How to Win a Tender Or Proposal

You are ready to write your proposal or tender. You know what you want to do, you've priced it up and you think that you have a great idea that will solve all your potential customer's business problems so what can go wrong?

Well here are a few ways to lose that tender, bid or proposal:

• Price: You can get the price wrong by bidding too high on a price sensitive bid. Evaluators often tell you what percentage that will give to the price. If it is over 50% you should pay a lot of attention to your price. Government proposals should always be price sensitive. In these cases you should bid the minimum solution that is required and price accordingly.

• Timeframe: Yes people still don't plan their proposal writing properly and either miss the deadline or squash everything into the last few hours. Yes, it does matter if you are late - that is usually a non compliant bid. A hastily prepared bid or proposal shows and you likely to miss off vital things. So plan your bid writing and leave enough time to complete all of your bid.

• Presentation: Ensure that you include your name and contact details, an executive summary and signed cover letter. These do get left off and the do not reflect well on the ability of a company to complete all of a task. Remember to write your proposal so that you are emphasising the best bits of your suggested solution and hiding all the weak areas. Use graphics to explain complex matters.

• Quality: You want to show that your company will undertake quality work - so make sure that your proposal reflects how your company will work.

• Inappropriate: Never bid with the hope that you can do the work if you win. A required business solution that you can't do properly and profitably will only end up with your company looking unprofessional and lose you money big time!

• Risk: There is always risk within any proposal so you need to learn how to recognise and mitigate risks. Ignoring them can be very expensive!

If you remember all of the above you are well on your way to winning your next proposal. Good luck!