We recently had the opportunity to tender for a project website and logo for Children in Scotland. It our first ever tender, so the experience was both exciting and nerve wracking. The mission is to look effortlessly outstanding without being overconfident… a tricky balance to strike.

This is by no means an expert guide to tendering, just a reflection on a couple of things we learned in the process.

Presenting yourself

Your presentation should reflect your aesthetic ability and your attention to detail. You are, after all, trying to convince someone to hire you for design work. Does that seem like a patronising point?

Although we have never written a tender as a company before Scott, our designer has been on the scoring side of the process in the past – he had a little insight into how not to stand out.

A well presented tender wont make you suitable for a job you’re not qualified to do, but if you are qualified then there is no substitute for sticking a great first impression. Think of it like this: would you go to a job interview in your scruffy old jeans or would you be aiming to look your best!

Seek to understand and then be understood

We got the job. We were confident that we had the right skills but we were inexperienced in this process so had no way of telling if our tender had met their standards. When we met with the project team they were happy to give us some feedback. They told us that what stood out most was that our whole tender was tailored to their questions and requirements. Again is this not an obvious thing to do? Apparently companies that tender a lot often fall into the trap of just rehashing and adjusting previous tenders rather than writing the whole thing from scratch.

I understand why companies would do this if they are sending tenders away each week and the differences between them seem so small. No one pays you for the time you spend pitching for work so the temptation is there to cut corners. However, making an effort to really understand what a company needs and speak directly to that need makes a huge impact on them. We all want to be listened to and understood and we can’t help but be drawn to those who make that effort.

In our case it was beginners luck, we’ve yet to fall into any bad habits – lets hope we never do!

Be honest

We all met working for Learning and Teaching Scotland and we still split our time between our jobs there and Post Creative. This doesn’t concern some clients at all. No job we have taken on to date is so big or has such tight deadlines that it produces any kind of conflict.

We were stuck with a difficult decision. A lot of the skills they were looking for in the project we learned working for LTS, our experience of creating public sector websites, our accessibility and usability training and knowledge. It would be impossible not to mention them, but how would it look on our CVs to say that we still worked there, would they take us less seriously as an established company?

In the end we decided that it is just too stressful to try and be something that your not. We are a new company still finding our way regarding establishing and running the business, but in other areas our skills are highly developed. In balance we guessed that our technical and design skills where more valuable to them than our business skills.

Should you always be honest and run the risk of perhaps talking yourself out of a job… it is hard to say for definite, personally I’m a people-pleaser. I hate promising what I can’t deliver because I don’t like to disappoint people. I’d rather be honest and take the chance that I might not be everything they are looking for. Then I can go learn what I need to learn so that the next time the opportunity arises I’ll be ready and confident, able to exceed expectations and keep them as a long-term client.