Racing Against the Clock – How to Deal With Lack of Time in the Bidding Process

We hear it from everyone.

Bid teams are chronically pressed for time.
Tight deadlines, juggling multiple bids, tender monitoring, and countless questions to answer.

Time is crucial in the bidding process. In this article, we’ll explore how bid teams can manage time constraints, combat stress, inefficient processes, and free up time to improve their business with the public sector.

Lack of time is a profitability problem

Who’s not short on time? Why is this a particular issue in bidding work?

Well, here’s the thing:

1. Public procurement is heavily regulated. There is a lot of documentation, rules, and administration required to secure a deal.
2. This means a lot of time needs to be spent on tasks adjacent to bid and sales efforts toward the public sector.
3. Which in turn means there is little time left for what really matters in terms of winning the tender or not.
4. Moreover, deadlines cannot be changed – when the bid must be submitted, the bid must be submitted. And the deadline is often short.

It’s common for lack of time to lead to bid teams:

• Not being able to submit all the bids they want to submit
• Not having time to refine and improve their bids
• Experiencing stress and burnout
• Having a lower win rate and higher cost per bid

So, if you can alleviate the time constraints for the bid team? Well, then you give them the opportunity to perform at the level your company deserves.

Start by identifying time thieves

It can be difficult to spot time thieves. Especially when you are used to working in a certain way.

But a bidding process often contains many small moments that steal time from the really important work.

For example:

• Scrolling through lots of irrelevant new procurements.
• Reading tender documents for procurements that turn out to be irrelevant.
• Compiling information for internal Go/No Go decisions.
• Finding, copying, and pasting all the questions that need to be answered.
• Chasing colleagues to help with technical questions.
• Searching for good previous tender responses.

Think about your bidding process.

What time thieves are there? What would you wish you could spend less time on?

Save time with good routines, automation, and AI support

A lot of time can be saved with good internal processes and routines.

Here are some examples of what you can work on:

• Minimise the time from when a procurement is published until you decide whether to bid on it or not.
• Have a checklist to ensure that you make good Go/No Go decisions and don’t spend time on poor business opportunities.
• Make it clear internally that it is a priority for bid teams to quickly get help with technical questions.
• Support technical colleagues in writing responses.
• Structure previous tender responses so they are easy to find.

However, while much can be accomplished independently, employing smart digital solutions may be necessary to significantly save time. 

Let’s look at three tools that combat time thieves in bidding.

Smart monitoring with automatic summaries

Spending time reading about procurements that are irrelevant to the business is a textbook example of an unnecessary time thief.

Tendium’s tender monitoring improves efficiency in two ways:

1. Monitor with keyword search in both notice and tender documents. Set highly specific search terms, to both include more relevant tenders and filter out more irrelevant procurements.
2. Read automatic summaries of tender documents. Skip reading through long documents just to find important requirements, blockers, and estimated value. Add your own keywords to quickly check if a procurement is interesting.

Some customers say they’ve saved as much as 90% of the time they spend finding the right tenders!

Collaborate efficiently with project management tools optimised for bidding

A project management tool made for the bidding process can save a lot of time.

Check-ins, back and forth questions, and copy & paste take more time than you think.

With Tendium, you get a project management tool tailored for the bidding process:

✅ Good overview of all ongoing and previous bids.
✅ Assign tasks, comment, and tag colleagues in all parts of the process.
✅ Efficiently create a project plan for all questions to be answered in a bid.

A good project management tool allows you to minimise the amount of time you spend on admin. Nice!

Write bids with AI tailored for bidding

A tender consists of a lot of questions. It takes time to write a good bid.

So why not use AI and your previous bid responses to quickly come up with a decent first draft?

With Tendium, you can generate automatic bid responses based on your previously submitted bids. Clever!

This gives you time to polish responses, instead of spending hours on repetitive questions you’ve already answered before.

Short on time? Book a demo!

Lack of time in the bidding process is a problem to take seriously. Not only does it create stress within the team, but directly affects your company’s chances in the public sector market.

Invest 30 minutes to see how Tendium can help streamline your bidding process. Book your demo here.