Tendering With Odds In Your Favour

Odds of winning

When looking to respond to tenders your firm should be looking at where it has a “competitive edge” or a way in which it can increase the chances of a successful tender submission.

Strategic advantage in terms of the odds of winning.

For example, if your submission is competing against 29 other submissions, your chances of success based solely in odds is 1 in 30, however if you have responded to a tender which has only 2 other responses the odds of winning are 1 in 3.

Obviously you will have to meet the requirements of the tender in both cases, but I know I would prefer to be working with odds in my favour. How can you start to push forward increasing the odds of winning on your submission, that is, how can you identify tenders where less people will respond?

Tenders Where Less People Respond

Document fees charged by different departments to get the tender specifications discourage people to participate in tenders. Likewise, there are sometimes provisions that the tender specifications be collected in person and be signed for to form response register, reduce the number of responses to where a tender specification fee is payable, many firms will be discouraged not realizing that the tender likely response rate will be lower and odds improved on winning. This is not to say we don’t have to prepare a great tender response but every bit helps.

The other area where response will be low is where a tender has a short dead time, so here is another opportunity to improve the odds of successful submission. Another way to increase the odds in tender submission is to look at the source or openness of the tender. The way in which the tender is advertised, obviously those tenders with the greatest responses and therefore will reduce chances of winning based solely on the odds and not taking the submission into account.

Also the day in which the tender appears in the main daily paper will also make a difference to the number of responses received. Many people look through the main daily paper on Sunday for tender but not on Tuesday when they still appear. Tender appearing in the local and regional newspapers, response rate to these advertisements, due to the smaller exposure is likely to be far lower. Another area is where government departments advertise through their respective procurement gazettes.This publication is good source of tenders which does not have the same level of exposures as the main daily papers. Some government departments have their own web sites now and advertise their tenders through their web sites only.

Summary

Over all the point to be made is that by recognizing and placing a submission to a tender which will have less firms responding is going to have an enormous positive effect on how well your submission will be viewed. You should be aiming at tenders with 3 or 4 competitions and not 30 or 40 therefore the information of your tender should be valued in terms of who else knows about it.

There are many on line tender information providing websites like www.tenderserviceonline.com .You can also visit this site for latest tender news and articles. So you can plan your response to tender invitation today and get lots of business possibilities in government sector.