From tender pack to submitted bid
How to Respond to an Invitation to Tender (ITT)
To respond to an invitation to tender, read the award criteria and weightings first, confirm you clear the conditions of participation, then answer each scored question in its own structure with specific evidence - named contracts, values, outcomes - inside the word limit. Price from your own costs and submit through the portal well before the hard deadline.
Published by BidSquirrel · checked against legislation.gov.uk and gov.uk · last reviewed July 2026
Knowing what an invitation to tender is gets you to the start line; responding to it well is the race. A public-sector ITT is not an essay competition - it is a structured answer to specific scored questions, submitted against a published rubric, under a hard deadline, and judged by evaluators reading many bids in limited time. The suppliers who win treat it as exactly that, and the ones who lose treat it as a chance to talk about their company.
This guide walks through responding to an ITT in the order that actually works: understand the scoring, clear the gates, plan the response, write to the marks, price the bid, and submit cleanly. If you are not yet sure what an ITT contains, start with our guide on what an invitation to tender is.
Before you write: scoring first, gates second
The first hour on any ITT is reading, not writing - and reading in a specific order. Start with the award criteria and weightings, because they decide where every subsequent hour should go: a 40% quality question earns your best time, a 5% one earns proportionate effort, and knowing the quality/price split tells you whether to invest more in the narrative or in sharpening the number. Our guide on how tenders are scored covers reading the weightings in full.
Then check the conditions of participation - the pass/fail gates about your firm. If a mandatory certification, insurance level or experience threshold is out of reach, this is a no-bid, and the disciplined move is to walk away on day one rather than write for a week and be disqualified on a technicality. Our bid or no-bid guide covers making that call honestly. Clear the gates first; then, and only then, start writing where it scores.
Writing answers that earn marks
Evaluators score against the question asked, not the essay you would rather have written. Three habits separate a scoring answer from a losing one:
- Mirror the question's structure - if it asks for (a) through (e), label your answer (a) through (e); an unlabelled block forces a time-pressured evaluator to hunt, and hunting evaluators miss the marks you meant to earn
- Evidence every claim - "extensive experience" scores as assertion; "delivered a £180k contract for [named buyer], on time, with [measurable outcome]" scores as evidence
- Respect the word or page limit - most ITTs state that content beyond the limit will not be read, so front-load your strongest point and never bury it past the cut-off
- Answer the awkward sub-question the weak bids skip - the difference between a 3 and a 5 is usually the hard part addressed head-on, not more polish on the easy part
- Mirror the buyer's priority language - if the tender names its themes, use their order and their words, because evaluators mark against their published menu, not your preferred framing
Price the bid and make the value case
Price is not a separate afterthought bolted on at the end - it is part of the response and, on most contracts, a scored criterion. Build the price up from your own costs and a defensible margin rather than guessing at a rival's number, and use any published budget or comparable awards only as context. Our guide on how to price a public-sector bid walks through the build-up, and how much to bid answers the anxious "what number?" question directly.
Then, where the ITT allows, write the value-for-money case rather than leaving a bare figure on the page. Award goes to the most advantageous tender, not the cheapest, so show what your price buys - the whole-life saving, the risk removed, the outcomes secured - and tie each claim to evidence. A price with a value case is judged on worth; a price alone is judged only on size.
Submit cleanly - the own-goals to avoid
More good bids are lost to process than to quality. Everything happens in the portal: download the documents early, ask clarification questions through the system rather than guessing, and upload your response well before the deadline. Portal deadlines are hard cut-offs - a last-minute upload failure or an internet wobble at the wrong moment loses the whole bid by default, and no evaluator can rescue a submission that arrived a minute late.
Before you submit, do a hostile read: score yourself against the published scale, question by question, as an unimpressed evaluator. Where you cannot point to the sentence that earns the mark, the panel will not find it either - and there is still time to fix it. Then submit a day early, keep the confirmation, and leave yourself room for the thing that always goes wrong on the day it matters most.
Take this to a live tender
Reading is the groundwork. When you are ready to act on it, BidSquirrel scores live tenders from major GB sources against your business, tells you which are worth bidding, and drafts the response with you - free to start, no card.
Frequently asked questions
What is the first thing to do when responding to an ITT?
Read the award criteria and weightings, then check the conditions of participation - before writing anything. The weightings tell you where the marks are and so where your effort should go, and the conditions of participation tell you whether you are even eligible. Writing first and reading later is how bidders waste days on questions that barely score or get disqualified on a gate they could not clear.
How long should my ITT answers be?
As long as the word or page limit allows, and no longer - most ITTs state that anything beyond the limit will not be read. Use the whole allowance on scored questions, front-load your strongest evidence, and do not pad: an evaluator rewards a specific, well-evidenced answer inside the limit over a longer, vaguer one.
Can I ask questions about an ITT before submitting?
Yes, and you should. Public-sector ITTs run a clarification facility where you submit questions and the buyer answers - usually circulating the answers to all bidders. Use it for anything genuinely ambiguous rather than guessing; a well-judged question signals competence and can shift the interpretation in your favour.
Answer the ITT the way it is scored
BidSquirrel reads the tender documents with you, surfaces the weightings and the conditions of participation, then drafts each answer from your own evidence against what the criterion rewards - and scores its own draft like a panel would before you submit. The final words stay yours.