More than words: why client relationships matter

Are you new to tendering and don’t know where to start? Tender Plus has developed its May newsletter to help you navigate the tendering process and understand what it takes to win your next opportunity. The newsletter is particularly useful for small- to medium-sized businesses that may have limited time, resources, or ready-made content available for tendering, bidding, and proposal submissions. Learn useful tools and tips to help focus your efforts and achieve greater impact.

Building positive and lasting client relationships in tendering can help give you the edge your clients are looking for. Having a deep understanding of project and client drivers, and their hierarchy of importance, is crucial to ensuring you can strategise and make sure your tender responses directly reflect the needs of your client.

Insights to begin building or improving your current client relationships include the following.

Form a genuine connection with the key stakeholders and decision makers within your client’s organisation

Get to know your client’s key team members, their individual and collective drivers and brush up on projects they have delivered in the past. Learn the nuances of what worked successfully and what could be improved. By understanding their project history, past successes and challenges and appetite for risk, you can put yourself in your client’s shoes when developing your tender solutions and point of difference.

Keep up to date on articles, media and other published information surrounding anticipated projects

Tenders can be ever moving with key dates, requirements and client drivers changing, even during the tender phase. Keeping up to date and sorting fact from fiction in media and other sources can help drive your understanding of project challenges, potential constraints, and stakeholder opinions.

Start your tender process early

Take advantage of time prior to tendering to form an understanding and connection with your client, their key objectives, and other stakeholders or potential project challenges so your strategy can be formed prior to tender release. Having an in-depth analysis of your service offering, point of different and unique selling proposition before seeing tender requirement and objectives will fast-track how you tailor your bespoke win strategy and solution. If you need a guide on establishing an effective tender process, get in touch.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions

More often than not, clients don’t want to request information or clarification during the RFI period of a tender as clarifications and client responses can be public and shown to all tenderers. However, by not fully understanding a component of the tender or background information, you run the risk of developing a solution that could be going down the wrong track or not meeting a key client driver. 

Debrief and deconstruct your tender submission to know where to improve

You are only as good as your last tender, so take the opportunity for continual improvement. Debriefing and deconstructing your previous submissions, successful or not, provides the space to improve on what worked and workshop improvement opportunities. Open forum discussions with your tender team also offer a platform for team growth, collaboration and cohesion leading into your next tender.

Tender Plus was engaged by a local Western Australian business with 15 years of experience providing expert wear solutions to the mining industry. Having recently joined forces with another local business with expertise in the same field, our client was keen to develop a value proposition based on their combined capabilities and experiences, that they could share with their customers and industry.

The How

To support the development of a robust value proposition and the communication tools to deliver the message, Tender Plus was engaged to: 

• Facilitate strategy workshops to better understand the similarities and differentiators of each company, current individual service solutions and methodologies, customer needs and drivers, and possible future combined offerings 
• Formulate a Value Proposition and Presentation Pack Strategy Statement that would inform the structure of a master presentation pack and subsequent bespoke customer presentation packs
• Lead content development sessions to create the master presentation pack, based on the agreed strategy statement
• Work with Subject Matter Experts to customise three customer-specific presentation packs for targeted meetings, and
• Design a contemporary and user-friendly PowerPoint template, using a combination of each company’s branding style guidelines.

The Outcome

Productive and respectful workshops facilitated meaningful outputs and forged good relationships to ensure content was able to be created, reviewed and approved quickly. As a result of this successful collaboration, Tender Plus achieved a comprehensive, high-quality and compelling master presentation pack that can be easily tailored for future presentations, and three polished customer-specific presentation packs.

“It has been a great experience working with you, and I want to thank you for all the effort you’ve put in over the past few months on the capability package and presentations… The slides look great.”