When it comes to tender writing, success often depends on your ability to stand out among a sea of similar bids.
Standing out starts long before you begin writing your tender – it starts with understanding your competition. Competitive Intelligence (CI) in tender writing isn’t about corporate espionage – it’s about collecting, analysing, and using publicly available information to understand your competitors better, and to craft a superior bid.
Understanding Competitive Intelligence
CI is an ongoing, systematic process of gathering and analysing information about your competitors. In the context of tender writing, this includes information about other businesses likely to bid on the same tenders you’re pursuing. It can help you better understand:
- Their strengths and weaknesses.
- The strategies they use.
- Their market positioning and how they differentiate themselves.
- Their past performance and track records.
- Pricing strategies and value propositions.
Information you gather about your competitors can help you identify gaps in their offerings, align your proposals to better meet buyer needs, and craft a value proposition that distinguishes you from the pack.
Why Competitive Intelligence is Important
In an increasingly competitive tender environment, buyers have more choices and are looking harder than ever to find the best value, rather than just the lowest cost. They have score sheets that put your bid against your competitors’, and because of this, merely having a good bid is not enough to guarantee success. The better you understand your competition, the better you can position your offer to stand out and win.
Buyers are also under more pressure to spend wisely. This means that they are paying more attention to what they’re getting for their money, not just how much they are paying.
Competition Insights Become Powerful
The more you know about your competitors and their likely strategies, the more effectively you can craft your own offer to meet buyer needs, differentiate from others, and address gaps that competitors are likely to miss.
Some of the specific advantages of using CI include:
- Helping you anticipate competitor pricing or value propositions. This can help you price your own bid competitively or demonstrate superior value.
- Identifying common language, clichés, or promises found in other bids. This can help you avoid sounding like everyone else and strike a more personal, authentic tone.
- Detecting common patterns in successful bids. Over time, you may start to see what wins in specific markets or with specific buyers.
Responding to client pain points that competitors may be ignoring. Buyers are often open about the challenges they face. By paying attention to this information, you can tailor your bid to solve their pain points better than others.
Where to Gather Competitive Intelligence
The best source of information is usually the one that is easiest to find. You don’t need to hack into your competitors’ databases to get the information you need. Simple research can go a long way, and there are several sources of information that can provide valuable insights. Some of the most useful sources include:
- Tender portals and award notices. Sites like AusTender, NSW eTendering, and your local council procurement portals often list information on previous contract awardees, winning bid prices, and sometimes summary scoring.
- Company websites and marketing collateral. Competitors’ websites, brochures, and other marketing materials can reveal service offerings, client lists, testimonials, case studies, and areas of focus.
- Annual reports and public disclosures. This is especially useful for larger organisations, as these documents often contain information on growth targets, new markets or service areas, or even potential capacity issues.
- Industry events and webinars. Competitors often present their capabilities, innovation, and key personnel at events and webinars that are open to the public.
- Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Depending on the procurement, you may be able to use FOI laws to request (redacted) copies of successful bids.
How to Use Your Competitive Intelligence
Once you’ve gathered the relevant information, it’s time to interpret it and decide what it means for your business. Systematic analysis of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is key, so it’s important to break down the information you’ve found and use it to help you position your bid strategically.
Capability and Experience
Review past project work, client industries, and the scope of services they offer. Are there competitors who consistently win in a niche you’re also bidding on? Do you consistently outperform in certain service elements?
Pricing and Value
Precise pricing is hard to find, but consider looking at contract award notices to understand competitors’ cost positions. Do any consistently undercut, or do others focus on added value through innovation or sustainability, for example?
Innovation and Differentiation
Do any competitors use certain types of technology, systems, or delivery models that you don’t? Do they focus on innovation in a way that could outmatch yours?
Reputation and Client Relationships
Search online for customer reviews, testimonials, awards, or industry recognition. Inconsistencies or negative reviews might indicate areas where you can come in with a more professional, reliable approach.
Compliance and Risk
Look for evidence of any past issues with contract terminations, safety or compliance breaches, or regulatory investigations. It’s a sensitive topic, but if such information is in the public domain, your bid can highlight your business’s lower-risk, more compliant profile by comparison.
How to Turn It Into Competitive Advantage
The hard work is done. Now it’s time to use the information to plan your position. CI will be the foundation of your tender approach and your secret weapon against the competition. Here are some ways to put it into practice in your tenders:
- Frame your USP with it in mind. Whether you’ve consistently delivered faster timescales, have deep local market experience, or perhaps even superior customer service ratings, a superior strength in one or more areas will outmatch most of your competition. This is the strength you’ll want to make your USP.
- Neutralise known strengths of the competition. If your competitor has a well-known reputation for scale and breadth of capabilities, you can position your business as more agile, personal, and responsive to client needs. If they have a new tech system you can’t match, you may be able to emphasise the stability, maturity, and reliability of your own.
- Attack the market. If the majority of your competitors take a bland, boilerplate approach to their tenders, you can put the work in to personalise your bid and demonstrate a clear understanding of the buyer’s needs.
- Drop it subtly throughout your bid. Weave information into your method statement, risk assessment, or company profile subtly. The last thing you want is a bid claiming “we have a better reputation than Competitor X.”.
Data Privacy and Ethics
Information gathering is a sensitive business, so it’s important to operate within the law and remain ethical in your approach. Most information gathering should be based on publicly available information or information that you can reasonably obtain in other ways. Avoid using confidential information from previous employees or other restricted material.
Ethical and legal compliance is about more than just following the law – it’s also good for business. By maintaining high standards, you build a reputation as a business that buyers can trust and want to work with.
In today’s increasingly data-rich tendering environment, businesses that incorporate competitive intelligence into their bidding strategies are better placed to win. By understanding what your competitors offer — and where they fall short — you can craft submissions that align more closely with buyer expectations and outperform rivals where it matters.
For businesses regularly bidding for NSW government tenders, mastering this analytical approach is no longer optional — it’s a key ingredient of long-term success.