A GETS tender was to supply power equipment for a council’s landscaping and maintenance work. My client has an excellent reputation in retail but wasn’t as well known to council buyers, and they were up against competitors who would likely price lower.

Challenge

Make the evaluator’s priorities obvious in the response. An evaluator’s concerns show up in the overall read of a bid, not just in the individual questions. After reading the tender closely, these were the points being scored:

• Warranty parameters

• Customer support

• What happens when equipment breaks, and how easily it gets fixed

• Parts supply

Action

Bid / no-bid assessment. The assessment showed the evaluators’ concerns were clear, and my client was well placed to meet them. It was a bid worth pursuing.

Win themes built around the evaluator’s concerns. I worked with the team to pull together the right information and develop three themes:

• Easy servicing through a local workshop and team who can fix or repair in good time

• Parts availability within NZ - easy to get, quick to fix

• A warranty covering three years of commercial use

Confronting breakdowns head on. Commercial equipment breaks and we wanted to confront this head on. We developed two case studies on existing commercial customers who rely on my client’s ongoing support to keep their operations running. This showed the evaluators that my client understands what regular use looks like and what downtime costs.

Reliability over upfront price. We also positioned the reliability and efficiency of my client’s products against cheaper alternatives, showing the time and money saved over the long term.

Results

“Angeline helped us with a complicated tender for a council contract with a tight deadline to navigate. She took our half-written bid, worked with the team to get all the right information and turned it into a winning tender.”

A winning tender. In the post-evaluation feedback, the council noted that although my client wasn’t the cheapest option, they scored them highly on reliability and maintenance, which had been a concern with them in the past.

• Concerns the evaluators raised were answered directly in the bid

• Local support and warranty became the deciding strengths

• A retail-known brand was successfully introduced to a council buyer