Best practice for bid success – a lesson from the SANDBOX school of public sector tendering

Finding government opportunities

One of the main pieces of feedback from the chamber events is that a lot of people aren’t sure where to look to find public procurement opportunities in the first place. Well, it turns out 138,760 is the magic number. Any project with a value below that (and above £12k) must be advertised on Contracts Finder, while anything above it will be listed on Find a Tender. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own specific portals, while it is also worth checking regional sites; for example, a lot of local authorities in the North West use The Chest.

There is a myriad of other portals, some of which require paid subscriptions, which provide tender information. While these can be helpful in aggregating notices from the above sources in a user-friendly way, they can also be expensive – so make sure you do your homework and find the one that’s right for you. Free trials, if available, can be very helpful for this.

Once you’re registered on the right sites – what are you looking for?

Prior Information / Early Market Engagement Notices – provide early visibility of an upcoming procurement and details on how you can engage with the contracting authority in advance to help shape their thinking.

Tender / Contract Notices – announce that a tender process has started, and provide details on where Invitation to Tender documentation can be sourced from.

Award Notices – publish the details of tender process outcomes and name the successful supplier(s). These are useful if you’re looking for supply chain opportunities.

The new Procurement Act (see below), requires contracting authorities to publish more notices at different stages of the procurement lifecycle, and there may be some tweaks to terminology. The key thing is to make sure you’re checking the right sites on a regular basis, so you don’t miss anything.

Filter, qualify & get ahead

The promise of fair and transparent processes, surety of funding, ethical behaviours and equitable payment terms makes public sector work attractive to a lot of organisations. But, this makes it highly competitive, and bidding for government work can be complex, resource intensive and time consuming. This means having a defined bid/no bid process is essential, ensuring you invest your time and effort into the right opportunities where you stand a decent chance of success. Just because you’re capable of fulfilling a client’s need, doesn’t mean they’re likely to choose you. They may have a well-established incumbent provider, or one of your competitors may have a stronger offering. Also, consider internal factors – do you have the team and time available to produce a high-quality response in the required timescales? Learning to say no is a vital part of effective public sector tendering.

Ideally, you need to identify key target opportunities / frameworks well in advance of procurement processes going live – enabling you to develop a capture plan and win strategy. I have blogged separately on the importance of capture management. Through early strategic planning, you will create a winning position, get ahead of your competitors and maximise the efficiency of the actual tender period.

Best practice principles

Getting the basics right will give you a solid foundation for a successful bid. These include:

Read all the documents: don’t assume anything; the devil is in the detail. You need to show the client you have fully understood their requirement and play this back to them in your responses. Also, it ensures you capture all compliance requirements and deliverables for your proposal.

Ensure you satisfy conditions of participation: most government bids will ask you to self-certify that you meet mandatory and discretionary selection criteria, often requiring evidence to be provided. These range from minimum turnover thresholds to ISO certifications. Make sure you can tick all the right boxes at an early stage, before you invest a lot of time into the bid.

Answer the f***ing question! Excuse my language, but we can’t be politicians when it comes to bidding. Don’t answer the question you think they’ve asked, or hoped they’d ask. Make sure you’re giving them the information they actually want and need.

Show empathy to your marker: Yes, they’re terrible people who are making you do this horrible tender when you have a million other things to do. But you’ve got to get them to like you to win. Bids are seldom marked by procurement professionals. More often they are marked by estates managers, project managers, headteachers or senior executives who have busy day jobs. Make your proposal stand out, make it readable, make it specific to them and their challenges, and you’ll win hearts and minds.

Proofread: nothing undermines the credibility of a proposal than a typo on page 1, or a sloppy copy and paste error. Get someone detached from the bid to give it an independent, fresh eyes proof before you submit.

Get feedback and improve: public sectors buyers are mandated to provide feedback on all bids they receive. Whether you win or lose, engage with the procurement team (face to face if possible) to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your tender, and build the feedback into your tendering process.

Become a bid writing hero!

Writing a proposal can be a daunting prospect. There is nothing worse than staring at a blank page in MS Word, cursor blinking, with two pages of content to produce for a deadline in three hours time. This often leads to panicked and unscrupulous copying and pasting from the last tender document your company produced, which rarely leads to success.

SANDBOX has defined five “hero” personas to help you get into the right mindset for effective proposal writing. These are:

The general: who plans meticulously, nails bid management, defines a structured bid programme, and produces storyboards to capture required content and support response writing.

The detective: who does in-depth research on their client, understanding their needs and “hot buttons” allowing solutions to be targeted that meet and exceed expectations.

The sales rep: who sells benefits rather than features, clearly showing the client why they should pick them.

The journalist: who front-loads content, lodging key messages in the client’s mind and making content easy to understand.

The barrister: who uses compelling evidence to inspire client confidence and win their trust.

Use AI – but for the right things

The bidding world is increasingly harnessing the power of AI to produce content. To try and tell anyone not to do so would make me a very obvious turkey pleading with you to not celebrate Christmas. However, care is needed. Firing your questions into ChatGPT and watching it instantly produce your proposal while you put the kettle on, is tempting. However, its content is highly unlikely to be tailored to either your client’s need, or your business and what makes you unique. Also, remember that ChatGPT is OpenSource – so any business information you do put in to try and improve its output becomes available to other users.

As AI develops it should automate the more mundane, administrative elements of bidding, freeing up your peoples’ time to be creative and develop amazing client solutions. And AI can help with this too. It is a useful source of ideas for storyboarding and content – which you can then draw inspiration from and apply to the specific bid you are producing.

Prepare for the new Procurement Act

On 28^th October – in around 7 weeks’ time – the Procurement Act 2023 will come into effect, replacing the Public Contract Regulations 2015. This will bring with it changes to how government runs, administers and manages procurement processes and public contracts. While many of these feel like window dressing, it is essential for all organisations bidding for public sector work to be aware of what is coming. I will be blogging separately on the Act in more detail in the lead up to it going live, so watch this space. For now, there are law firms such as Mills & Reeve and Trowers & Hamlin who have provided very useful, free guides to the act on their websites.

I hope you have found this ‘crash course’ in public sector tendering to be useful. We’ll be following up with more detail on some of the areas above in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled. If you feel that we can assist with your bids, then please get in touch: paul@sandbox-studios.co.uk

At SANDBOX, we connect brand, marketing, digital and tenders through playful creativity and collaboration, helping our clients deliver on their objectives and brand ambitions. Please visit our website, or get in touch, to find out more.