Defence Bids and Tenders: Best practice and winning strategies

Defence contracts are almost always complex, usually high in value (sometimes into the Billions of dollars), and most certainly competitive. A range of factors beyond the bid and tender itself come into play including geopolitical ties and pre-tender and capture planning activities.

The development of win themes starts from the capture planning stage of a client. You need to assess the opportunity, what problem needs to be solved, how your product or service (be it a submarine or military uniform) will solve that problem, and what differentiates you from your competitors.

When assessing what differentiates your product or service from your competitors, it’s important for you to look at it from the perspective of the procurer.

When it comes time to tender, and your win-themes may be evolving and developing, you need to review the RFP documentation in detail and develop and tailor your win themes to the opportunity. Given the complexity of defence tenders, it’s sometimes difficult to develop and convey your key selling points consistently. That’s why your win themes need to encapsulate your key selling points, and they need to be interwoven into all different aspects of your response.

For example, let’s assume you are bidding for a contract for the provision of electronic jamming equipment with a focus on attack drones. One of your win themes may be the simplicity of the system and ease of training for key personnel to operate the system. You need to go beyond just conveying this point in the response to training. It needs to be incorporated into the executive summary, your company history, experience and track record, safety and other aspects of the response.

The evaluation panel need to all walk out with the same key messages, even if they have been reviewing different parts of your response.

Graphics have long been considered the norm for bids and tenders in the defence industry. Infographics, however, have now become the norm.

It’s important that infographics are well thought through. There’s no use in littering a proposal document with graphics and infographics that haven’t been well thought through and don’t provide sufficient detail. In addition, detail is generally provided in the writing.

What goes into an effective infographic in a defence tender?

Firstly, where complex engineering or technical solutions have been developed, an infographic is a great opportunity to convey these in a simple and easy to understand manner. For example, the specifications and unique capabilities of a fighter jet can be summarised and conveyed using an infographic.

Secondly, you need to ensure an infographic is well thought through and connected and expanded upon in the text. For example, the fuel capacity and range of the fighter jet may be detailed in the infographic, however, on the pages following the infographic, you would be wise to include a page or two outlining the more detailed specifications of the fuel tank and range. By coupling the infographic with explanatory information, you give the reader and the procurement panel confidence that there is substance behind your solution.

Finally, graphics and infographics need to be used to communicate the win themes discussed above. This ensures that your key win themes are reinforced throughout the document through graphics. Remember, different people interpret information in different ways. Some people enjoy reading through the detail, and others read the detail but prefer graphics. It’s important to cater to all audiences when submitting a document.

It was always somewhat expected in bid process for defence bids that once you completed storyboarding and developed your win themes, you would then proceed to write the tender. The responses for each question would evolve with the bid writing team gathering input from relevant stakeholders. A kick-off meeting is generally put in place and the bid preparation process would start.

Internal best practice now generally goes one step further. Individual questions from each section of the RFQ are workshopped. This involves bringing in all relevant stakeholders to meet to discuss the interpretation of the question and develop a guideline to the response.

This is to ensure that a maximum score is attained for each question against the weighted criteria. When the final draft is developed, a meeting with the same group of stakeholders is convened to review the response and ensure it is comprehensive.

For major bids and tenders, it’s not unusual for high level politicians to be used as a key tool in the bid process. The meetings and involvement at Prime Minister level of Japanese and French companies bidding for the submarine contract in Australia are one example of this. It’s important that when developing win themes and putting together the bid documentation, insights and key messages from these meetings and information gathered by ‘reading between the lines’ are considered and incorporated.

For example, let’s say we are a manufacturing company based in New Zealand bidding for a contract to develop and deliver ATVs to the US Defence Force. Now let’s assume that there is highly valuable intellectual property incorporated into the development of the ATVs, and that they will be compatible with and need to communicate with a range of US Defence Satellites and other equipment. Now although there may be no questions in the RFP around the NZ / US Defence relationship, but it is an area that should be focused on in the tender response as should the NZ Government’s membership of the five eyes agreement.

This is an area that is always critical and requires real evidence to be successful. In any defence tender, the downstream economic benefits to the country purchasing the equipment or service need to be detailed and demonstrated. What is important is that there are clear commitments and evidence that this will occur. You need to provide guarantees of what parts of the manufacturing process will be completed locally, and the total number of jobs to be created.

In any tender submission, when it comes to supporting local businesses and ensuring local industry participation, broad brushed statements of support generally score low, and detailed, evidence-based guarantees score higher and are more persuasive.

A well-resourced bid team is critical to win any major defence contract in New Zealand and globally.

Jason Cooney is a bid and tender writing specialist. He is the founder of Tsaks Consulting (formerly The Tender Team), which operates in Australia, New Zealand, Greece and the UK.