Participating In Tenders or Request of Proposals (RFP)? Think Again

Read our lips..

“Don’t waste your time participating in a tender. It belongs to someone else already. Unless you’re involved very deeply into the project since Day 1, way before the tender process began”.

If you just participate into the tender without exactly knowing what the requirements are, who are the end-customers and other stakeholders, decision criteria, and those whatnots, there is a strong chance you won’t succeed. In our previous encounters as well as our friends’ on the tender participations, almost none of them are success. We say out of 100 attempts, 99 will not be a success even though your offers are superb.

This is a story of getting a decently big project here in Malaysia. In Malaysia, having strong solutions, pricing structure and business case is just one-third of the story.

The other one third is well established networking of contacts, real strong contacts among the stakeholders (within the customers’ side) as well as among stakeholders’ friends and getting them into your side.

The final one third of the story is you must have a great level of passion and believe in your products or services, and it works great as a solution to your customers. Then the customers’ must share the same passion as you are of the solutions, convinced that it will work great to solve their problems and fit perfectly well into their requirements.

Again, if you are just participating in a tender or RFP for the sake of just making up the numbers – read our lips “Forget It”. You are going to waste your time…