There are a number of general approaches to writing a successful bid. We always say that to win a tender, you need to know your business and know the buyer, making sure to concisely and methodically explain how you intend to meet the buyer’s requirements. This sounds like fairly straightforward advice but it does involve picking apart the specification documents and tailoring your response to tick off these requirements one by one. As a general approach, this works and is a good rule of thumb. However, over the last couple of years, it’s become clear that there are some differences in the approach depending on what the buyer is actually buying. And this is key in making the difference between scoring well and winning.

In 2020, we’ve managed to secure an 83.3% success rate with our bid writing services, meaning that in the 24 tenders we’ve written or reviewed, we’ve won 20 of them. We’ve written bids across a number of industries including construction, social care, IT and digital and professional services and have noticed that the buyers, specifically the teams writing the tender questions have quite different priorities. Focusing on construction tenders, we’ve celebrated huge successes this last year, winning just shy of £11 million of contract values for our clients in 2020 alone.

Part of our success, however, comes from understanding the priorities facing public sector estate regeneration teams, asset management teams and housing and property teams.  Within the often large number of tender documents, there is frequent mention of social value priorities, renewable energy and sustainable build practices. These are becoming more and more common in the construction tenders we write, and given an increasingly higher weighting, highlighting a priority shift within these teams. With the government’s ambitious desire to become carbon neutral by 2050, the pressure is on local government to carry this out, and one way they’re doing this is by tweaking the way they commission building projects.

It’s not enough to show that you have a qualified team of multidisciplinary workers, or that you have robust risk management and health and safety practices in place. These days, to win that tender, you also need to demonstrate how you source sustainable supplies from local merchants, and how you support your team in their personal and professional development. You need to be able to demonstrate that you can stay on top of modern methods of construction, are aware (and use) the newer environmentally friendly materials like insulation and prefabricated components. You need to support apprentices, involve yourself in the local community helping out where you can. You need to invest in low emission initiatives, from the big things like low emission vehicles in your fleet to the small things like having no single-use plastics within your environment management policy. Even introducing a car/vehicle sharing policy or cycle to work scheme gives you something to talk about for these kinds of questions and helps to demonstrate to the buyer that you are like-minded in your pursuit for a more sustainable future.