Writing a Winning Quality Response to a Tender

The single most valuable shift in bid writing is to picture the evaluator: a person scoring many bids in limited time, against a published scale, who must record reasons a disappointed bidder may later read in an assessment summary. They are not looking to be charmed; they are looking to find the evidence that justifies a mark. Everything about how you write should make that job easy.

That is why the losing move is to write about your firm - your history, your values, your ethos - when the question asked something specific. Under the Procurement Act 2023, buyers score against their published assessment methodology, question by question. An answer that does not track the question, however well written, forces the evaluator to hunt for the marks, and a hunting evaluator under time pressure awards fewer of them.

The difference between an answer that scores 3 out of 5 and one that scores 5 is rarely eloquence. It is almost always these four disciplines, applied to every scored question:

• ·Structure to the question: if it asks for (a) to (e), answer (a) to (e), labelled - never make the evaluator reconstruct your answer from an undifferentiated block
• ·Evidence, not assertion: replace "extensive experience" with a named contract, its value, and a measurable outcome - the specifics are what a panel can defensibly award marks against
• ·Address the hard part: the awkward sub-question the weak bids skip is usually where the top-band marks sit, so answer it head-on rather than steering around it
• ·Respect the limit and front-load: content past the word or page limit is usually not read, so lead with your strongest evidence and never bury it at the end

Evaluators discount what they cannot verify. "We have a strong track record in similar contracts" is an assertion; "we delivered a three-year, £240k grounds contract for [named council], hitting 98% of KPIs, evidenced in quarterly reports" is evidence a panel can score. The habit that wins is to attach a specific, checkable proof point - a contract, a number, an outcome, a name - to every claim that carries a mark. Where you cannot evidence a claim, either find the evidence or drop the claim, because an unevidenced superlative reads as filler.

This is also where social value and other themed questions are won or lost: a commitment scores only if it is specific, measurable and local - "two apprentices recruited in the contract area by month six, evidenced quarterly" beats "we support apprenticeships" every time. Our guide on scoring social value covers that in depth. Across every question, the rule holds: the panel marks what you can prove, not what you claim.

Before submitting, become the evaluator. Take the published scoring scale and mark your own answers, question by question, as an unimpressed reader who owes you nothing. For each mark, ask "which sentence earns this, and would I believe it?" Where you cannot point to the sentence, the panel will not find it either - and, crucially, you still have time to fix it. This single discipline lifts more bids a band than any amount of rewriting for style.

This is exactly the loop BidSquirrel runs with you. We draft each answer from your own evidence against what the criterion rewards, then score the draft the way a panel would - flagging the generic sentences that will score nothing and the claims that still need a proof point, while you can still act on them. The evidence and the final words are yours; what we add is the evaluator sitting beside you as you write. See how it works on our methodology page.