🚫 5 signs you shouldn’t tender 🚫

Key signs you shouldn’t tender:

👉🏼 the tender team is too busy to tender properly - so the results will be sloppy and poorly pulled together and pricing may be out of the ball park OR may be risky.

👉🏼 Same for if you don’t have a project team with capacity for the project start- this is especially true for government and defence projects or where the client side PM clearly knows that your suggested delivery members will not be available for the project

👉🏼 the project is in a different sector than you regularly work in - so you can’t price as competitively, and you may not be seen as capable of delivering the project as well as your competitors

👉🏼 you don’t know the client or any ‘influencing persons' through previous projects or relationships and there is a large, open tender list. This means that you risk not understanding your clients needs or wants as strongly as any competitors; and if you are not highly established / you have weak submission documentation, you may not be able create a sense of certainty of delivery.

👉🏼 you have had issues in previous delivery and they are unresolved and you are not making effort to resolve the problems. Yes this happens. I’m not saying don’t tender at all, but I encourage you to resolve your issues. It is quite demotivating for the tender team to work on a project where you might even be going through litigation with the client on a current or past project! Stepping up and showing how you will resolve past issues in future projects can however resolve this.

Get in touch if you would like help developing a stronger go/no-go process so you can increase your win rate and reduce stress on your team.