The key benefits to outsourcing your tender writing
As a business owner, you understand your business inside out because you live it every day.
But responding to the questions asked in a tender about your business, ensuring you understand the nuances, structure the answers appropriately, include all the information the buyer is looking for, and get your point across to beat the competition, can be a much more daunting prospect.
Just as you would consider utilising the services of a specialist to support your business in other areas where you don’t have in-house skills (for example HR or IT), using a tender writing specialist to enable you to win more business is something every business owner should be considering. If you are at the stage where your business is ready to take the next step and start tendering for business, or if you’ve tried a few times without success, then enlisting the help of an experienced professional to at least get you started should be close to the top of your (no doubt very long) to-do list.
Understanding your business
A specialist tender writer will work with you to understand your business and its unique selling points. They understand what constitutes a winning bid (having won many contracts before) and will ask you to provide the material and evidence that the buyer will be looking for, so they can use it to craft a successful response. A specialist will have expertise in reviewing and understanding the tender specification; relevant industry sector experience plays a part, so it’s worth finding a specialist with previous experience in your field.
Although many questions follow similar themes that cross industry sectors, there will be some key industry knowledge and experience that can make the difference between scoring 4/5 or 5/5 on a response.
Exactly how responses will be scored is detailed within the tender documentation, so knowledge of this will also be something the tender writing specialist uses to ensure the responses they write on your behalf are designed to be high-scoring.
Working together
A specialist tender writer will create evidence-based, well-structured, relevant responses which they should then share with you for review, so you can ensure they are factually accurate and represent your USPs. Critically, they need to reflect your understanding of the competition and demonstrate why your business should be selected. Your input and feedback is hugely important at this stage and good writers will incorporate this into the responses to further personalise them to your business and make your tender the obvious choice for the buyer.
There may be more editing and updating before there is a final version that you are happy with, but the outcome should be a tender response that you can be confident answers the questions properly, paints an accurate picture of your business and stands you in good stead for submitting a contract-winning bid.
