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.
Once you’ve got that clear in your head, the easiest way to stop yourself wandering into the wrong bid is to use a simple framework. You don’t need a giant gate review, a workshop, or a deck full of coloured arrows. Especially if you’re a smaller team, you need something quick enough to use when people are busy and simple enough that it doesn’t get ignored until the bid has already started by osmosis.
The framework I’d use comes down to four things: Fit, Position, Value, and Practicality.
Fit is the blunt one. Is this actually the sort of work we do, or are we already starting to invent a fantasy version of ourselves that could maybe do it if everything went perfectly? In normal business, stretching can be sensible. You hire someone, sharpen a process, bring in a partner, and 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.
Position is different. It asks whether you’ve got any real reason to believe the buyer might choose you. Being able to do the work isn’t the same as being well placed to win it. Did you know it was coming, or has it landed completely cold? Do you know enough about the client, market, or incumbent to avoid guessing your way through the response? Do you understand what the buyer actually needs, or are you just reacting to the wording on the page? Have you got any real angle beyond turning up and hoping to write something half decent? Small teams in particular can burn themselves out on cold bids because the effort feels heroic while the chance of success stays quietly miserable.
Then there’s Value, which is where people often get a bit daft. Headline contract value looks good, so everybody starts acting as though the opportunity must be worthwhile. It doesn’t work like that. For a tender to be worth bidding, it has to be worth winning. That means looking properly at margin, payment profile, mobilisation effort, reporting burden, delivery risk, contract length, cash flow, and whether the work actually moves the business in a useful direction. Big contract doesn’t automatically mean good contract. Sometimes the smaller piece of work is the better one because it fits, pays properly, and doesn’t require a monthly internal war to keep it alive.
And then there’s Practicality. You might have a decent fit. You might have a good position. You might even think the contract would be excellent to win. Fine. Can the team actually respond properly? Have you got time to read it, understand it, 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? Small teams get hurt here all the time. They don’t only lose by chasing the wrong opportunities. They also lose by trying to do too many decent opportunities at once.
If you want to pressure-test a tender quickly, I’d reduce the whole thing to a short set of questions:
- Do we know why this tender exists, not just what the paperwork says?
- Is it a genuine fit for the business we’ve actually got?
- Are we well positioned enough to avoid guessing our way through it?
- Would winning it actually be good news?
- Can we put in a response that’s strong enough to justify the effort?
If you want to make that a bit more repeatable, score it. Nothing elaborate. Just score Fit, Position, Value, and Practicality from one to five, then write one sentence on the biggest risk. That sentence matters because numbers on their own can lull people into feeling more confident than they should. A tidy-looking score with one rotten commercial problem hidden inside it is still a bad bid.
I’d also keep a middle ground in the decision. Too many teams behave as though every tender must be either a clean yes or a clean no. “Bid with conditions” is often the most honest answer in the room. Maybe the bid is fine, but only if a delivery partner is confirmed, or finance signs off the pricing, or a key person can make time, or the clarification comes back the right way. That’s much healthier than pretending everything is green when half the team can already see the shelf wobbling.
You don’t need every answer to be perfect. 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 one final test, use this one, 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.