Supporting your pricing with an excellent submission

The Public Sector  usually requires a Quality and Technical Response section (either combined or individually) with a ‘Price’ section scored separately. The marks are added together, and the supplier with the highest mark wins the bid.

Often, the lowest price submitted achieves the highest ‘price’ score. The score for prices is often based on a percentage of that lowest price. For example, a price which is 10% higher than the lowest price, will attract only 90% of the marks available in the price section (100%-10%).

Excellent Qualitative / Technical scores can offset a decrease in the scores for pricing, as shown in the table below. These are actual results for a client, following feedback from a tender which my client won. This is compared with Tenderers  2, 3 and 4, who were also trying to win the business.

	Lilypad Client	Tenderer 2	Tenderer 3	Tenderer 4
Quality / Technical	40.50 (1st)	34.25 (2nd)	21.65 (3rd)	21.38 (4th)
Commercial (Price)	45.13 (2nd)	34.29 (4th)	50.00 (1st)	35.45 (3rd)
Total	85.63	68.54	71.65	56.83
Overall Position	1st	3rd	2nd	4th

 

My client was more expensive than Tenderer 3, so achieved a lower Commercial (Price) score of 45.13 marks out of the 50 marks available, which Tenderer 3 scored.

The Quality / Technical mark is the section which Lilypad could influence. My client’s score (40.5) was far higher than the competitors, the next nearest being 34.25%.

The combination of the two scores meant that my client scored highest overall, (85.63 marks with the next competitor scoring only 71.65) so won the tender.

The service is now being provided at a price which my client is happy with, and he does not feel that he ‘bought’ the business by offering a very low price. The business was won because excellent Quality / Technical responses offset the low ‘Pricing’ mark.