Tendering in the healthcare market does not have to be complicated. Read our guide to healthcare tenders to learn everything you need to succeed.
Understanding Health Care Tenders
Tendering is when suppliers are invited to bid on contracts to provide goods, services, or works to public sector organisation.
In healthcare, many innovations in health and medical technologies come from tendering out contracts. It’s often required by contract law to tender out contracts in healthcare.
For people working in the industry, it’s crucial to create a tendering process that suits their business, meets the needs of buyers, and achieves overall goals.
Here are some important steps to consider in the tendering process:
Step 1: Research the Market and Your Competition
To start the tender process, do some basic market research to see how much demand there is for what you’re offering.
Sometimes, a simple search can give you insights into how contracts are awarded for a specific product or service, and what results buyers are looking for.
But often, you’ll need to do more detailed searches using different keywords and phrases in your target market to understand the size and shape of your potential customers.
Step 2: Healthcare Buyers
In the healthcare tendering process, it’s important to know who your buyers are.
Take the time to identify the types of healthcare organisations are.
Pay attention to their specific care environments and look for contextual information about their growth as an organisation and their procurement strategy.
Step 3 Get to Know How Buyers Decide And Get Paid
Now that you know who your ideal buyer is and how your product or service can help them, it’s time to figure out how they will buy and get paid for it. To do this, learn about the rules and funding options for buyers to get your product or service. Buyers usually follow these stages when buying something:
The “Awareness” Phase
This is where they start looking for new ways to solve their healthcare problems. Some are driven by doctors who want better outcomes for specific diseases, while others are administrators trying to save on overall care costs.
The “Consideration” Phase
In this stage, buyers really think hard about how to solve their problems. They do their research, checking out different products and options.
They might even do online searches or talk to experts at conferences to gather all the info they need.
And if they don’t have a budget yet, no worries! They’ll try to find funding within their organisation or move some money around to make it happen.
The “Decision” Phase
Now, the buyers are ready to make a move. They ask for bids and decide what they want to do next. To make their choice, they carefully look at all the bids, using specific criteria and quality as their guide. What the bidders say and how they present their solutions really influence the buyer’s decision-making process.
Step 4: Create a Tender Discovery Framework
To increase your chances of winning tenders, it’s crucial to focus on high-quality tender leads. These are the leads that perfectly match your offering to the buyer’s problem and needs. Not every contract or tender opportunity will be the right fit, so it’s essential to do thorough research to determine if a contract or a buyer or request is a good fit for your product or service.
Here are some key dimensions to consider when qualifying a tender lead:
Identify the Problem
Understand what problem the buyer is trying to solve. This will guide you in recommending the right product or offer as the tender process moves forward.
Previous Solutions
Find out if the buyer has tried to address this problem before and how successful their experience was with existing solutions. This context will help you tailor your pitch and address their pain points effectively if your product is the right fit.
Decision-Makers
Determine who makes the final procurement decisions. Knowing all the critical stakeholders involved, the decision-making process, and the budget and funding available will shape your bidding strategy.
Step 5: Plan How to Talk to Buyers
When it comes to healthcare tenders, it’s essential to communicate effectively with the buyers.
Once you understand what the buyers need and if your healthcare products or services match those needs, it’s time to create a strategy for engaging with them. Make sure your messages are clear and consistent across all communication channels.
Step 6: Plan How to Set Prices for Tenders
When bidding for healthcare contracts, you need to figure out how much to charge for your products, equipment or services. It involves understanding your costs and choosing the best pricing strategy.
There are three common pricing strategies in healthcare:
Cost-plus Pricing
Add up all your costs and then add the value as a margin to set the selling price. This helps you make a fair profit while staying competitive with other companies in the market.
Value-based Pricing
This means setting a price based on what customers are willing to pay. It might be higher if your offer is special or urgent, or it could be lower for generic products. You can use this strategy to find areas where you can charge more based on the value your product brings to the customer.
Marginal Pricing
It is when you set the price to cover the extra cost of making one more unit, plus some profit. Big organisations sometimes use this strategy in tender markets when they have extra production capacity.
Step 7: Write a Winning Tender Bid
Writing a tender bid can be tough, even if you’re an industry expert. To succeed, you must understand how tender contracts work and take a thoughtful approach to writing your bid. Here are some tips:
- Read the contract carefully and take notes on important points.
- Think about the questions and take detailed notes for your responses.
- Ask the buyers any questions you have about the tender.
- Use persuasive language in your proposal, not just descriptions.
- Make sure your answers are thorough and easy to understand.
- Keep your responses simple and clear.
- Reference the question numbers correctly and label evidence correctly.
- Provide evidence to back up your claims for each outcome.
- Proofread your submission carefully as a team.
- Make sure your tender looks professional and consistent.
- Don’t forget to submit your bid before the deadline, ideally a day before.
Step 8: Keep Track and Improve
High-performing tender teams always measure their results to get better. Some important metrics to track are:
Tender Productivity
Measure and evaluate how efficiently your department, team or department handles tenders and contracts.
Bid Development Time
Track how long it takes to prepare a tender response.
Conversion Rate
Measure how many opportunities turn into qualified tenders.
Win / Loss Ratios
Track how many submissions lead to successful contracts.
Step 9: Plan Ahead
Once your tendering process is set up, start planning for future tenders. Create a tender calendar for each buyer in the market, months or even years in advance. It’ll help your teams prepare better and fill any gaps in evidence for your offers when the tender comes up.
Step 10: Improve Your Tendering Process with Data
Use internal and external market data to create a structured tendering strategy that fits each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Analyse and evaluate the tender documents to identify areas where your department and your organisation can improve and grow.
Unlock Healthcare Tendering Success with Supply2Gov
You may feel a bit overwhelmed as a beginner, but don’t worry! Everyone starts somewhere, and we’re here to help you on your journey.
Take it step by step, and with the right guidance, you’ll become more confident. Remember, even the most experienced experts were beginners once. Embrace the learning process, and you’ll be amazed at how much you can achieve!
Click here to register for free and start winning healthcare tenders now!
