Don’t Assume Buyer Knowledge When Completing Tenders

Writing tenders successfully requires your information to be provided in a format that is clearly understood and interpreted. You are an expert in your specialist industry sector but don’t assume the buyer is.

As an example, it was a great pleasure to recently work with a client who operates from a laboratory, and who is without doubt an expert in their field. With a degree in Biochemistry (far too many years ago) it was fascinating for me to don a lab coat once again. My client's diligence is such that they prove the accuracy of their own performance by inviting other companies to send them  ‘control samples’ of chemicals of known concentration. My client then tests them and compares their results with the known concentration.

Graphs were created which show how good my client is at testing. Their ability to achieve precision at miniscule levels which most lay people can’t and don’t understand, is the basis of this blog.

My client produced graphs showing the accuracy of their test finding against the known control samples' concentration. They understood that the graphs represented infinitesimally small amounts, and that the difference between their results and the control samples were startlingly good. They were very proud to present them.

However, the Procurement experts / buyers who would be assessing their tender were not chemists. The Procurement experts would simply see  two columns on a bar graph which didn’t match. They would probably have no comprehension of the achievement which those graphs signified.

I suggested for that reason that my client didn’t include the graphs.  Instead, we included reference to the accuracy achieved, having calculated the findings in easy to understand percentage terms – it appeared along the lines of 99.999999999%, which everyone knows is very accurate! That’s all the Procurement people needed to know.

The moral of the story is that, when completing a tender, we present the excellence of our clients in a manner which is understandable to all levels of competency. The buyer is looking for an overall, rounded and cost effective solution, but can’t be an expert in every topic.

My client won the business.