When we were working on Datore 2.0 – one of our north star statements was ‘helping FM service providers turn their data into their differentiator’ and as we evolved our offering into Your Data Department last year, it really felt like this was coming true.
You know the bid you’re not supposed to win?
The one where the incumbent’s been in for six years. Word on the street is that the relationship’s solid. The client’s happy enough. Your price is competitive but it’s not the cheapest. On paper, you’re column C fodder, making up the numbers as It were.
Except you’re not. Because something has changed in the way these bids are being evaluated, and most FM providers that have clocked it, are re writing the rule book.
The question that's shifting everything
I’ve sat in enough bid debriefs over the past 2 years to spot the pattern. The providers losing contracts they expected to keep aren’t losing on price. They’re not losing on service quality. They’re losing because they can’t answer the data / innovation / AI question with any credibility.
And the providers winning contracts they had no right to win? They’re the ones who can.
It’s that simple (and that uncomfortable, for some)
The last three competitive bids I had visibility of all had a variation of the same question buried in the evaluation criteria: “Demonstrate how your operational data informs decision-making and how you will provide us/the client with visibility of performance at site level.”
That’s not a tick-box question or a 1 sentence answer. That’s a “show me your working” question. It’s a back to GCSE maths question, where the how is as important as the what, and it’s worth 15-20% of the score in most frameworks I’m seeing now.
What "good" looks like in a bid
Big ‘ol spoiler alert, this aint what you think it is going to be.
It’s not a paragraph about your “robust data infrastructure” or your “commitment to data-driven culture.” Procurement teams have read that sentence a thousand times and It means nothing.
The strongest answers name a specific contract. They describe a specific scenario where operational data flagged something before it became a problem. They show what the client saw, when they saw it, and what changed as a result.
They talk through WHAT they measure, WHY they measure it, and HOW / WHAT they take action based on it.
One provider I worked with recently won a £3m contract against an incumbent who’d held it for five years. Their bid team included three screenshots of their client portal – actual screenshots, not mockups – showing real-time absence tracking, staffing cost variances by site, and a contract P&L view the client could access themselves – along with a link to a demo version of the portal that they could have a little poke around.
The incumbent’s answer talked about “comprehensive reporting capabilities” and “regular performance reviews.”
It wasn’t close.
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- The data and AI questions now showing up in FM tenders
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Why this catches providers off guard
Most FM providers I talk to have data. They’ve got T&A systems, they’ve got people data, scheduling platforms, finance tools. The raw material is almost always there.
What they don’t have is the join-up. The bit where absence data connects to contract cost. Where scheduling patterns connect to service delivery. Where the finance team’s month-end numbers match what operations is seeing on the ground.
And they definitely don’t have a way of showing any of that to a client (that isn’t 3 days’ work in a dodgy spreadsheet)
So, when the bid question lands, they’ve got two choices. Write something vague and hope nobody pushes on it. Or be honest and say they’re working on it.
The providers winning these bids chose a third option. They built the capability before the question arrived.
The competitive advantage nobody's talking about
Here’s what tickles my pickle about this whole situation. We’re not talking about AI. We’re not talking about machine-learning driven predictive analytics, ‘human out of the loop’ agentic workflows or any of the stuff that gets airtime at conferences and is filling up your linkedin feeds.
We’re talking about the basics. Foundations. Fundamentals. Joined-up, clean data that has been modelled in a specific way for a reason.
Can you open a dashboard where T&A and Contract data talk to each other?
Can you show a client their absence patterns and staffing costs over twelve months?
Can you demonstrate that you spotted a staffing problem before they rang you about it?
For my money, that’s the differentiator.
And it’s a differentiator precisely because so few providers can actually do it. The bar isn’t high, it really isn’t, it’s just that almost no one has cleared it yet.
If you’re an FM provider turning over £20m, £50m, £200m – and you can walk into a bid presentation with a live portal showing the client exactly how their contract is performing + you’ve got matching internal analytics, running from the same data set, that you use to proactively stay ahead on delivery, you’re not competing on the same terms as everyone else. You haven’t moved the goalposts, you’ve near-as-damn-it changed the game.
What the smart providers are doing
The ones I’ve seen make this work aren’t treating it as a technology project. They’re treating it as a commercial weapon and elevating it to their strategic priority list.
They pick one contract – usually their most strategic client – and they build the proof point. They connect the data sources that matter for that contract. They build a view the client can actually see. And then they use that as the case study in every bid from that point forward.
It doesn’t need to take two years. It doesn’t take a massive IT programme. One contract. Real data. A portal the client can log into paired with operational dashboards built on the same data – bid differentiation sorted.
Then they do something clever. They bring the client into the story. “Here’s what our client at [company] sees every morning when they log in. Here’s the alert that fired when absence hit 12% at their Birmingham site. Here’s what we did about it before they even knew.”
The window is closing
Right now, this is still a differentiator. Most FM providers can’t do it. Most bid teams are still writing vague paragraphs about data culture and hoping for the best.
But that window is closing. The procurement teams asking these questions aren’t going to stop asking them. If anything, the questions are getting sharper and more specific with every tender cycle.
The providers who move now get to be the ones setting the standard. The ones who wait get to be the ones trying to catch up.
I know which side of that I’d want to be on 🚀
If you want to talk about what this looks like for your business, drop me a message. As chief geek in residence, I love chatting about this stuff, deal or no deal.
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