The advice from just about every bid consultant and bid best practice source is that knowing who the evaluators will be for your bid is a ‘must’ if you want to win.
Only then can you fit your solution and bid writing to their needs, personal preferences, unique perspectives, even their preferred reading style. And by making that fit, you’ll get the best scores – and win.
And it’s true – ignoring the evaluators, not fitting your submitted bid to their preferences certainly won’t help. So you should pay attention to best practice and those consultants.
But.
There are more important people involved in the customer procurement that have far more impact on your chances of winning than evaluators do.
So, who are these important people?
The person/ people who decide if the procurement is made at all.
Who decides if the work you’re bidding for should be procured at all – versus run inhouse, directly awarded, the current contract extended etc?
Knowing them, understanding their needs, and influencing their decision could make the difference between there even being a bid, or not.
The person / people who decided what the scope of the contract will be.
If your organisation offers a very specific service, a broad scope could put you out of the running (or mean you need to partner). Or if your differentiators are around a broad scope of services, a more focused scope could open the way for specialists to win.
Quite apart from the value of the opportunity, those deciding on the scope of the procurement have a fundamental impact on your ability to win (or even whether you can bid).
The person / people who wrote the specification
What you’re expected to deliver on the contract, and how, will have real consequences on your ability to win, deliver, make a profit.
The people writing the specification decide all those things, as well as everything else you need to take account of in your bid solution and show you can deliver.
The person / people who decided how (and where) the contract should be procured
Full negotiated open process? Mini competition on a framework (one you might not be on)? Extensive market engagement or none? Presentations or just a one off submission of a document?
Those decisions can make the difference not only about how much work goes into the bid, but whether you’re eligible to bid at all. Quite important.
The person / people who decided the quality to price ratio, the pricing format etc
The difference between 80% price 20% quality, vs 80% quality 20% price ratio on your bid will have a fundamental impact on how you bid, if you bid, which competitors you might be facing, and the profitability of the contract.
So, the person deciding this will have a real impact.
The person / people who wrote the questions (and whoever decided on question weighting)
Questions that fit with your strengths, or your competitors? A few key questions, or many? Well focused and structured questions, or vague general questions with multiple bullets? Long or short wordcounts? Weighting on the questions you’ll do well on, or those you won’t?
Decisions about the questions you’ll need to answer (and that evaluators mark) can make a bid painful or easier to answer. But also make the difference between whether you, or your competitors find it easier to get your messages across (and get the scores where it really counts).
The person / people who decided the scoring criteria
Evaluators score against a scoring criteria. What criteria will allow them to give you top marks? What defines the difference between top marks and lower scores the evaluators can give you?
Who decided what the criteria should be – and how does that impact your bid and ability to win?
The person / people who chose the evaluators
Evaluators sometimes (often) don’t choose themselves. The number, role mix (procurement, operational, specific expertise etc) and specific people who are chosen as evaluators can impact what gets focused on in your bid when it’s being evaluated.
Who chooses the evaluators (and perhaps decided the process they’ll use; how they’re trained and instructed to conduct the evaluation; whether and how their scores will be moderated too) can have an impact on what and how your bid is evaluated.
When are these people making their decisions?
Evaluators make their scoring decisions when you submit your bid. At (or near) the end of the process.
But the people making decisions on whether to procure, scope, specification, procurement method etc – those decisions are made right at the start. That could be a year or more before evaluators become relevant.
And once those decisions are made, they’re hard to change. Only by building relationships well before these early decisions are being made will you be able to influence them.
And that can be the other problem you face by focusing on evaluators – you don’t start your customer relationship, understanding and influencing process early enough.
So, evaluators are important, but…
They may be evaluating a bid that might not have happened at all, with a scope decided elsewhere, to a specification written by someone else, procured through a process they perhaps had no part in deciding.
They could have been chosen by someone else, to score questions they didn’t write, to criteria they didn’t set, with weightings they had no part in creating, using rules they didn’t decide.
So yes, once you’ve got to the stage where you’re writing your bid, evaluators do become more important.
But by then most of what will impact whether the bid happens, whether it’s suited to your business, and your likelihood of winning has already been decided by others.
Maybe evaluators aren’t the only people your bid consultants, bosses, or you, should be focused on.
Because by the time you get to the stage where they do become important, you could already have lost the chance to win.
We’ll make sure your rebid preparation process is fit for purpose – so you win your rebid.
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