Why tender

More than ever, the tender market is suitable for all types of organisations, large and small. There are so many companies out there that can help you on your tendering journey. We cut out a portion of the work for you and deliver you new opportunities to your inbox daily and we do it for the best price in the country. You are getting jobs on a series of very official criteria. Tendering is not new, but the internet has made this process a whole lot easier for you and your business.

Plain and simple, tendering is just another way for you to get work. Tendering for work allows you to get ahead of your competition, build your skill base and keep your business growing. Our Growth Director, Jill has been winning work via tendering for well over a decade, and she is sharing with you below, her top five reasons for tendering.

Responding to tenders means businesses have already established the need for your services and have allocated a budget to carry out the work. This reduces the need for selling the benefits of the services and establishing the benefit of investing money. Responding to a tender means your core goal is to ensure they see that you are the best fit for their business. When tendering the client usually outlines when they would like the work to start and end, meaning you can work your internal timescales around this, the project may not run exactly on time, but it will give you an overall indication.

When selling directly B2B we often have projects on hold waiting for particular aspects to be confirmed or budgets to be agreed upon. It also allows you to benchmark your fees against what people expect to pay. Tendering allows you to see how businesses are spending their budgets. This helps you to better understand where you should be spending your own time marketing services and what services are the most popular. So, the top five reasons above may have convinced you to tender for contracts.

Now, you might be wondering what the typical stages of tendering are and where to begin. If you don't get the contract, the money and time spent is usually lost, so you need to carefully weigh up whether or not a tender is worth bidding for.

You also need to consider how important the customer is to your business. Is this a good potential client or one you don't want to offend by not tendering? Try to understand things from the client's point of view. In order to gain a clearer understanding of a potential client's requirements, see if you can arrange a meeting or have a telephone conversation with them, before you start work on the tender.

You should always raise questions by phone or email if tender documents are unclear - on anything from deadlines to how you'd get paid. Make sure the client is serious, and that you're not there to make up the numbers or to test the market. Sometimes customers may just be fishing for ideas they'll then use for themselves. You can prevent this from happening by requesting customers to sign a non-disclosure agreement before presenting your tender. But don't forget many clients genuinely want you to make a creative contribution and provide ideas.

Summarise your bid and explain why it answers the client's needs. Write this last but put it at the beginning of your tender. A good starting point is to make a list of all the questions you would ask if a company was submitting a tender to provide a product or service to you. Include a covering letter that responds to the bid invitation, summarises your main message and explains how the documents are organised. You should also be aware that information from your tender may be disclosed in the future under the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information.

This gives anyone, including your competitors, the general right to see information held by public authorities - including the information in your tender.

It is well worth spending some time looking at the presentation of your tender. Here are some tips on editing and supplying your tender:. Above all, make sure the tender is delivered on time - it is unlikely that organisations will consider your tender if it arrives after the closing date. You may want to deliver it yourself, by hand, to ensure it arrives safely. Alternatively, contact the organisation to check they have received it.

Our information is provided free of charge and is intended to be helpful to a large range of UK-based gov. Because of its general nature the information cannot be taken as comprehensive and should never be used as a substitute for legal or professional advice. There are many advantages in using a tender process as your procurement method of choice for approaching the market — these include:.

Q: When should an organisation undertake a tender? Currently, any government or state organisation in the UK, by legislation, must follow the EU tender route. Q: What are the overall benefits of adopting the EU-tender practices? The aim of EU procurement practices is to enable organisations to demonstrate that their processes and practices affecting suppliers are professional with respect to:. Q: What does a tender do to show you savings? The tender process can include consolidation; at present you could be buying your products from lots of suppliers.

By purchasing from multiple suppliers, the value of your purchases to each may be relatively small, and as such you may not necessarily be seeing the biggest purchasing value. The tender process consolidates your purchases; leveraging total scale on a sole supplier or a few suppliers that best fit your needs.