Welcome Writing Amazing Tenders to Win New Business

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WelcomeWriting Amazing Tenders to Win New
Business

• Caroline Plane
• Larch Consulting

Selling to the City is funded by the City of
London Corporation as part of its commitment to
bridging the gap between the City and
its neighbours, and increasing prosperity across
the City fringes. Selling to the City is
delivered in conjunction with Supply Cross River
and part funded by the European Regional
Development Fund.
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First Things First

• Introductions
• Housekeeping
• Timetable
• Please remember to switch your mobile phone to
  silent

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What we will cover today

• Setting the Scene
• Overview of the Tender Procedure
• Pre-qualification
• Managing the Bid Process
• Ingredients of a Successful Proposal
• Skills Needed
• Practical Tips and Techniques

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Creating The Supply Chain
Major Procurement

• Cleaners
• Printers
• Specialists

Your co.
Designers
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Tiered Supply Chains

• Where do you fit into the supply chain?

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Setting the Scene London Procurement Landscape

• City of London
• Expenditure on goods and services is
  approximately 230,000,000 per annum.
• Economic Development Strategy for London
• investing places and infrastructure, people,
  enterprise, marketing and promoting London.
• London Procurement Programme (LPP)
• Launched out of the NHS Supply Chain Excellence
  Programme (SCEP) to drive collaboration among
  London's 74 NHS Trusts.
• Trusts across London spend in total 5 billion on
  goods and services every year.
• London 2012
• Set to provide unprecedented opportunities
• CompeteFor will maximise business involvement
  throughout the 2012 supply chain

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Setting the Scene The Purchasing Process

• Formality of the process increases in line with
  value and risk.
• Example City of London

?http//www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/Tender
s_and_contract
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Tender Process
Contract Notice
Expression of Interest
Pre-Qualifying Stage
PQQ Evaluation
Invitations to Tender issued
Prepare Tender Submit
Tender Evaluation
Contract Award
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Tender Process

• Pre-Qualification Stage
• Compliance
• Are you a Safe Appropriate choice?
• Past Performance
• Tender Stage
• Your service / product offering
• Future Performance

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Understanding Pre-qualification

• Evaluation - 3 key areas
• Business Probity
• Financial Standing
• Technical Ability
• Mix of pass / fail and qualitative criteria.
• Often a fail in some areas will disqualify you
  from proceeding further.
• Uses a relative marking system.

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Pre-Qualification Questionnaire

• Private Sector Example

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Pre-Qualification Questionnaire

• Focus on
• Product Service Provision
• Financial Performance
• Environmental Management
• Health Safety
• Corporate Social Responsibility

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Pre-Qualification Questionnaire

• Private Sector Example Can include more onerous
  requirements

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Pre-qualification Evaluation

• Common Pass / Fail Criteria
• Accounts
• Business professional standing
• Insurances
• Staffing Levels

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Pre-qualification Evaluation

• Common Requirements
• Policies
• HS
• Equal Opportunities
• Environmental?
• Quality
• Business Activities
• Client References
• Case Studies
• Professional Credentials
• Staff Competencies

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Completing the PQQ

• Key Issues
• More than just a form filling exercise!
• Some sections need to be specially written for
  this opportunity, as opposed to providing generic
  information.
• Develop your companys USPs in relation to a
  current opportunity you are pursuing.

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Tendering for Contracts
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The Invitation to Tender

• A Pack of Documents
• A letter of invitation to tender
• Instructions to Tenderers
• Standard Conditions of Contract
• Specification
• Pricing Schedule
• Form of Tender
• Any other relevant document
• Tender envelope, label

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Who is involved in preparing a tender?
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People might be involved
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What are the key steps to delivering the bid?
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Steps to delivering a bid
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Deciding Whether To Bid

• Do we have the skills to deliver this project (or
  can we get them)?
• Do we have the capacity/resource to deliver it at
  the right time?
• Can we price it a level that is attractive?
• Can we demonstrate that we are the best choice?
• Can we respond in time?
• Can we win it?

Example Criteria
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What are the Ingredients of a successful proposal?
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Bid Writing The Basic Ingredients

• What we will do
• How we will do it
• Who will do it
• Where we will do it
• When we will do it
• How much it will cost

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Bid Writing The Icing on the Cake

• Demonstrates a clear understanding of the brief
• Provides evidence of relevant previous success in
  this area
• Adds value and brings innovation to the brief
• Explains why choose us?
• Creates a strong brand identity
• Sets out clear next steps

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Interpreting the Brief

• Play it back, paraphrase, comment upon it to show
  you have understood.
• Extrapolate outcomes, add value, consider
  knowledge transfer, legacy, sustainability.
• Relate your proposal to the brief, and to the
  implicit (or explicit) evaluation factors set out
  in it.

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Competitive Positioning

• Why choose your approach?
• Why choose you to deliver it?
• How to test your unique selling points
• So What..
• Yeah right..

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The Importance of Value

• Value for Money (VfM)
• The optimum combination of whole-life cost and
  quality (or fitness for purpose) to meet users
  requirements. This is rarely synonymous with
  price

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What is value?
50p
30p
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Building up the costing

• Normal costing
• Who/what?
• Charging rate(s)
• Fixed Costs / Variable Costs
• How much time?
• Travel Extras
• Contingency

Cost Model
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Bid Writing Skills Needed

• Ability to write long documents in plain English.
• Understanding of what is required and how your
  organisation will deliver it .
• Full knowledge of using Word and its helpful
  features.
• Able to articulate the value proposition of your
  proposal.

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Plain English

• General rules
• Short sentences (15-20 words max)
• Active not passive verbs
• Say we and you
• Avoid jargon and unexplained abbreviations
• The most helpful resources
• www.plainenglish.co.uk/howto.pdf
• www.plainenglish.co.uk/reportsguide.pdf

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Before and After Exercise
If there are any points on which you require
explanation or further particulars we shall be
glad to furnish such additional details as may be
required by telephone.
Plain English Campaign
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Before and After Exercise
Your enquiry about the use of the entrance area
at the library for the purpose of displaying
posters and leaflets about Welfare and
Supplementary Benefit rights, gives rise to the
question of the provenance and authoritativeness
of the material to be displayed. Posters and
leaflets issued by the Central Office of
Information, the Department of Health and Social
Security and other authoritative bodies are
usually displayed in libraries, but items of a
disputatious or polemic kind, whilst not
necessarily excluded, are considered individually.
Plain English Campaign
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Useful features in Word

• Use of templates / Styles
• Amending Page set up
• Page Section Breaks
• Headers, footers, page numbering
• Tables
• Cutting Pasting
• Automatic contents page

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How Tenders Are Evaluated

• Published evaluation criteria
• Best Price
• Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT)
• Usually evaluated by a panel
• Scoring matrix used to objectify subjective
  opinions
• Scores are weighted
• Tendering rigorously controlled and audited
• Company with highest mark will win the commission

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Sample Tender Evaluation
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Tender Evaluation

• Non-financial considerations
• Track record on performance
• Staffing capabilities
• Transaction costs
• Quality
• Innovation
• Monitoring/managements arrangement
• Community benefit
• Ability to develop good working relationships
• Realism of offer
• Cultural fit

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How organisations with a good service let
themselves down

• Not achieving the right balance between thinking
  and writing
• Not being able to write about what they do
• Writing by committee/no narrative flow
• Talking about what you want to sell, rather than
  what they want to buy
• Failure to understand the specification
• Using an answer for more than one question (e.g.
  see question 2)
• Answering specific questions with generic blurbs

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Most common reasons for disqualification

• Missing the tender deadline
• Using the wrong envelope / label
• Form of tender not signed correctly
• Pricing form not completed correctly
• Supporting information missing
• FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS!

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Knowledge Transfer

• Make the document self-referential.
• Save all proposals, bids and tenders into a
  Precedents folder.
• Save the components separately (e.g. CVs, case
  studies etc) .
• Link to a table that sets out wins, fails and
  feedback.
• Use the same people again.

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Tender Readiness Checklist
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Happy Tendering!
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For a copy of this presentation email me

• innovate_at_larch.co.uk