Tender & bid writing: a practical guide

Before drafting, decompose the pack into a requirements matrix: every scored question, its weighting and marking guidance, each pass/fail (mandatory) requirement, and the documents you must submit — the ESPD, certificates, insurances, and tax clearance, which is a mandatory pass/fail in Irish bids. Mapping this first means you never lose marks to a missed requirement, and it shows immediately whether this is a bid you can win — run it alongside the bid/no-bid checklist before you commit the hours.

If you want a starting structure rather than a blank spreadsheet, the tender response template lays out the standard sections of an Irish RFT response and where each matrix row lands.

Here’s a typical scored question from an Irish services RFT, and two answers to it. The question: “Describe your approach to service delivery and quality assurance for this contract.” Weighted at 20 marks, with marking guidance rewarding a methodology specific to the buyer’s requirements, named resources, and evidence of the approach working elsewhere.

The weak answer

Read it as the evaluator does, marking guidance in hand. Methodology specific to this buyer? None — every sentence could sit in any bid to any buyer. Named resources? None. Evidence it works? None — “leading”, “robust” and “excellence” are claims, not proof. There is nothing here the evaluator can attach marks to, however warmly it reads.

The strong answer

Same company, same facts available. But now walk the marking guidance down it: a methodology tied to this buyer’s specification and KPIs — marks. Named, specific resources with cover arrangements — marks. Evidence of the approach working on a comparable contract, cross-referenced to a case study — marks. Each sentence exists to be scored, and the evaluator can defend a high score on paper, which is what they need to do.

One warning: every fact in the strong answer must be true. The names, the contract, the audit cycle — evaluators can and do check, and a false statement risks exclusion. If you don’t have the evidence, the fix is to build it or narrow the claim, never to invent it.

A win theme is a short, provable reason this buyer should pick you: “already delivering the same service one county over”, “the only bidder whose engineers are directly employed”, “transition in four weeks because the survey work is already done”. Pick two or three — no more — and ground each in a fact you can evidence.

Then thread them through the bid. Evaluators score question by question, often days apart, sometimes different people per section; a theme stated once in an executive summary nobody scores is wasted. A theme that surfaces, in context, in every answer where it’s relevant is what makes a bid cohere — and what a scorer remembers when two bids sit a mark apart.

Treat every stated word or page limit as hard: depending on the buyer, text past it is ignored, penalised, or grounds for exclusion — and in all three cases it earns nothing. But the subtler failure is the opposite one: a 200-word answer to a 1,000-word, 20-mark question. The limit signals how much substance the buyer expects; leaving 80% of it unused almost always means leaving marks unclaimed.

Budget the words before drafting: allocate them across the sub-criteria roughly in proportion to the marks, write to the allocation, then cut the padding — openings that restate the question, boilerplate about your passion for quality, adjectives doing the work evidence should. Dense, specific and inside the limit beats eloquent and over it.

The slowest part of a first bid is hunting for proof: the case studies, the certs, the CVs, the policy documents, the insurance schedules. Do it once, properly, and every later bid starts halfway done. A working evidence library holds:

• — Case studies written for scoring: client, dates, value, what you did, measurable outcomes, a named referee.
• — CVs of delivery staff, kept current, in a consistent format.
• — Certificates, policies and insurances with their expiry dates tracked — an expired document found the night before a deadline is a self-inflicted exclusion.
• — Past answers that scored well, tagged by the question they answered.

This is also where good tooling earns its keep: drafting grounded in a maintained library of your own facts is what separates AI tender writing done properly from a chatbot inventing a track record you don’t have.

Most lost bids lose on marks. But a painful minority never get scored at all, and the causes repeat:

• — Tax clearance not in order. A mandatory pass/fail in Irish bids — check it at bid/no-bid, not at submission.
• — A missing mandatory document — an unsigned declaration, a missed appendix, an ESPD left incomplete.
• — Altering the buyer’s forms — reformatting a pricing schedule or “improving” a declaration can render it non-compliant.
• — Pricing in the wrong envelope — where the pack separates technical and financial responses, price leaking into the technical response can exclude you.
• — Submitting late. Late bids are excluded, full stop — and upload portals slow down as deadlines approach. Plan to submit the day before.

Leave time to score your own draft against the matrix as a hostile evaluator would — question by question, marking guidance in hand — check every mandatory document is present and in date, and submit on eTenders early (the eTenders supplier guide covers the upload mechanics). After the award decision, the standstill period lets you request feedback — use it every time, win or lose. And if the whole cycle is more than your team can carry by hand, weigh the options in tender software vs a bid writer.