Writing tenders is not natural for most people.
Everyone has to learn. Like any skill, writing responses to tender questions is something you can learn.
We’ve asked our tender evaluators, our team of tender writing veterans, to bring you a comprehensive guide for beginners.
We’ve seen it all – from common pitfalls to winning bids – and we’re here to share our wisdom.
Together, we’ll equip you with the skills and confidence to navigate the tender landscape, secure successful project contracts and be the best tender writer!
Helpful tips for the best tender writer
You’ve read the tender documents. The forms seem endless, the jargon confusing, and you know your competition is fierce.
We’ve got some very helpful tips to speed up the learning process, for the big tender win!
Tender writer tip no. 1 – Avoid the ugly blank screen
To get started, the first thing to learn to do is write rough responses, making sure that you specifically answer the Client’s question or requirement.
Don’t worry about whether it reads well, don’t worry about grammar, don’t worry about spelling – that can all be fixed later.
Just write: there’s nothing uglier than a blank screen!
If you can’t get started, here’s a trick: interview yourself using the dictation function of Word. Ask yourself the tender question and answer it off the top of your head. You’ll find that a rough answer emerges.
Once you’ve done that, go on to the next question or requirement and write a rough response for that one, and so on. If you can’t answer the question or requirement, highlight it in yellow and go on to the next one.
Set a date when all of the rough responses should be ready. That should be as soon as you can, because you never have enough time to write a tender: you’re day job always gets in the way.
At the end of that process of writing rough responses, then at least you know you’ve got written responses to a lot of the questions in the tender.
Tender writer tip no. 2 – Go back to the questions/responses worth more evaluation scores, and spend more time re-writing them.
Look up ‘Evaluation Criteria’ in your Client’s tender documents and find the responses that are worth more evaluation scores.
For example, it is quite common for tenders issued by Australian State Governments to require a ‘Local Economy Benefits statement’ (or similar) and often these are worth more of the total tender evaluation scores than even the pricing!
So, spend more time re-writing these responses than for others.
When you re-write these responses that are worth more evaluation scores, do these things:
- Use a pyramid structure to your written response so that it is easy for evaluators to score
– At the top of the pyramid, put your summary answer.
For example, ‘Yes, our organisation has 25 years’ experience delivering the products and services required by this tender’
– In the middle section of the pyramid, put facts, and give examples.
For example, ‘Here is a list of the Clients we have successfully provided the required products and services to over those 25 years’.
– then in the bottom section of the pyramid, if something needs to be explained, write the explanation.
For example, ’One of the reasons why we have a long successful track-record is that our products consistently top the industry quality measures: below is a chart that shows our quality measures over the last 10 years are consistently higher than the industry average’
(Head to the end of this blog for another example to demonstrate this point)
- Write facts in it
For example, if your answer is that your organisation has done something successfully, write the name of the project, or the contract name. Write the date your organisation did it successfully. If you have a testimonial from the Client, you may have reached maximum evaluation scores.
- Don’t ask others to write, you’ll waste valuable time.
If you don’t know the answer, don’t ask others to write the response. Because writing is time-consuming you can bet that they won’t write an answer for you.
Rather, interview them asking, ‘Off the top of your head, what is the answer to (repeat the tender question). From their answer, write a rough response and email it to them, asking them to correct it.
Correcting and editing is a lot easier and takes a lot less than time than writing, they’ll happily do that for you.
Tender writer tip no. 3 – Get someone to re-read your tender responses.
When all the responses are re-written, organise someone who is familiar with the Client but not familiar with the tender to read all your re-written responses and make notes where a fact needs to be checked, or where something isn’t clear.
Then, go back and edit what you’ve written.
Tender writer tip no. 4 – Advanced technique: a picture is worth a thousand words.
Can you replace a paragraph of words with one picture or table, or list or graph or drawing? It’s a lot easier for evaluators to read, and understand.
You will – other things being equal – tend to get higher evaluation scores!
Tender writer tip no. 5 – Advanced technique: look for what makes your solution less risky, faster, better, cheaper.
Not only is this hard to do, because you have to think like your Client, but it’s also quite rare to be able to find this.
So, you can only expect to be able to find out what makes your solution less risky etc for maybe 20-30% of a tender response.
Still, getting higher evaluation scores on 20-30% of your tender response versus your competition might catapult you from second place to first.
Here’s a tender writing pyramid example
Here’s an example of what to write to answer a very common question/requirement in tenders, written in a pyramid format:
‘Outline your organisation’s experience providing the products/services required by this tender’.
* top of pyramid
‘We have 12 years’ experience successfully providing the products and services required by this tender to similar organisations’.
* middle of pyramid
‘Examples of similar organisations include X, Y and Z. These organisations are similar in size and requirements. Below is a written testimonial from one of these similar organisations referencing our service timeliness and value-for-money’.
* bottom of pyramid
‘One of the things that makes us different is that we have a method of proactively procuring stock and planning services that has been proven effective in maximising our Clients’ availability whilst saving inventory costs for them.
Examples of where we have successfully done this include A, B and C.
Below is an outline of the method that we use:
1. First we do this
2. Then we do this
3. Then we do this etc
That’s the basic answer. You can pad out that answer with pictures etc and more explanation if you need to get close to a word count (if you are given one).
Stop the all nighters
Get your tender response in on time!
We’ve got some blogs to help you in other ways too –
Rushing is the number 1 cause of errors and omissions in tender responses – some of which can be very difficult to back out of once you submit the tender documents to your Client.
So how do you stop the rush? We’ve got three top tips!
Should you use AI? Read our blog, AI tender writing – yay or nay?