I have been involved with some tender responses lately and have had problems with over specifying my bids. To be competitive in tender responses you need to ensure that your proposals match the bid requirements exactly. This inevitably means you restrict yourself to the precise wording in the tender document rather than thinking about the requirements behind them. This is a difficulty for me in that I specialise in seeing past a customer's expression of how they see their requirements and digging out actually what it is that their business or organisation really needs. This might sound presumptuous but I find people usually express things in terms they understand or based on past experience - this means the solutions they envisage will probably exclude things that are outside their experience. So what is a supplier to do if faced with a tender proposal that quite clearly doesn't address the real needs? If you want the work you restrict yourself to the limitations of the tender document and leave the customer to deal with any shortcomings at a later date. Hardly a recipe for long term success.

Average user rating