If every tender request goes straight to an engineer for calculations, the customer controls your team’s workload. All they have to do is send the terms. A salesperson tracks the submission deadline, an engineer selects a solution, and the question of whether the company should take on the order is put off until the proposal is ready.
This leads to an unpleasant argument: staff are busy, orders are scarce, and the owner demands more frequent participation. But first, you need to find out where the current attempts end. Was our proposal beaten by someone else’s? Or was it rejected because of a mandatory requirement that was known before the calculations even began? Increasing the number of submissions before answering this means adding work without knowing what it will fix.
I believe the head of sales’ right to stop preparation here is just as important as their duty to see the selected enquiry through to submission. But a decision not to proceed needs a specific explanation. Simply calling it a bad tender is not enough.
A rejection has a date. So does the reason for it
Put the original request, the correspondence with the customer and the response to the submitted proposal side by side. Find the requirement that caused the enquiry to be rejected. When did it appear? Who saw it? What was the engineer asked to do after that?
If the requirement was in the request, the technical team immediately said it had no means of meeting it, and detailed preparation continued anyway, the company knew the reason for rejection before spending most of its time on the work. That is the point to ask the head of sales: what was the basis for continuing?
For example, lowering the price cannot satisfy a requirement to install equipment using your own crew if you have no crew of your own. First, you need the customer’s answer on whether another contractor is acceptable. Then you need that contractor to confirm that they will do the work within the required time. These answers determine the enquiry’s fate before a polished proposal does.
If the terms changed after preparation began, the review is different: did the head of sales reconsider the decision in time when the change arrived? You cannot judge their earlier choice using information that was not available then. But once a new requirement has arrived, continuing the calculations needs a new justification.
An unexplained rejection proves none of this. Its cause still needs to be established using whatever method is available for this tender. Recording price as the reason for losing simply because that is what you usually do means later demanding a discount to address an unknown cause.
An engineer has the right to finish the task with “we cannot take this on”
An obvious objection follows: how can we decide whether we can fulfil an order if we have not done the calculations yet? A salesperson cannot assess a complex configuration on their own. Barring them from consulting an engineer until everything is clear means leaving the salesperson to guess.
Look, the task “find out whether our equipment can handle the required load” allows for a negative result. If the engineer has shown why it cannot, the task is complete. The task “prepare the proposal by the deadline” calls for a finished document. If you assign the second task while skipping the first decision, the employee has to choose for themselves: stop or finish what they were asked to do.
So before complex calculations begin, the head of sales agrees with the head of the technical team exactly what answer is needed to make the choice. Together, they decide how much work is enough and how much time to allow for it. There is no need to go into every supply option before answering the deciding question.
A full set of calculations may also be needed to make that choice. In that case, assign it as exactly that: establish whether the order can be fulfilled, with the right to finish by declining to take part. I consider it dishonest to call a large amount of work a quick assessment to make reporting easier.
Once the answer is in, the head of sales changes the task. If it is confirmed that the order can be fulfilled, the team prepares the proposal. If an obstacle is confirmed, preparation stops. If there is no answer by the agreed deadline, the head of sales decides how much more time to allow and what other work will have to be put off. They raise any new costs or changes to what the company promises to do with the owner before making a promise to the customer.
The hardest part is allowing work to stop after the calculations
The more work has already been done, the harder it is to decide against submitting. People have put in effort, the deadline is close, and the report needs to show activity. But completing the calculations does not give the company the ability it lacks to fulfil the order. Further work needs to be justified by what it will change.
When the head of sales is assessed only by the number of submissions, an enquiry that is stopped counts against them. One submitted despite a known failure to meet the requirements counts in their favour. The demand to select tenders will remain a wish as long as the owner criticises every drop in that number without examining the reasons.
This is no reason to reward the head of sales for a short queue. Take their own decision not to proceed: is a specific obstacle named, where does the information about it come from, and did the sales team look into an acceptable way to remove it? If the head of sales declined without reading the customer’s clarification, they lost an opportunity for the same reason they previously wasted the engineer’s time: they made a decision without the available facts.
You can see the new process at work before the tender ends. Compare the time the deciding answer was received with the next task given to the engineer. Once an obstacle was confirmed, did they stop being asked to make revisions? After a positive answer, were they assigned to prepare a proposal, and did they complete it by the promised deadline? If the answers are sitting in the correspondence while the queue carries on as before, selection exists only on paper.
At RENTROP, “turnkey sales management” includes this daily responsibility too: deciding which enquiries the sales team prepares and changing the work when new information arrives. If your calculations are piling up faster than orders, you can use a free sales review to examine when a request becomes a task and who has the right to stop it.
The owner does not need to read every tender themselves to retain control. They need a head of sales who can explain both the work they chose and the work they rejected. Otherwise, everyone who sent the company a request has already made the choice for it.