The top three tender management challenges and how to fix them!

Challenge one: getting bids in on time

The first difficulties are often experienced in planning the tender response. A company can have the best solution, but if they aren’t able to respond before the tender deadline, the opportunity is missed.

In many cases, a tender response will need input from different people across different teams, and the management and combination of these inputs can be challenging, particularly with a short response timescale.

A CRM system can provide a location to hold data on the tender, such as:

• Tender receipt date
• Deadline date for a response – this can drive the next actions
• Expected project start date
• Who in the team needs to take the next steps
• Bid management checklist

Intelligent project workflows

The next steps can be broken down into activities. These can be assigned to the relevant team members, with individually assigned due dates. Some actions might be created automatically through a workflow.

These sales rep ‘To Do’ lists ensure that the team knows what to do and when by. There is the added benefit that a manager can see any actions not yet complete.

The visibility of data in lists and reports can be supplemented through alerts to the sales reps in question. For example:

• Reminding a sales rep of the upcoming deadlines with a ‘2 days to go’ alert
• Notification to the team manager if actions haven’t been taken ahead of the deadline
• Some companies may want to build contingency into their timeframes to ensure that the response is not being finalised ‘right up to the wire’

As an example, Gold-Vision allows you to create automated activities when a new project or job is created.

These can be assigned to the project or job owner or another team member and the due dates of the follow-up actions can be based on the tender deadline date at the Project level. This removes the need for manual creation of the follow-ups and ensures the tender response will get actioned.

(Our customer team helps you to configure these processes and automated workflows during the CRM implementation so that they are as intuitive as possible.)

The above processes will help get the response in on time. In a worst-case scenario of a deadline being missed, having a clearly visible record of what actions were or weren’t completed can provide a feedback loop to allow the team to improve for the next time.

Challenge two: Understanding who is involved in tender projects

A key part of the tender response process is that multiple customers (contractors, for example) will require a quote or estimate for services and products.

The best approach here is to maintain a single record for the project in question but add the links to all the involved parties. This would include the contacts and companies being quoted and anyone else who might be related to the project. In a tender project example, this might be end clients, architects or developers.

Easy visibility of the associated parties on any project will come as a result and means that in the future, from a contact or contractor, the previous involvement can be seen.

Challenge three: Unclear pipeline

Another challenge when tendering for projects is reporting, especially where sales teams are expected to provide increasingly accurate and up-to-date forecasts. The situation where the same project could appear twice in the sales pipeline is a problem.

In many cases, different customers won’t always identify the same project by the same name. One refers to it by the project location, another by what the future building will be called, another might not give any details at all!

Holding additional information about the project, including the site location and the type of project (for example the industry or application) can assist in matching up two projects and minimising duplication.

Building best practice processes into your sales team can help. For instance:

• Ensuring the salesperson does a basic search for their ‘new’ project before adding a new entry
• Obtaining as much detail from the potential customer about their project to aid in searching
• Establishing a baseline of details that ‘must’ be provided by salespeople on new entries
• Encouraging knowledge sharing within a sales team, so that there is greater awareness of the projects different people are working on

A sales team wants to ensure that there is a record of the current and previous quotes on a project, but without duplicating the values in the pipeline. In a traditional scenario, a sales team could end up with multiple entries in their pipeline for the same project, falsely inflating the sales pipeline.

Single project records

The best approach is to hold a single project record but with multiple estimates under that project. Each of those estimates is linked to the relevant contact or contractor. The different estimates may all be for the same value or might have different values from different estimated options.

This brings all the estimates for a project together, with the final piece of the puzzle being to indicate which of these estimates needs to drive the overall project value. This can be dealt with by having an indication field against each estimate to show that it is ‘included’ in the project.

Those estimates that are ‘included’ add up to give the total project value. This offers the salesperson the ability to control which estimates they consider most likely to be won within a set of bids on a project, based on knowledge of the contractors involved and their expertise on the type of project.

This level of control also offers the ability to estimate multiple phases of a project within a single project, potentially with those phases having different forecast dates depending on their expected delivery. Those phased estimates may wish to be closed independently.

In the example illustrated below, only Estimate 4 is included in the value of the project, keeping forecasts accurate.

How Gold-Vision CRM can assist with multiple estimates

Sales teams want to minimise their effort in producing estimates for the same requirement for multiple contacts. This is where an option to copy an existing estimate between opportunities provides a time-saving shortcut.

Rather than having to recreate the same estimate for a second or third time from scratch for another contact, the copy action provides a quick way to set up the same set of products and prices for another potential client.

These could be for the same project, but potentially could also be used to add the same estimate against a different project for a similar requirement.