Love Me Tender

Lewis Carr writes about the agony of crafting tender responses.

As someone who trawls tender portals and regularly submits responses to e-learning projects, I have a love-hate relationship with tenders.

It always starts the same way. I’m minding my own business and battling through the daily workload when an email notification pops up: “New Tender Alert!” My heart races as I open it, eyes shakily scanning the details. “Yes! This is the one - a perfect fit for us. We can win this!!” I think naively.

Thus begins my tender quest, an unholy time-suck of a task filled with more twists and turns than an M. Night Shyamalan movie, testing the very limits of my sanity. First, I have to locate the tender documents, which are inevitably scattered across seven different websites and cloud storage platforms. All of them require me to reset my password just to log in and access them.

Once I have assembled the 15-plus documents, the tender reading ritual can commence. I pore over every last excruciating detail, analysing each line for loopholes or inconsistencies that could make or break my bid. Is 12pt Times New Roman acceptable, or must it be 11pt Arial?

The real fun starts when I attempt to fill out the response templates. Non-sensical questions, formatting nightmares, and endless matrixes lead me to ask more questions than I do answering them. “Provide evidence that your solution utilises bleeding-edge, industry best-practice technologies while leveraging tried-and-true platforms for optimal futureproofing.” What does that even mean?! I strategically think about buzzwords while trying to decipher the actual ask. Hoping I can fill the 2000-word quota; I’ll leave this for now and return to it after I scan the rest of the documents.

Next comes the pricing templates, complex spreadsheets riddled with multiple tabs, and more complex calculations than an A-level maths exam. Price my solution too high, and I’ll get laughed at. Too low, and I’ve just committed financial self-destruction. It’s a perilous balancing act. I can only price it once I know what I’m pricing for, so I return to the tender response questions.

But what makes for a good tender response? What will get me to that interview round? What will make my services stand out more than the guys down the road?

The agony of completing a tender is real, but there are a few secret weapons I employ to lessen the suffering and increase my chances of winning - and, ultimately, writing a bloody brilliant tender response.

The first tactic I employ is to understand my audience: who will be reading this thing? These poor evaluators have to wade through dozens of soulless corporate responses filled with empty jargon and marketing fluff. So I always try to be different and be, well…me! I use plain English, injected with my personality, and maybe even a splash of humour to breathe life into my submission. A bit like how I try to write for Dirtyword, but with fewer movie references and 80s nostalgia.

I’ll never forget the time I led with an honest account of how we do things in Yorkshire - “We’re an honest bunch of developers from Skipton. We won’t ever overcharge you, but we might tell you straight if we think something is nonsense.” Did it make the evaluator smile or warm to us? Well, yes, it did. We got through the interview stage, and the clients discovered what we were like. As long as you are truthful, you have nothing to hide. The real trick is to get the evaluators nodding and feeling the personality behind your words. They’re human, too, so give them something less dry to read.

Another game-changer is going above and beyond the evidence. Don’t just superficially check the boxes - dig deep and really sell your credibility. Back up every claim with robust examples, data points, and graphics. I go crazy on visuals. I often include a branded mockup even when it’s not asked for. This gives evaluators clear proof that I walk the walk.

I try to impress them with the detail and thoughtfulness that I put into each response. This leaves no doubt about my capabilities AND my ridiculous level of commitment to tendering. It not only shows that I am taking this tender seriously but also shows what the client can expect if they get to work with me.

There is always the looming fear that I am “tender fodder”. That the tender is already earmarked for another company and that my response is simply “the third quote”. And this has happened to me many times. Sometimes, there are telltale signs such as a ridiculously short submission deadline or a mandatory requirement of “you must have an in-house doctor to help with content writing”, (honestly, this was in a tender I didn’t win; they actually requested that a member of the team be a GP!).

I’ve not known many doctors who write prescriptions by day and dabble in Storyline at night. But the “tender fodder” risk is a risk worth taking, as my hunches have sometimes been wrong, and I’ve won a tender that I would have bet the mortgage on being fodder. I was wrong.

Finally, my winning trick is to make sure every response is carefully mapped to the stated criteria, it sounds obvious right? But it is a tough skill to master. Too many tenders get instantly binned because suppliers go wildly off-track. It’s essential that I stick a laser-focused summary at the top of each response, clearly stating how I will meet the requirements. Then, I build out the evidence and my personality underneath.

When I do all of the above well, I might get invited to the interview stage. Suddenly, I’m not just black text on a white page but a living, breathing e-learning legend. The interview stage is cause for another article, as that’s a different kettle of fish.

The final stage of the process is the dreaded wait time, sometimes weeks or even months. And even though the tender had a list of dates for interviews and feedback, it’s rare if they run to time. And sometimes, I don’t even get a response. Months pass until I finally accept that I didn’t win or the tender was withdrawn. To me, this is worse than an email with the words, “Regrettably, we will not be proceeding with your tender on this occasion.”

A soul-punching rejection to all of my hard work, but it’s still better than leaving me in limbo.

But as all e-learning warriors of the tender world know, you pick yourself up, dust off the crushed dreams, and struggle to the next potential opportunity. It’s a vicious cycle of agony and waning hope. Yet when that lightning does strike, it’s a high like no other. And it’s worth it in the end.