Positive Quality - Win New Business and Protect Your Reputation

In many types of business, the traditional tender process is still the most effective way to demonstrate your capabilities to a potential customer. It has for many years enabled service providers to get a foot in the door and gain easy access to the decision making individuals in an organisation. Most would agree that the benefits are good if you pitch it right, but I wonder how much thought has been given to the potential downside if you get it wrong.

Experience

As a facilities professional with over 20 years of experience in the corporate and public sectors, I have undertaken many tender processes, both in-house and as a consultant. I like to think that I have seen most things that a tender could offer. Imagine my surprise therefore when I recently undertook a PQQ evaluation as part of an FM purchasing exercise and encountered so many poor quality returns that I almost had to rip everything up and start again.

Having reviewed the process and the document content the inescapable conclusion was that the returns were just very bad. It caused me to step back and consider why an organisation would risk its reputation this way?

Positive Applications

There are clearly a number of positive reasons for any organisations to compete for new business through a tender process. The prospect of entering and actually winning is the most obvious and is the number one reason for submitting a proposal. I strongly suspect that many organisations also see a tender as an opportunity to raise their profile with the right people. Facilities professionals like to know the key players in a particular field and getting their name on the PQQ or ITT list is a smart move for any service provider even if the application proves unsuccessful.

Negative Applications

I tried to consider some of the less positive reasons why a company might decide to submit an application.

Not being on the list might be a risk in some eyes, especially if it was felt that many industry competitors would be applying.  It could be argued that this alone might be worth the effort in some situations. So competing just to be seen rather than winning might be a reason to get involved.

I also accepted that some companies have sales or marketing staff on the payroll with instructions to apply for everything that hits the market, irrespective of quality or strategic planning. I imagined a stressed sales manager hastily putting together an application just so that he could tick a box to say that it had been done. As unlikely as it seemed, I was starting to believe that many organisations probably utilised an “in it to win it” philosophy where they felt that putting something on a PQQ return was better than not taking part.

This intrigued me.

I had walked away from the tender exercise with a very negative view of at least 75% of the organisations that had submitted a return.  I had evaluated these companies as being so poor that they had no chance of being shortlisted. I also knew that if anyone ever asked me my views on any of these organisations at future networking events my response was unlikely to be positive. So why risk a hard won reputation over something that was simple to rectify?

It was clear to me that something I had taken for granted might not be so obvious to some service providers; in order to do themselves justice in a competitive tender situation an organisation needs a positive strategy and professional quality control.

Quality

The quality issues that I had encountered were simple and basic.

• Not answering or ignoring part of a question.
• Inserting information in the wrong section or including irrelevant information.
• Not following instructions EXACTLY.
• Incorrect numbering.
• Not removing internal instructions to colleagues from the final document.
• Providing a “cut and paste” answer.
• Providing too little or too much information.
• Inconsistent information between answers.
• Including attachments or inserts and not correctly numbering them, not referring to them in the correct section or using them instead of providing the requested response.
• Poor spelling and grammar, bad English and abbreviated sentences.
• The use of different fonts, or different sized fonts, within the same answer.

Why do organisations believe that these mistakes are acceptable in a tender document?

Quality is everything. If you are positive enough to submit a proposal to a client, you must ensure that it meets your quality standards. If you are not sure of your quality standards, get them defined. Your organisation, brand and ultimately your reputation will suffer if it does not.

• Consider using an independent consultant to document your quality standards and compile your tender return.
• Get an independent view on your proposal and be open enough to take the feedback as constructive criticism.
• Ensure a robust quality control process is enforced before anything leaves your office.

If you make certain that your submission is absolutely the best it can be then you leave nothing to chance. To lose out to a better competitor is business. To lose out as a result of spelling mistakes, missed questions or incorrectly labelled documents is unforgivable.