The Winning Line -How helping your clients results in a win - Issue 17

Our top tips, advice, guidance and the latest news related to winning more work through tenders

Welcome to this week’s edition of our newsletter, packed with top tips, advice, and the latest insights to help you win more work through tenders.

The words selling or sales for some is an immediate turn off – words often associated or given a bad name by those who push too hard, badger, pester and twist arms to get a sale to hit stats/targets and earn commissions.

It’s programmed us to be suspicious, wary and often automatically switched off to solutions, services and products that could actually help us because we don’t want to be sold at.

I’ll never forget going to look at cars about 8 years ago, we were a good 6 months off actually buying but wanted to look at options so we could work out budgets/deposits etc. As soon as we walked into the showroom a Sales Manager approached us to ask what we were looking for…no issue there... that’s helpful.

I explained the situation but rather than hearing me, he launched into his pitch on the offers they had on that day and how by acting that day we could access those.

I tried to persevere just looking at what they had in the Showroom as planned, but his persistent pushing of offers/deals/can’t be missed – made me feel like my skin was going to crawl off my body!

I ended up just wanting to get out as quickly as possible, leaving with none of the answers I wanted and feeling thoroughly cheesed off that I’d wasted my time with the trip.

It reminds me so often of submissions we see for bids where rather than take into consideration the client requirements, questions and criteria for deciding on a chosen partner or provider, organisations try and cram in what they want to tell the client. Headings and titles such as ‘About Us’, ‘Our History’, ‘Our Approach’ and ‘Our Experience’ tell me straightaway this proposal/bid is going to be all about the company bidding in, not about the client they are trying to work with.

By switching 'About Us to 'Your Brief' and ‘what can we sell’ ‘or what can we tell them about’ to ‘how can we help’ not just in bid responses but in every interaction and every stage of an engagement process – you can turn the whole thing around. Don’t just say you put your customers first – actually put them first in everything you do including how you write your proposals and bid responses.

I’ve always tried to articulate what we do in a way that makes it easy for you to understand ‘how we can help’, how our services link together to offer you an end to end solution with bidding to take away pain from each element of bidding and most importantly improve your win rate.

As we continue to develop our offering, I hope those two things continue to remain obvious – how can we take your pain away and how can we help you win more. Everything else is just noise!

In October we launch The Bid Club – which is going to pull together so much of what we do into a Platform that makes it easy to access training, support, document templates, bid coaching, accountability, bid strategy and planning, expert external speakers on topics such as Carbon Reduction Plans, Social Value, Procurement Act, Data Protection, Safety Financials as well as weekly Q&As.

If you have any areas of support that you think would be critical in that offering - let me know. Your feedback is super helpful to shape this into something you will find immensely valuable.

Next week look out for an email where I’ll share the link to join the waitlist and find out more information, but in the meantime – if you need support finding tenders, writing responses or reviewing submissions and just want a quick overview of all our services that can help you win more work – just reply to this email with a ‘Yes please’ and I’ll ping over some details.

Thank you for your continued trust in our services. We’re here to support you every step of the way in your tender journey.