Most successful companies submit tenders as part of their growth strategy. The reason? Most of Australia’s top contracts are exclusively won through tendering.
However, tenders are challenging to get right. Avoiding common mistakes will help to get a return on investment. Here are the top five mistakes most people make when tendering.
1. Spelling, Grammar & Writing Style
Poor writing is the cardinal sin of tender writing. Think about the last time you read through a document littered with spelling and grammar mistakes. How did it make you feel about the content, the reliability of the author and the brand it was trying to represent?
Getting the content to read well, in a narrative format, with correct spelling and grammar, is important in ensuring your message is delivered in a way that enhances your brand.
The more readable your content, the more likely your message is to reach the decision maker. On the contrary, the worse the writing, the more likely your tender is to end up in the bin.
2. Using Generic Content
Tenders are often seen as an administrative task in many companies. Therefore, the authors generally try to make writing them as quick a process as possible by borrowing generic content from tender to tender.
The problem is that generic content often only answers part of the question or answers it in a very basic way without considering the nuances of the specific contract. Even worse than this, we’ve seen key information relating to other tenders remaining within tender content.
The impact all of this has is that it communicates to the buyer that you can’t put the effort into your response or, worse, that you don’t understand the subject matter well enough to put together quality content. Both of these will put a halt to your tender success.
3. Ignoring the Presentation
Ignoring the aesthetic qualities of your tender document is tantamount to wearing shorts and a t-shirt to a sales presentation. The presentation of your tender is your first impression. Make it clean, structured and professional.
Often, it pays to invest in professional design to improve the presentation of your document if you aren’t able to format the document yourself.
4. Burying the Lead
One of the most frequent mistakes we see as tender consultants is when companies don’t adequately communicate their value or showcase their unique selling points (USPs). Often, it takes an external perspective for companies to see their USPs and how those would be perceived by the buyer.
It’s incredibly important when writing tender responses to understand your value and what differentiates you from your competition. These unique selling points need to be features within your overall sales narrative and shouldn’t be buried within general, voluminous content.
Be succinct with your content and make sure to feature your USPs.
5. Tendering Before They’re Ready
Tenders play an important part within most sales pipelines. They give companies access to substantial opportunities that achieve important strategic growth objectives. As a result, tenders require companies to be in a position to demonstrate prior success on comparable scale.
Because of the desirable opportunities tenders release, we often see companies trying to tender before they’re ready. Most of the time, these companies don’t meet core criteria and in some cases, wouldn’t be able to handle the work if they won it.
We recommend companies that want to start tendering first engage a consultant to tell them what hurdles they might first need to overcome. We offer this service for free, along with many free support resources to assist clients to become “tender ready”.
If you think your tender submissions could be improved, or you’d like to find out whether you are “tender ready”, get in touch. It’s free!
