Posted on 02-02-2012 at 08:00
Tender submissions: continuous improvement through feedback
Ask any business auditor or process management specialist about how to improve anything, and they’ll tell you about the feedback loop. Produce, launch, seek feedback, apply feedback, relaunch – repeat.
Feedback on tender documentation
When you submit tender documents to a procurement department, there should be a feedback mechanism. For those tenders that fall above the threshold for advertisement in the Official Journal of the European Community (OJEC), giving feedback is a requirement. For smaller tenders, there should still be a feedback mechanism. It’s your responsibility to ensure you obtain feedback on your submission.
Turn a loss into a gain and a gain into more of a gain, by ensuring you learn from every tender you lose … and win.
Obtaining feedback
It may be automatic, you may have to request it yourselves, but it’s always vital to make sure you get feedback on every tender proposal submitted, whether it wins or loses. The information you gather at this stage can be used to feed directly back in to your next submission, dramatically increasing your chances of success.
Request a meeting or telephone conversation to ensure you get the opportunity to ask questions. Nobody particularly likes getting negative feedback about themselves and their companies, but I’m sure you’ll agree that we learn the most from our mistakes, so take the comments on board and aim to never hear that kind of comment again.
Questions you could ask include:
• Is it possible to see the scoring and the scoring criteria for each question we answered?
• What did we do right?
• What did we do wrong?
• Did we put in anything additional we shouldn’t have included?
• Did we miss anything?
• What one thing could we have changed that would have changed your mind?
How to use feedback to your advantage
Once you’ve obtained your feedback from the procurement department, make sure you use it. Book a meeting with the people in your office involved with tender proposals and go through the points one by one. Look at your documentation: what could you have done better?
• Do you need to firm up your pricing offer and make it more competitive?
• DO you need to concentrate more on the benefits than on the features?
• Do you need to improve the spelling, grammar and businesswhen writing tenders?
• Do you need to improve the design and presentation of your documents?
• Do you need to work on accompanying information such as policies and copies of documents?
• Do you need to look at other aspects of the process, such as presentations and demonstrations?
Seek feedback and heed that feedback and you’ll improve your tender submissions. Bring that feedback to us and we’ll help you to produce a better tender proposal next time. And there’s always a next time.
Executive Compass® can increase the value of the feedback process even further by submitting requests for information to obtain feedback on the documents other companies have submitted (that’s why you need to copyright your own documents).
