Bid as Little as Possible
A Top Tip on Bidding - Do it as Little as Possible!
It's an expensive sport bidding. Lots of time and heartache gets wrapped up in it, whether your business chooses to measure the cost or not (most businesses don't). It is a real drag on the business. Cost of sale is a real thing.
There's a really interesting thing we've found in our research working with our clients - that more than 85% of the reasons why companies lose tenders were known to them before they ever submitted the bid. Quite startling. They were always going to lose, they just weren't honest with themselves in the run up to the thing.
So during your qualification, whatever model you use (the Scotsman is a model you can Google) - being robust, challenging each other, and being honest above all else is absolutely King.
There's an ever-growing school of thought in the world of capture, that you should be making pursuit decisions a year before tender.
Ask yourselves:
Does this opportunity fit our business plan?
Are they our people? Are they the sorts of people we want to work with?
Do we have the capability?
Can you genuinely win it against the criteria that are going to be set?
But particularly - how do we stand up against the competition if it's going to be a competitive tender?
Everybody, particularly more senior people who aren't at the coalface on live bids - get optimism bias, big time. We all have our biases and we're all competitive people. We want to beat those competitors. We want to believe we've got a better business than them, but probably you can't win them all.
Someone also made an interesting point the other week on the difference between how pricing is scored in the public sector, for instance, and how quality is scored. Lets say it's 60/40, quality price Vs price. If you get 40 points for being cheapest or closest to the mean, or whatever they're going to do to measure it, and then you get 35 out of 40, if you're second. That's quite difficult to make up in the quality score, where you're being marked per question, fairly subjectively. So against the criteria set, if you can get it from previous procurements or if the client releases pre-procurement information early, just game it through. Can you actually win this thing? If not, go and do something else.
There is a cost of sale attached. You are literally burning the profits of the business every minute you work on that losing bid. There is an opportunity cost involved too. If you are bidding that deal you are always going to lose, you aren’t focused on positioning for the next one that you could.
So bid as little as you can. Be as efficient as you can be, and as focused as you can. You will win more and you’ll be more profitable, have happier staff and happier clients.
Want to Advance Faster?
Get our full Bid Writing Training Video Set — practical, on-demand training designed for individuals like you.
Explore the Full Training → the bid toolkit
Next Chapters