Tender debrief
If you’ve gone to the effort and expense of tendering be sure to debrief – win or lose – on the outcome. If there is an opportunity for face-to-face debriefing, take it – it’s only fair that large legal consumers who invite tenders offer debriefing and feedback to tenderers, whatever the result.
Use these questions to at your next tender debrief to shed light on your performance and to learn for next time.
- Why did you go to tender?
- How do you identify which firms to invite?
- Where did we rank in the overall evaluation?
- How were selection criteria weighted?
- Were there any surprises?
- Did your views change during the tender process?
- How did various firms compare?
- How important was price?
- How did our pricing benchmark again that which you accepted? And, in what area/s were numbers significantly different?
- What was the relative price position of the successful tenderers in the final outcome?
- In what areas did we do especially well?
- In what areas did our tender fall short?
- How effectively did we address reducing your business risk?
- Was our technology a positive in the evaluation?
- How much did your past experience with us and with each of the alternatives influence your ultimate decision?
- How will you know if you made the right decision?
- How will you monitor performance of the winner/s?
- Were any consortium bids (i.e. multiple law firms forming a consortium) credible and seriously entertained by you?
- What separated the winning proposals from the others?
- What value adds were you offered?
- We are committed to the field of practice. What recommendations or suggestions have you for us to position ourselves optimally with others in this sector?
- What do we need to do to be certain to win your business next time round?
Each should be gently but doggedly probed out, in full, ideally without response or discussion, to derive maximum learnings and to inform your future decision making.
If you need help with your next tender debrief, please get in touch.
Select articles
Feature article
Tender readability – tips to improve your tender presentation and some tender presentation no-nos
Tender readability remains a problem for some in the 21st century. I still see submission documents that cling to a handful of really old hat tender presentation and formatting techniques. I suspect this is because some of these ‘rules’ are viewed as being more appropriate to a ‘formal’ style of document such as a tender. […]
