TENDER PLANNING
Quality Review
When you appoint Milestone to help you improve your win rate, we can review your last 12 months’ bids to look at where you have left points on the table and to suggest improvements. Our suggestions are pragmatic and will enable you to improve your next scores. A common error, for instance, is in not understanding the nature of a question, e.g. the Added Value question where too often bidders do not provide the monetary value or include something here that is elsewhere in the bid. Another is not understanding what the question is driving at and providing the correct level of detail to score the full marks available. And finally, sometimes it is simply a question of rewriting the answers in such a way that it make it easy for the person marking to score the answer. The Quality Review can look at PQQ responses as well as the full submission.
We know that a busy team under pressure often has to make compromises simply to get a document out of the door (and you don’t get any prizes for bid documents which are beautiful but still sitting in the desk drawer). Even so, there are some relatively easy wins to be made which will not dramatically increase the workload for your team but will improve the scores.
Bid Strategy and Win Messages
It is our experience that the bids which are the most compelling are those with a clear bid strategy and with win messages that all contributors understand and buy into. We have a half day workshop that we can run with your bid team that will take the existing “what we know” information and craft it into a bid strategy with clearly set out win messages, together with how this translates for each section of the proposed tender. In this way, contributors know what is required from them and the document itself is not just consistent but also compelling.
Compelling, clear documents are more likely to score highly and what’s more, when you come to having to present at interview stage, the presentation more-or-less writes itself as you already know what the key win messages are.
What’s more, having a clear bid strategy and win messages means it is easier to assess success – if you can understand why you won a tender, it makes it easier to repeat that success.