...your guide to winning contracts

16 March 2010 - Tips from Procurex 2010 - The Do’s and Don’ts of PQQs

The Procurex National Procurement Exhibition, 2010 (9th and 10th March) included a good range of rapid, half hour training sessions on a wide number of topics – the most popular with private sector punters being The Do’s and Don’ts of PQQa (Pre Qualification Questionnaires). Most are no-brainers but still it’s good to be reminded about some of the techniques to deal with issues and perceived weaknesses when you are tendering for public sector contracts.

Lesson number one is – know the rules – if you don’t know the rules you will most likely fall foul of them and be weeded out early on in the process. As the presenter of this session pointed out ‘the purpose of the Pre Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) is to get rid of you’. Typically the buyer does not want to invite more than five or six companies to tender so if you make it easy for them to rule you out on a technical issue they will do so.

Tell the truth but “big it up” where you can e.g. no need to say that you will be using however many sub-contractors to deliver the contract if you are not specifically ask to say whether your human resources are staff or sub-contractors.

Similarly the buyer may ask for three years of financial records or a certain level of turnover which you don't quite have – rather than dryly saying we have only been around for two years and our turnover is xxx, what you might say instead (if true) is 'we have only been around for two years but look what we have achieved in that time and we forecast that next year our turnover will be xxx and in three years our turnover will be xxx (much bigger) and look at the clients we have already worked with' etc. etc. – spin it!

-Do provide the personal profiles of your people, to demonstrate how capable they are.
­Do provide references and testimonials from former clients.
­Do provide details of memberships of professional bodies and details of your accreditations.

Most of all do make sure that you read the Pre Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) and read it again, plus find someone else who is competent to read it as well, to ensure you do not miss anything. Check your final submission against what is asked for and again get a second person to do the same.

Do meet the submission deadline and return your PQQ as requested e.g. if asked for three hard copies, send three hard copies, if asked for your PQQ electronically send it electronically.

As I said this is all logical and good sense yet it seems so many would-be suppliers manage to get the basics wrong.

For details of the trainer for this and other sessions on Day 2 of the exhibition follow this link:
http://www.procurexnational.co.uk/day2zone2.html