Lots of organisations use a formal tender process to source their consultant. Either because they have the procurement process tied up in this, or because it just takes the strain at their end.  But some organisations don't - and that's OK.  What we need to know usually falls out of a formal procurement process, but not all the time.  So here are some of the things that are important to us.

Firstly tenders are very important to us but they are also resource-intensive to complete. We do have the basic information to hand of course, but actually completing the tender documentation can take at best half a day, sometimes 2-3 days. This is one reason why smaller organisations often don’t do formal tendering for things like local government roles. We just don’t have the resources to take our lead consultant out of the business for a few days to complete something like this.

(quick rant coming up) We know plans are afoot to encourage larger organisations to think about their tender processes, but please, think about the reality of the smaller organisations when setting the questions – do you absolutely need 11 pages of questions about our IT – if we are ICO registered, GDPR compliant and our servers are UK based, what more do you need? (rant over). 

Like most consultancies we subscribe to a number of different tendering portals. These are great because they tell us when someone is looking for a specialist and we can then go on and log an interest. There are many different portals and your procurement team (if you have one) will know which is the best for your sector. And of course, you don’t have to use a portal, its not compulsory. You can decide to handle it all and just contact organisations you like the sound of. We quite often get invited to tender because the potential buyer has spoken to someone who knows us.

Irrespective of how you find your tenderers, there is some key information we need to know. I refer you back to the blog on the questions we ask Questions a Reward Consultant Will Ask You (rewardrisk.co.uk) – but here are some basic things that get included in tenders:

1.      An organisation brief – These are usually 1-2 pages of information about the organisation, your history, culture and the reason you need a specialist. You may also include the cultural fit of the organisation you are looking for and the nature of the support (critical friend etc).  Think also about the type of data you want sourced and things like regional limitations etc.

2.      Copies of relevant documents – make copies of current documentation available on request, unless it is commercially sensitive: pay structures, policies, strategy etc. and potentially a list of the job roles or job groups affected by the project.

3.      Key contacts and method – tell us who to contact with questions – and how you want that contact made. Don’t give out a telephone number if you only want contact by email. (quick tip – also make sure the recipient knows they are expected to be available for the duration of the “open for questions” period – we withdrew our tender for one opportunity after the contact was unavailable to answer any questions which meant that only the current supplier could respond – mean trick and a waste of our time).

4.      Your own approach/policy on compliance and ESG – what you are expecting suppliers to comply with in this respect and are you asking them to commit to something specific. We recently tendered for a charity who asked us commit to some work in the community. Not a problem and we were happy to commit to complying but we did have to point out that this was not necessarily practical as they were the other end of the country. We offered instead to commit to charity days on their behalf in our local area.

5.      What’s the marking system – how the tender will be scored helps you to focus on getting the right information in the right places in your response. Cost isn’t everything so make sure we know how much of the focus is on cost and how much on other elements. Some organisations put cost above experience in their particular sector or vice versa and knowing this helps us to decide whether to decline the opportunity.

6. Limitations on wording, presentation, of our responses etc – and we’ve even had instructions like the font and font size, or the numbers of images to be used.

Basically, there is no such thing as too much information. If it's about the organisation, or about the process, then tell us about it.   We reward specialists like detail.  Sorry, I know its not really fashionable to say these things - but we do!