive tone with the reader, but stay professional.
- Read Aloud. This might feel awkward at first, but that is actually the result you want. Reading your proposal aloud can reveal awkward phrasing, inconsistencies and missed transitions. If it sounds awkward in your mind, it will sound awkward to the reader, and that will raise questions you don’t want during evaluation. Smooth the narrative to ensure an easy and impactful reading experience for the client.
In today’s competitive landscape, proposal quality can make or break your chances. A well-written proposal clearly communicates your value, and makes it easier for evaluators to select and defend you as the winning choice.
Production
The proposal is written, reviewed, improved, and approved. Now it's time to finalize and package your tender proposal for submission. While this might mean printing hardcopies, it might also mean preparing files for an online or portal submission.
Either way, setting expectations and following standardized steps makes it faster and easier:
- Roles: Proposal Coordinator, Production Manager, Desktop Publisher, Graphics Designer and Writer.
- Compliance: Confirm your proposal with your compliance matrix.
- Proofread: Proofread for grammar and punctuation. Confirm your headers and footers.
- Assemble: Confirm required documents and volume separation requirements.
- Layout: Review and correct layout and formatting. Pay close attention to headings, subheadings, call-out boxes, graphics and tables.
- Check for Amendments: There’s nothing like a last-minute amendment to change the game, and push out the schedule.
Submission
You’ve submitted your proposal, but the job doesn’t actually end there.
- Confirm. Send a brief email to the ITT contact. Confirm your submission, and express your appreciation. Add that you are available for clarification questions or follow-up discussions.
- Stay vigilant. Monitor your email or the client’s portal for updates. The client might have questions about your submission.
- Congratulate your team. They worked hard, and you couldn’t have done it without them. Kudos to everyone! (You might want to refrain from reminding them when the next tender is due for today.)
- Schedule the Debrief: Win or lose, this is your opportunity to emphasize what’s working and fix what’s not.
Take a breath! You worked hard and taking a break now will refresh and better prepare you for your next proposal.
Lessons Learned
There’s not always a lot of time between proposals, but pausing now to reflect and improve can make you more efficient and effective next time. No one likes to rinse and repeat while expecting different results. Focus on identifying why you ended up with the proposal you submitted - and where you can make improvements to make it easier and higher-quality next time. For example:
- Collaboration. Does everyone have easy access to each other and the content? Or are documents being passed back and forth via email, leaving experts out of the conversation?.
- Coordination. Does everyone know where their piece of the puzzle fits and what is expected of them? Or are they wasting time searching for what to do by when?
- Quality Assurance. Does everyone know what quality looks like and why it’s important? Or are experts just answering the questions?
Teams who regularly evaluate and improve their process execute a more seamless transition from ITT and submission to award, and scale to take on more proposals.
Ready to Produce Quality RFP Proposals 70% Faster?
If there’s one constant in tendering it would be the combination of limited time and strained resources. Meanwhile, you are being asked to do more with less. By mastering these steps, you'll be on your way to a more standard process.
By leveraging technology, you’ll achieve the efficiency and effectiveness you seek. Imagine extra time to improve quality, and to take on more tenders with your same staff. A crucial edge in today’s competitive landscape.
How does Xait help our global clients master their tender process?
Let’s connect and talk about how Xait can help you increase your chances of winning new Tender contracts.
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