Cleaning Tenders
Tenders for Cleaning Contracts
Our expert tender and bid writers will help your business write compelling cleaning tenders and secure new contracts. We take care of the entire process including preparing for your tender, reviewing the criteria and submitting your response. We leverage on our experience completing over 84 cleaning tenders to help you win more cleaning tenders.
Overcoming challenges in cleaning tenders to win
Most building and facility owners outsource cleaning services. This gives rise to many contract opportunities for cleaning contracts. It is also a highly competitive market. You need to ensure your experience is closely aligned with the opportunity. One of the main challenges of winning cleaning contracts is choosing the correct tender to bid for. A thorough bid/no bid analysis is critical to ensuring you allocate your internal resources appropriately.
Once you have reviewed the tender specifications and deciding to put in a proposal one of the biggest challenges is standing out from the crowd. It’s no secret that there are a lot of cleaning companies across New Zealand competing for tenders and bids. With relatively low barriers to entry and limited licensing requirements, incumbents often find themselves bidding against their own sub-contractors.
You need to deliver value. You need to innovate. Importantly, your tender submission needs to outline:
- Why you are different.
- How your proposed service is different.
- What additional value you will deliver.
- What aspects of your proposed service is innovative.
Strategies for winning cleaning sector contracts
- Site Visits. Take a detailed and thorough approach to any site visits you are invited to. Look at how the site is presented at the moment from a cleaning perspective. Where you see areas for improvement, note them down. Identify any difficult to clean areas that may impact your pricing. Ask questions about the current roster and structure. Finally, identify any specific materials. For example, is there alot of carpet? If so, will you need a dedicated carpet cleaning machine to clean it. These are all important points that will enable you to make your tender more compelling. It will help you get your pricing right. It will also assist you in putting forward innovations in your proposal. For example, is the outside area of the building not being cleaned thoroughly? Will you provide this as a value added service as part of your portfolio?
- Focus on Quality. One of the key win themes for any cleaning tender could be quality. A focus on quality needs to be integrated throughout your bid. You need to detail how you will deliver the cleaning service consistently and to a high standard. This is especially critical for government or specialised facilities such as medical research labs or other nucler science research centres. Areas to illustrate your commitment to quality include:
- In your response to the question on equipment. Talk about how you use the best cleaning equipment as well as how you service and maintain your equipment.
- Internal auditing. Do you undertake random internal audits of your work?
- Staff training. Talk about how you train your staff on the best most up to date cleaning practices.
- Materials. What type of chemicals do you use? Are they at a higher grade than normal chemicals? Do they limit any long term damage to the building materials you are cleaning?
- What type of roster are you proposing? Do you propose to have a supervisor in place to ensure quality?
- Supporting documentation. It is critical that you have the appropriate supporting documentation in place for any contract. This extends to safety, quality and environmental documentation. If you are ISO certified, then be sure to reference your certification. If you are not ISO certified, it is recommended you state how your documentation is aligned to the ISO requirements. In addition, take the time to tailor your documentation to the opportunity. Your tender submission needs to be complemented by the supporting documentation. For example, if you have an environmental management system, you need to focus on the environment in your tender response. Talk about how you use environmentally friendly cleaning chemicals. Provide a tailored plan of how you propose to dispose of waste. With respect to safety, you may have submitted a safety management system. If so, talk about some of the specific safety issues for the project. Will you need to work at heights? If so, provide specific supporting safety documentation to address each high risk safety issue.
- Detail your cleaning methodology. It may seem obvious to you, however, many procurement personnel who are running the RFP, RFT or cleaning tender may not know a lot about cleaning. If you take the time to detail your methodology and demonstrate that you have thought through the requirements of the tender, it will help you win. Go into detail and discuss how you propose to service the contract, what cleaning techniques you will use and why you have put forward your proposed roster. If there are any considerations you have taken into play (for example, if you are cleaning a shopping centre or hotel, what process you have in place for cleaning spillages safely in high traffic areas) be sure to include this. Finally, talk about the training you provide to your cleaners and how they will implement your proposed methodologies.
- Provide relevant experience. Your level of experience is critical to securing any bid or tender. When detailing your experience, in the form of example a case study, make sure the experience aligns to the specifications of the tender. If it is a government tender, provide previous government experience. Talk about how you are able to deal with the reporting and administration requirements of a government contract. If you are proposing to use some of the same personnel, name them. If you received positive feedback from the contract and have retained the contract over a number of years – talk about that as well. Go into detail about your previous experience and talk about the outcomes you delivered from a cleaning perspective as well as a contract management perspective.
The above are just some of the strategies you can employ to win more cleaning tenders in New Zealand. We have helped clients across New Zealand including in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and all over the north and south island to secure government and private sector contracts. Our team is always ready to help you win.