One of the chief enemies of good business is inconsistency. If your company is unable to produce accurate work consistently, you’ll find that your clients and customers trust you less and feel less able to trade with you in the long run. Meanwhile, consistency is a sign of accurate mapping and planning and is a source of pride and trustworthiness across the business space. Nowhere is consistency more important than in your bids for work, and the pricing you apply to those bids – and that’s what this article will be examining in more detail, showing you how to increase the consistency of bids.
Automating the Process
Over time, if you’re a company that regularly makes bids for projects, you’ll save a great deal of time, energy, and cash by simply filling in forms through an automated software system that knows your pricing to a tee. You’re able to use CPQ software to achieve this simple automation – something plenty of advanced bid-producing companies should consider in 2020.
Make a Template
Whether you’re bidding for funding in your organization for a specific project you plan to undertake, or you’re looking to bid for a construction project proposed by local or national government, it’s important that you understand what your bids usually consist of, and how you can ensure that this template it reliably copied out for every bid. Creating a template, which you’ll use for all future bids, will help you build consistency in delivery.
Price Up Goods and Services
Second, you need to look through every single good or service that your company may offer on a project and find ways to price them so that you’re consistent across all of your bids. There’s nothing more off-putting to a potential bid grantee than seeing two bids whose prices misalign. You need every cost to be fully mapped through your company, and accessible on a shared document for all your staff to consider and understand.
Inflation Adjustment
Of course, you’re going to need to adjust these prices for inflation and other market fluctuations. They’ll not be final – they’ll be provisional, in pencil, and ready to evolve to meet both supply and demand. Whenever you update these prices, then, when the market changes and you need to adjust pricing, you need to share your updated document with all relevant staff and encourage them to delete older versions of your pricing file. This will also support your consistency.
Networked Delivery
Cold-calling is frowned upon in the marketing space, and there’s an element of the same logic that should be applied to your bidding process. By sending in a bid for a project, you’re declaring your interest – but if you deliver it with some form of personal and professional communication, you’ll show the people behind the bid, and this may influence the decision-makers in your favor. Don’t be shy: ensure that your voice is respected and heard when you hand in a bid.
Bid writing and pricing can be painfully drawn-out endeavors – but this article aims to make them far easier, saving your business time and cash every time you bid.
