After thirty years of writing tenders, fixing tenders, and sometimes dragging them back from the brink when they should never have been started in the first place, I’ve become a lot less impressed by the simple fact that a tender exists. That isn’t cynicism. It’s just what happens when you’ve seen too many businesses get excited by the sight of a live opportunity and mistake that excitement for a reason to bid.
A tender notice is not a prize. It isn’t proof that the work suits you, that you can win it, or that you’d even want it if you got it. It just means a buyer has put something out to market. That’s all.
Plenty of businesses still behave as though the publication itself is the signal. Something lands in the inbox, someone senior perks up, the contract value starts looking seductive, and before long everybody is moving as though a decision has already been made. People start reading documents, chasing pricing, pulling together old case studies, talking about resource, and generally creating a lot of noise. A week later, nobody’s quite sure who actually decided this was a sensible use of time. The effort itself becomes the justification.
That’s where teams get themselves in trouble. They don’t usually bid for the wrong work because they’re lazy or clueless. They bid for the wrong work because they don’t stop and tell themselves the truth early enough. Most of the time, the warning signs are there.
- The client is unknown.
- The geography’s a pain.
- The commercial model looks thin.
- The timeline is awful.
- The specification seems to have been written with one particular supplier in mind.
Everybody can feel it, but nobody wants to be the person who says, “No, this one’s not for us.”
That’s understandable. Saying no can feel negative, especially when there’s pressure on pipeline, revenue, or just general business optimism. But a good no-bid decision isn’t weakness. It’s judgement.
One of the first things worth getting straight is that not all tenders turn up in the same way. Some are completely cold. You spot them on a portal, or somebody forwards them over late, and that’s the first you know about the client, the contract, or the context. You can still win cold bids, of course you can, but let’s not pretend they’re easy. You’re trying to work out in a couple of weeks what better-placed suppliers may have known for months: what the real problem is, how the requirement was shaped, what the buyer actually cares about, whether the incumbent is vulnerable, and who else is likely to be in the race.
Other opportunities feel very different. You knew the contract was coming. You understand the market. You’ve had sensible conversations in advance, or you’ve done enough market intelligence to know the shape of the thing before it formally lands. That doesn’t mean you can coast in on “relationship” and charm your way past procurement, but it does mean you’re not starting blind. In bidding, that matters a lot.
So before you get lost in the paperwork, ask the most useful question of the lot: why does this tender exist? Not what the document says on the surface, but what’s actually going on underneath it. Contracts go to market for reasons. The incumbent may have made a mess of things. Demand may have grown. Budgets may have shifted. A service may need rethinking. A contract may simply be expiring with no appetite to renew it as it stands. If you don’t understand the pressure underneath the tender, you’re left answering words on a page instead of the real problem. That’s a much weaker place to be.
Then you need to ask something a bit more blunt: are we actually right for this work, or are we already starting to invent a fantasy version of ourselves that could do it if everything went perfectly? This is where a lot of businesses kid themselves. In normal trading, stretching is often part of the game. You hire someone, bring in a partner, sharpen a process, make it work. Fine. But tenders are much less forgiving of wishful thinking. If the job needs a geography you don’t really cover, accreditations you don’t yet have, subcontractors you’ve never worked with, or a service model you haven’t properly delivered before, that risk doesn’t disappear because someone writes a confident mobilisation plan.
And being able to do the work, in some broad sense, still isn’t enough. Lots of suppliers can do lots of things. The real question is why this buyer would choose you. If the only honest answer is “we might be cheaper”, then you haven’t got much of a strategy. You’ve got a hope. A proper reason to win usually looks more grounded than that. Maybe your experience lines up tightly with the buyer’s problem. Maybe you’ve got stronger local knowledge, lower mobilisation risk, clearer proof, a sharper delivery model, or social value that actually means something. Whatever it is, you should be able to say it plainly. If you can’t explain why you ought to win without disappearing into vague nonsense about quality, commitment, or passion, that should make you pause.
Then there’s the part too many businesses leave until far too late: would this actually be good work to win? Headline contract value has fooled more people than I can count. A tender can look lovely from a distance and then turn rotten the moment somebody properly looks at margin, payment profile, mobilisation effort, delivery spread, reporting burden, TUPE, liability, or all the other fun bits that only show up once the excitement wears off. Big work isn’t always good work. Winning the wrong contract isn’t a victory. It’s just a slower way of giving yourself future grief.
And yes, time matters as well. Not in the heroic sense of “can we get something out of the door”, but in the real sense of whether you can produce something credible. Have you got time to read it properly, understand it properly, clarify what needs clarifying, shape the response, price it, evidence it, write it, and review it? Or are you about to stitch together a submission from boilerplate, caffeine, and blind optimism? Because those are not the same thing.
If you want a practical way to pressure-test a tender before the whole business disappears into bid theatre, I’d reduce it to a short set of questions:
- Do we know why this tender exists, not just what the paperwork says?
- Do we know enough about the client, market, or incumbent to avoid guessing our way through it?
- Can we deliver it with the business we’ve actually got, rather than the one we wish we had?
- Do we have a proper reason to win beyond “maybe we’re cheaper”?
- Do the numbers stack up well enough that winning would actually be good news?
- Can we put in a response that’s strong enough to justify the effort?
You don’t need six perfect answers every time. Real opportunities are rarely that neat. What you’re trying to judge is the overall shape of it. One weakness doesn’t kill a bid. A pile of weaknesses usually should. The real danger is pretending that a whole cluster of obvious problems is just something the team can power through with enough energy.
Some warning signs deserve a bit of fear and respect because they come up again and again. If the specification looks tailored to one supplier, pay attention. If the qualification burden is ridiculous for the likely value, pay attention. If you’d need capabilities you don’t yet have, pay attention. If the timetable is so tight that the bid will obviously suffer, pay attention. And if the main argument in favour is that the opportunity “feels important”, pay very close attention indeed. A depressing amount of wasted bid effort starts with that phrase.
And yes, sometimes somebody senior will decide that a bid is strategic and you’re doing it whether the qualification says yes or no. That happens everywhere. If it does happen, don’t just shrug and let the whole thing disappear into politics. Write down why you’re bidding, what the known risks are, what assumptions you’re making, and what this is going to cost. Then review it honestly afterwards. One of the best ways to improve bid selection over time is to compare the bids the business was forced into with the ones it chose properly. Without that, companies repeat the same bad decisions for years and call it ambition.
If you want something a bit more structured than instinct, a one-page scorecard is usually plenty. Score the opportunity on client knowledge, delivery fit, competitiveness, commercial sense, and whether you’ve actually got the resource to do it properly. Add a short note on the biggest risk. Then ask one final question, because it cuts through a lot of nonsense very quickly: if the word tender disappeared and this was presented simply as a piece of work, would we still think it was a smart use of time?
That’s really the point. This isn’t about becoming timid or only bidding for safe, familiar work. It’s about telling the difference between a real opportunity and an expensive distraction. The easiest way to improve your win rate isn’t always to write better. Quite often, it’s to stop wasting time on work that was never really yours to begin with.