Today, our expert Category Managers share their top tendering tips when procuring:

• When planning a procurement exercise, ask as many open questions as you can, of as many stakeholders as possible. A wide range of answers and ideas will give you more opportunities for innovation, creativity and commercial gain for both the buyer and supplier.
  
   
• If retendering a recurring requirement, find out who the end users are. Ask them what the incumbent supplier is doing well, and what they could do better, often concentrating on the latter. Use this feedback when drafting the quality questionnaire questions and frame the questions by asking the suppliers how their company or solution will deliver the requirement. Use their response to differentiate which bidder aligns itself closest to end user needs.
  
   
• Introduce a competitive edge into the exercise wherever possible. Make achieving first-place on the agreement mean something and if it fits with the category, include dynamic scoring up front to enable the ongoing assessment and re-ranking of suppliers through its entire life.
  
   
• When tasked with drafting an unfamiliar specification, ask your line manager if it’s possible to hot desk from the client department’s office for a few days. This way, you can observe how the team works together and interfaces with their internal customers and suppliers. It should also foster trust with your customers and allow you to refine and improve the specification through informal queries and conversations with staff. This experience will also be useful when scoring the bids and allow you to apply the evaluation criteria more accurately to the business context.
  
   
• When drafting an evaluation methodology that will be applied to the evaluation of your bid, ensure that the scoring mechanism and evaluation criteria are clear, reasonable and unambiguous so that bidders understand exactly what they are required to present and how their bids will be assessed. This is also key to mitigate potential risks of procurement challenge.
  
   
• Provide bidders with templates and clear instruction on what you want them to do, where to find additional information, what will happen at each stage, and the rules they must follow.
  
   
• When evaluating qualitative tender questionnaires, stakeholders often print all the bids in one go and evaluate them separately around their day job. It’s better to instruct your evaluators to score each question separately, across all the bidders (e.g. score question 1 across supplier A, then supplier B, then supplier C, etc.) instead of scoring each supplier submission separately (e.g. score all supplier A’s questions, then score all supplier B’s questions, etc.). This will enable you to compare the relative strengths of each supplier across a certain topic in a consistent and comparable way. It also prevents you from revisiting and re-scoring bids every time you come across a better (or worse) submission.