Qualifying Opportunities

Working in bidding for many years, I’ve worked with organisations that carefully qualify opportunties to those that barely even give the process a second glance. Different strategies work best depending on the organisation, but I would always recommend having a clear qualification process to ensure you are best using your time and resources, as well as ensuring that you can deliver if you win the bid.

There are many different tools and processes out there to qualify opportunties, but make sure that whatever you use meets the specific needs and strategy of your organisation. A qualification tool/process should also only ever be a guideline to making a decision; you need to use your common sense to further ensure an opportunity is right (or wrong) for your organisation to bid for.

Tender Alchemy can support you in developing a tool/process bespoke to your needs, but as a guideline always consider the following questions:

• Have you done any pre-bid activity? E.g. speaking to commissioners and getting/giving a positive impressions

• Does the opportunity fit with your business strategy? Including with regards to geography, service type, etc

• Is the opportunity affordable to be delivered if you win it?

• Do you have the capacity to bid for the opportunity? If not, do you need external support?

• Do you / would you have the capacity to deliver the contract if won?

• Is there a strong incumbent? If so, are they possible to beat?

• Who will your competitors likely to be? And how will you beat them?

• Do you need sub-contractors and/or partners? If so, are relationships already in place?

• Are there infrastructure implications, such as premises and/or IT requirements?

• Is TUPE applicable?

The above is just a snapshot of what you could ask - there are many more and specific questions you might need to ask to meet your needs. You may also want to weight and score the above questions depending on what is most important to you.

Finally - consider qualifiying an opportunity at different stages, from pre-bid through to a mid-bid review, seeing how the answers/score change across the process.