Tendering: how to bid without wasting the effort

Tendering is competing for work through a formal, documented process — the buyer publishes what they need and the rules, suppliers submit written bids, and an evaluation follows criteria that were stated in advance. It is common in public sector work and in any large organisation buying something significant, and for a small supplier it is either a reliable route to substantial contracts or a quiet drain on the best people's time.

Which of those it is depends almost entirely on the decision made in the first hour: whether to bid at all.

The bid or no-bid decision

• Can you meet every mandatory requirement? One unmet mandatory condition means disqualification regardless of how good the rest is — read these before anything else.
• Do you meet the qualification thresholds: turnover, insurance levels, certifications, years of trading, reference contracts of comparable size?
• Is there an incumbent, and is there any evidence the buyer wants to change? Bidding against a happy incumbent is expensive market research.
• How is it scored? Price-weighted tenders favour scale; quality-weighted ones favour specialists. Know which you are before you write.
• What does bidding cost you, in the hours of the people who would also deliver the work?
• Is the contract actually good — margin, term, payment terms, liability, and what happens if volumes are lower than indicated?
• Can you deliver it if you win? A won tender you cannot staff is worse than a lost one.

Say no more often than feels comfortable. A supplier that bids for everything wins a low proportion, exhausts its team, and learns nothing; one that bids for a third as many, chosen deliberately, usually wins more in absolute terms because each bid gets the attention it needs. Track your win rate by category — it tells you where you are actually competitive, which is rarely where you assumed.

Writing a bid that scores

1. Read the whole pack first, including the evaluation criteria and weightings, before writing a word. The criteria are the specification for your document.
2. Build a compliance matrix: every requirement in one column, where you answer it in another. This is what stops the omission that disqualifies you.
3. Answer the question that was asked, in the order it was asked, using the buyer's own terminology. Evaluators score against a sheet and cannot award marks for something they cannot find.
4. Give evidence rather than adjectives. Named reference contracts, numbers, dates and named people beat "extensive experience" every time.
5. Address risk explicitly. Buyers score confidence, and a bid that names the three things that could go wrong and how they are handled reads as competent, not weak.
6. Price deliberately and write down your assumptions, so a clarification question can be answered without reopening the whole model.
7. Have someone who did not write it read it against the criteria and score it as an evaluator would. Every gap they find is a gap that would have cost marks.
8. Submit early. Portals fail, uploads are slow, and deadlines in tendering are almost always absolute.

After the decision

Ask for the feedback, whichever way it went. Public bodies usually must provide scores and often a comparison against the winning bid, and that document is the cheapest competitive intelligence available anywhere. Read it against your compliance matrix and record what actually lost the marks — price, a weak answer, a missing certification, an unconvincing reference. Do this for a year and your bid or no-bid decisions get sharply better, which is worth more than any single contract.

In Ettex, the bid itself lives in Ettex Docs: threaded comments with @mentions so a colleague can challenge an answer against the paragraph it concerns, version history so you can see what changed between drafts and recover the version submitted, and templates for the answers you reuse. The compliance matrix and the pipeline of open tenders — deadline, portal, status, owner — fit Ettex Sheets, where conditional formatting can flag a deadline approaching. Reusable answers to the standard questions belong in Ettex Notes with tags, the finished pack is assembled and page-numbered in Ettex PDF, and anything requiring signature goes through Ettex Signature.

Said plainly: Ettex has no bid or tender module. There is no portal integration, no automatic tender alerts, no answer library that suggests previous responses, no evaluation scoring, and no submission workflow. It gives you a document editor with real version history, a spreadsheet for the matrix, and a way to assemble the final pack. The reading of the pack and the discipline of the compliance matrix are the work, and neither is software. The formal version of the same exercise is an invitation to tender, with process rules that have to be applied literally.

Receiving bids is only half the job. A structured bid comparison — normalised prices, pre-agreed weights and a recorded decision — is what makes the award defensible if it is challenged.

Which document you send depends on how settled the specification already is. The RFI RFP RFQ sequence asks three different questions, and sending the last one too early produces prices nobody can compare.

Why bids lose

• A mandatory requirement missed, which ends the bid regardless of its quality.
• Answers that describe the company rather than answering the question, so evaluators cannot find the marks.
• Adjectives instead of evidence — "world-class", "proven" — where a named contract and a number were wanted.
• The buyer's terminology ignored, making the evaluator translate before scoring.
• Risk avoided rather than addressed, which reads as not having thought about delivery.
• Price built without written assumptions, so clarifications become renegotiations.
• Submitted in the last hour, when the portal is slowest and there is no time to fix a rejected upload.
• Feedback never requested, so the same mistakes are repeated at the next tender.

Two documents shape the decision before any writing starts. An invitation to tender contains the rules that have to be applied literally, and an rfp response is the logistics problem underneath the prose — questions with owners, and a deadline two days before the portal closes.

Tendering is won by preparation and lost by omission. Decide honestly whether to bid, build the compliance matrix, answer in the buyer's words with evidence, submit early — and read the feedback whichever way it goes.