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Sit Down with our Bid Manager, Nick Eyley

Last updated: Mar 17, 2022 @ 4:04 pm

Q: Introduce yourself!

Hi, I’m Nick, a Bid Manager here at Hudson, part of the Succeed Team and it’s my job to manage technical response questions for our customers and ensure the best possible quality submissions are delivered, every time.

Q: How long have you been working with Tenders?

I’ve been managing tender opportunities for over 10 years now. I started on the buyer side of things managing an annual budget of £30 million for a national medical research charity.

Q: Where does your expertise come from?

In my role at the charity, I hosted each tendering opportunity and worked with individual researchers to help them develop their technical responses, acting as the point of contact for them to answer any questions they had about the tenders.

I did this for three years before moving into Higher Education and tendering for research grants for the University. This was my first experience managing the technical responses in each tender. It was a bit of a shock compared to what I was used to!

I worked alongside individual academics across the university, using their technical knowledge and expertise to form the response to each question within each tender.

Q: Was working with a lot of different people hard?

It could be, yes. But this is where I developed my flexible approach to delivering responses. Everyone works in a different way, and so I learned how to work with different personalities, changing how I worked with them to get the best responses possible.

Q: How did you do that?

Well some academics were really laid back and left me to manage the whole technical submission myself. Where that happened, I made a plan to manage each technical response and created a draft answer to each question. I then worked with the academic to get the key information needed in each response.

Sometimes, the academic was really proactive, and I managed each response in a cooperative way. I would work with the academic to agree how each response should be written and together we would create the technical content.

Q: Which way worked better?

I was lucky in that I worked with some of the leading experts in their fields and I enjoyed tender success by working in a range of ways. There really was no guaranteed method for success, so I think the best way of working came down to being able to adapt to different ways of managing the technical responses.

Q: What happened after that?

Next, I moved to a different university and took on more responsibility. I had a team of people working under me and helping develop the technical responses for tender questions.

I was working with the same tenders and funding opportunities, but with a completely new set of experts.

Q: What did that mean?

I learnt a completely new way of working whilst producing bids for the same buyers. This helped me understand that there is more than one way of writing technical responses and I realised each of my ‘clients’ worked in a different way. I became flexible in my approach to bid management, working with each client in a way that best suited them.

Q: What happened next?

From bid management in Higher Education I moved into the Private Sector and worked in the construction industry, writing technical responses for tenders across Highways, Infrastructure, Housing and Public Realm developments. The tenders here were very different and I learnt quickly how to create strong technical responses for each question.

Q: So what makes a good technical response?

In my experience, there is no guaranteed way to create a perfect technical response. There are however ways you can work to maximise your chances of scoring highly. These are:

Understand each question, what is being asked and what the buyer wants to know.
Break your technical response down into subheadings answering each section of the question.
Write clearly and concisely.
Relate each point in your technical response to the technical specification the buyer has issued as part of the tender documents.
For every claim, you make, provide evidence to back it up.
Use examples of previous successes to strengthen your argument.
Support your technical response with evidence in the form of:
- Images
- Designs
- Reports
- Programmes
- Drawings (where applicable, of course).
Provide added value in your technical response.

Q: Is that the same for every response?

Broadly, yes. Taking the same approach to each technical response will set you on the right path to creating a strong quality submission.

You need to be careful and consider the requirements of each question individually though, and of the overall tender.

Q: Can you give any examples?

So let’s take a methodology response as an example.

This is a question that comes up again and again and it’s vital that your technical response scores well for you to be in with a chance of securing the contract.

Firstly – Understanding the question:

Methodology responses need you to show how you:

Understand the buyer’s specifications.
Plan to deliver the works.
Plan to meet (and exceed) the Specifications.

Take the time to understand the Specification details and what the buyer wants you to deliver.

It is also important at this stage to decide if you really want to bid for the opportunity. You should consider:

Can I/we meet all the requirements?
Do I know how I/we can deliver the project?
Would my / our costs to deliver the project be competitive?

If the answer to all these is yes – you can start to work on your technical response.

Secondly – Break down your Response

Use the question as your guide for creating your technical response. An example methodology question might be:

Tenderers are required to detail their proposals for this contract in response to the specification and your response should detail the following minimum requirements at least.

Work schedules for staff term time.
Methods of cleaning term time, non-term time.
Shift patterns term time, periodic times, weeks covered, Example schedules.
Periodic cleaning and scheduling.
Reporting of cleaning completed.
Cleaning strategies – when, why, times, methods.

For this response I would suggest breaking your technical response into the following subheadings:

1.Overall Approach to Service Delivery

2.Work Schedules