“Address the Awkward” Honesty is the Best Policy in Bid Proposals
When a client asks for a proposal or tender, one of their key criteria is to judge the risk involved in employing a supplier.
When a client asks for a proposal or tender, one of their key criteria is to judge the risk involved in employing a supplier.
Your bid or proposal should be a stand-alone document. It should not require prior knowledge or interpretation to be understood by the recipient.
When submitting a proposal or tender, you will probably need to include policy and procedure documents.
Public sector procurement is often thought to be an administrative jungle and is therefore avoided by many companies. There is however, a guarantee of fairness as buyers must follow EU regulations. This is not the case with business to business or private sector procurement.
Take a fresh look at the document templates you use and decide if they really are fit for purpose. Often templates have been produced by marketing people and are not suitable for technical proposals.
Deciding how to set the price for a project is never easy. Ideally you will know the client’s budget and expectations in advance of writing a proposal but this is not always possible.
There is no ‘correct’ structure for a bid team, nor is there a ‘right’ place for bid people to sit within an organisational structure.
Merely attaching a policy or procedure document to respond to a question about quality or health and safety will not score highly.
Many companies treat a winning tender as the holy grail of documents. They assume everything in it must be good, and therefore re-use sections of text in future tenders.
Preparing a perfect proposal is like baking a cake. If you include all the ingredients you are likely to be successful, but omitting one could be disastrous.