Sometimes you’ll miss out on a tender.  

No matter how much effort and money you put into preparation of a great bid, it’s a competitive process and you won’t always win.  

It is disappointing, like when you apply for your dream job and don’t get it. Or is it?  

Tender wins and losses mean different things to business

 But if it is key contract for your business that you were relying on, then the loss of tender would be very painful. 

For that reason, I want to talk about the benefits of a debrief after tendering.  

The benefits of a tender debrief

A debrief is offered when the results of a tender are announced.  

You can do a debrief whether your bid wins or loses. 

A debrief offers an opportunity to receive feedback from the very people who reviewed your bid to determine whether you were successful or not.  

What do you get told in a tender debrief?

The chair of the debrief will usually provide the strengths and weaknesses of each section of your tender.  

They will provide feed back about the overall context of the tender process. Sometimes the fact is that the process was very competitive and they were looking for something that everyone had, but you just weren’t the most competitive tenderer.  

Questions to ask in a tender debrief

My recommendation when going into the debrief is to have a few key questions ready.  

Hopefully the chair of the debrief meeting will provide you with all of the information you wanted. Sometimes they wont so if you are prepared with some questions, you might be able to get more information than you would otherwise.  

Here are a few questions I would recommend: 

• Was there anything missing from our bid?  

• What sections did we do well at?

• Which sections needed more information?  

• How were our responses to [areas you were concerned about or struggled to write about]?  

• Could you suggest anything we should do differently next time? 

• Would you recommend we submit a bid next time?  

Feedback is important in business 

Feedback is a really important part of running a business. It is sometimes hard to hear. It sometimes takes all our willpower to respond appropriately. But when we get feedback we can use it to improve.  

My recommendation is to always get the feedback!  

Conni  

Thanks for checking out this blog.  

If you would like to talk more about tendering or improving your bid for next time, please make a time to meet online or in person.