Competitive tendering offers huge growth opportunities for public sector-focused businesses, but success requires more than diligent compliance checking, robust workflows and tick-box writing.
Beyond the nuts and bolts of team coordination, compliance standards and submission formatting that’s covered in traditional tendering advice, many other topics can impact the quality of your tender writing and tender preparation efforts.
Buyer Psychology
At the core of high-quality tender writing is a deep understanding of buyer psychology. Yet, this topic is rarely addressed in standard training and guidance. When evaluating tenders, government buyers are risk-averse. They’re not just selecting a product or service; they’re spending taxpayers’ money and need to be convinced you can be trusted to deliver.
To resonate with risk-conscious evaluators, your proposal needs to build confidence. It must paint a picture of your trustworthiness, capability, and value for money. Don’t simply list features but explain the benefits, and demonstrate your understanding of what the buyer is trying to achieve.
Engage evaluators by aligning with their objectives and articulating your ability to meet them, even amid uncertainty. Address the unknowns with your solutions and clear communications. Tenders aren’t just a sales pitch; they’re a test of your ability to interpret and respond to buyers’ needs.
Early Intelligence and Future Sourcing
Every business will know that the moment a tender they’re interested in is advertised is usually too late to have an impact on the eventual outcome. That’s why the smarter, more ambitious businesses spend time focusing on activities that provide early insight into future opportunities.
Engagement and networking are essential before the official tendering process even begins. Participate in industry briefings about procurement plans and open any opportunities to join relevant supplier panels or working groups. At the same time, go to industry events and forums and speak to the procurement and business staff directly (face-to-face if possible) to get a feel for where the organisation is heading and what they’ll be looking for in terms of a supplier. Some state and federal procurement departments are even starting to publish procurement pipelines or strategic procurement plans to help the market better understand their priorities and needs.
It’s this sort of forward planning that can align your business development with tender cycles. As well as making your business more responsive, it should also increase your odds of being truly competitive and not just “fit to proceed”.
Content Libraries and Reusability
There is no substitute for a carefully managed and curated content library of up-to-date, accurate information that can be used to improve the speed and quality of responses in tenders, particularly when businesses are responding to tenders with large volumes of complex questions or requirements (which are not uncommon in NSW and Australian government tenders).
Elements of your content library can include the following:
- Corporate capability statements
- Detailed staff CVs and project histories
- Risk management processes
- Boilerplate WHS and quality assurance documentation
- Standard content on sustainability and inclusion commitments
This content won’t write your tender responses for you, of course. Copy-pasting without considering the audience and individual RFT will land you in a world of trouble. But a robust content library that is regularly reviewed, updated, and made easily accessible to staff will give you a head start in tender writing. It also frees up resources to do the more bespoke and tailored work in response to individual tenders and evaluators.
Infographics and Data Visualisation
Speaking of helping evaluators absorb complex information quickly, why not do the same in your own tenders? Tables, timelines, infographics, and process diagrams can reinforce and drive home key messages in your submissions. This is especially useful when it comes to presenting a methodology, project schedule, team structure, or list of relevant achievements and experience.
Visuals can also help evaluators to quickly identify different sections and materials in your submission document. For example, you can use visual elements to make it quickly apparent to evaluators how your phased approach to project delivery lines up with and supports the buyer’s project milestones, as a way of quickly reinforcing your strong understanding of the project and their objectives.
Training and Resource Planning
This final point on investing in and training staff is worth mentioning in any context, but is made more important by the fact that it’s an issue that very few sources choose to discuss. If you have ambitious growth plans and expect to be responding to tenders more frequently in future, you may want to start planning now to build internal tendering capacity and resource sustainability in your business.
Consider using professional consultants and advisors to help out with tender writing for large and complex state and federal tenders. However, having in-house staff with knowledge of and experience in bidding is also important to keep costs down and build continuity and expertise. Where possible, train and encourage staff in your own business to contribute to the process, and get input from people in operations, finance and legal as well. Tender writing and tender preparation are the responsibility of the whole business.
Tender writing and tender preparation are a critical but frequently misunderstood topic. In a competitive public procurement landscape, particularly for government work, there’s a need to go beyond formatting, submission checklists and basic collaboration. By incorporating strategic insights into buyer psychology, early intelligence gathering, in-house content libraries, data visualisation, staff training and more, your business can achieve not just more compliant tenders, but better, stronger submissions with higher chances of being selected as the successful tender.
So whether you’re bidding on national tender opportunities or more local NSW tenders, being strategic, prepared, and persuasive are the first steps towards turning tenders into long-term strategic wins.