Council’s, NHS trusts and other public bodies have a responsibility to spend tax payer money wisely. For each contract, they typically set out a set of eligibility criteria that all bidders must meet. You should be able to find these listed within a few of the documents; usually in the “selection questionnaire”, “invitation to tender” document or the contract specification”.

Make sure that you can meet all of these requirements. Buyer’s are pretty strict on these and you don’t want to waste the time writing a tender response, just to be excluded because you don’t meet the minimum financial levels or hold the right accreditations.

Tenders can be convoluted and complicated to navigate. Don’t be afraid to ask the buyer questions through their procurement portal. Anything you don’t understand, you can raise as a “clarification question” during the tender process. Make sure you ask any questions early, as there is usually a deadline to raising a clarification.

This may sound obvious, but perhaps the biggest mistake is not answering each quality question fully. Most tenders are split between Price and Quality. With the quality section being further divided into a bunch of essay-style questions for you to respond to. You want to make sure that you address everything in each question as fully as you can.

If a buyer poses a long, drawn out question, use the points in the question to structure your answer.

The scorers will be using each part of this question to methodically make sure you’ve answered it in full. Almost like following a checklist, to see whether you’ve covered everything.

Far too often companies will summarise or skip parts of the question entirely. You need to make it easy for the scorers to see that you’ve answered everything, and in full.

Show don’t tell. This is vital in convincing the scorers that you really can meet the service deliverables. Make your answers real and tailored to you by giving actual real-life examples. Reference work you’ve completed for other buyers, painting a quick picture of the problem and how you solved it.

So many companies simply say “yes, we can do this”, but from a scorers point of view, this isn’t enough.

Name drop council’s you’ve worked with before, talk about your systems, software and team members. Say “how” you have achieved something, rather than simply saying you’ve done it. It’s the detail that makes the difference.

It’s tempting to use AI like Gemini or ChatGPT to help you draft out your responses. Whilst these might help give you some content, these tools don’t know your business. Everything they produce will be generic and formulaic. It might sound good on first read, but buyers will quickly sniff out that there is no real content to the response and score you down. This is why we never use AI to write bids for our clients. For now, they just aren’t good enough to win a tender. The human element, describing your business and experience is essential to maximise your score.

Finally, if the buyer has set word limits, make sure you stick to them. Often any words that go over the limit will simply be disregarded and not even scored. It might mean bullet pointing your answers, or skipping some of the fluff like introductory or conclusion paragraphs to keep within these limits.