One of the biggest letdowns is putting in a bid where you know you have a special rapport with the group calling the tender, a very competitive product and good reason to believe your price is well structured – then along comes the news – you are not successful.  What went wrong – you are told, nothing went wrong you did not meet the criteria!

So what is meeting the criteria? Short answer – depends on what drives the business activity being called for in the tender. So is a sound understanding of the required activity enough? Short answer – it depends on whether the activity is public or private. So is it the money? – Well it depends – so lets look at projects of government (Federal and or State) and about 30% found price the reason, 37% possibly, 33% not very likely. So is it the economic conditions? About 58% say yes, 37% very possible, 5% No reason to think this is the reason.

Compare this to carbon intervention programs: Initiatives based on economic drivers (47%), based on accounting functions (53%). It is therefore very possible when putting in a bid you could underestimate the impact of factors other than price (in other words external factors) by 11% (58% – 47%).

How can you factor in an 11% margin for the effect of external matters? Co2Land org is not going to try to answer that question. However, polling your networks might be very useful to narrow this margin. If you research through professional and social media you can quickly profile and assign a probability of the likelihood it will impact on your bid assessment. Think about it – how often do you find yourself thinking something should be done about that and next day it is news?   This is even more important when the assessment is weighted score (This is when each criteria is not equal in the marking).