The moment an invitation to tender lands, the clock starts.
I don’t just mean the formal submission deadline. There’s also an internal clock: how quickly you move from receiving the tender to understanding it, assessing it and putting a plan in place.
It’s tempting to open the response document, divide up the questions and start writing immediately. That feels productive, particularly when the deadline is tight and there’s already pressure to show progress.
In my experience, though, the most important work happens before anyone starts drafting.
The bids that run well aren’t simply the ones with strong writers. They’re the ones where the team has understood the requirement, identified the risks, gathered the right people and agreed a realistic plan before the writing begins.
When an ITT arrives, these are the steps I’d take first.
Read and Analyse the Full ITT
Start by making sure you’ve got the complete tender pack.
Depending on the procurement, this may include the specification, instructions to tenderers, evaluation criteria, pricing schedules, selection questionnaires, draft contract terms and supporting appendices. There may also be separate documents for different lots or service areas.
Check that every file has downloaded correctly and that the relevant members of the team can access the procurement portal. It’s far better to identify login problems or missing attachments at the beginning than on the day of submission.
Then read the documents properly.
Don’t limit the initial review to the scored quality questions. Those questions only make complete sense when they’re read alongside the specification, evaluation methodology, pricing requirements and draft contract.
Understanding the wider ITT tendering process will also help you see how the different documents fit together and what the buyer will expect from a compliant response.
I normally recommend reading the tender in two stages.
The first review is about understanding the opportunity as a whole:
- What is the buyer trying to achieve?
- What services, works or products are required?
- What outcomes appear to matter most?
- How will the submission be evaluated?
- What would successful delivery involve?
- Is the opportunity divided into lots, and which should you pursue?
The second review should be more detailed. This is where you begin extracting specific requirements, evidence needs, risks and actions for the bid team.
You’ll also need to check whether the buyer has already issued any clarifications, amendments or replacement documents. Tender packs can change while the procurement is live, so it’s worth agreeing from the outset how the team will keep track of which version of each document is the live one.
If a revised document is issued, make sure the whole team knows which version they should be using. Working from an outdated specification or response template can cause serious problems later.
Look for Red Flags and Showstoppers
Before committing significant time and resource, establish whether there’s anything that could prevent you from bidding or make the contract unviable.
Possible showstoppers might include:
- Mandatory experience or turnover requirements you can’t meet
- Accreditations, certifications or memberships you don’t hold
- Insurance levels that would be difficult or expensive to obtain
- Geographic or mobilisation requirements beyond your capacity
- Contract terms your organisation can’t accept
- Pricing conditions that would make delivery unsustainable
- Pass or fail questions where you can’t provide the required evidence
Beyond these practical showstoppers, there may also be less obvious strategic concerns.
Winning the contract might require resources that are already committed elsewhere. The proposed timetable could be unrealistic. The opportunity may fall outside your core delivery area, or the commercial model might expose the business to more risk than initially expected.
Finding a problem at this stage doesn’t always mean abandoning the opportunity. You may be able to raise a clarification question, obtain an accreditation, involve a delivery partner or agree an internal approach to managing the risk.
Ideally, though, many of these issues should already have been identified during the pre-bid stage. Early market engagement, prior information notices, tender alerts and initial opportunity reviews can give you time to assess likely requirements before the full ITT is published. That might allow you to strengthen a partnership, gather missing evidence, review your accreditations or decide that the opportunity isn’t a good fit before the formal bidding period begins.
The ITT review is still an essential check. The final documents may introduce requirements that weren’t visible earlier, or confirm that an issue is more significant than expected. What matters is identifying it before substantial work has been completed.
This is why I’d recommend having a direct bid or no-bid conversation as early as possible. A structured bid/no-bid decision matrix can help the team consider deliverability, profitability, strategic fit and the realistic likelihood of winning, rather than relying on enthusiasm or instinct alone.
The fact that an opportunity is attractive doesn’t automatically mean it’s right for your business. Saying no to the wrong tender protects the time you need to pursue the right ones properly.
Pull Out the Compliance Requirements
Every tender has its own submission rules. Even organisations that bid regularly shouldn’t assume the requirements will be the same as those in the previous competition.
The ITT may specify:
- Word or page limits
- Font sizes and document formats
- File naming conventions
- Required certificates or declarations
- Mandatory response templates
- Whether supporting evidence can be attached
- How pricing must be presented
- The portal or method used for submission
- Whether files must be uploaded separately
- Whether electronic signatures are accepted
- How long the response must remain valid
Capture these points in a compliance checklist or matrix.
This shouldn’t sit within one person’s notebook. Keep it somewhere the whole bid team can access, with clear owners and statuses so everyone can see what’s complete, what’s outstanding and what still needs to be checked.
I’d also separate the compliance checklist from the response plan.
The compliance checklist confirms that the submission follows the buyer’s rules. The response plan tracks the scored questions, their weighting, the people responsible for them, the evidence required and their progress through drafting and review.
They’re connected, but they serve different purposes.
For organisations that regularly struggle to keep track of portals, documents, deadlines and submission requirements, dedicated bid administration support can help create greater control around this part of the process.
Compliance may not be the most exciting part of a bid, but it’s fundamental. A strong answer can’t score if it’s excluded, uploaded incorrectly or submitted in a format the buyer hasn’t permitted.
Note Every Important Deadline
Record the submission deadline immediately, including the exact time and the portal through which the response must be submitted.
Then identify every deadline that comes before it.
The clarification deadline is particularly important. It may be your only formal opportunity to ask the buyer about unclear, inconsistent or potentially restrictive requirements.
This is one of the dates I see teams overlook most often. They focus on the final submission date and only discover an ambiguity after the clarification window has closed.
Don’t wait until the final day for the bid team to raise questions. Ask contributors to record anything unclear as they review their sections, then assess and submit the questions in good time.
Other important dates may include:
- Supplier briefings
- Site visits
- Deadlines for registering an intention to bid
- Presentation or interview dates
- Deadlines for submitting conflicts of interest
- Contract award and standstill periods
- Mobilisation or service commencement dates
Once these dates are confirmed, work backwards from the submission deadline.
Your internal deadline for a completed draft shouldn’t be the same as the buyer’s deadline. The plan needs to protect time for review, amendments, approvals, formatting, portal uploads and final compliance checks.
Where possible, aim to complete and upload the submission early. Procurement portals, internet connections and individual files don’t always behave as expected, and there’s little value in preparing a strong response only to put the submission itself at risk.
Assess the Work Involved
With the documents understood, assess what producing the response will actually involve.
Consider the number of scored questions, their word limits and their weighting. A 500-word response that requires input from several departments and supporting data may take longer to develop than a 1,500-word question based on well-established material.
Look carefully at the evidence behind the answers too.
Will the bid require:
- Relevant case studies?
- Performance data?
- Customer references?
- Policies and certificates?
- Delivery plans?
- Process diagrams?
- Social value commitments?
- Carbon reduction information?
- Staffing structures?
- Detailed mobilisation plans?
- Input from subcontractors or partners?
Check whether that evidence already exists and whether it’s current, relevant and specific enough for this opportunity.
A case study may cover the right service but be too old. A policy may exist but need formal approval. Performance figures may be available, but not in a form that can be used without further analysis.
These dependencies need to be reflected in the timetable.
This assessment should give you a realistic view of the workload and the main pressure points. It will also help determine where your strongest writers, contributors and reviewers are needed.
Every mandatory question must be answered properly, but that doesn’t mean allocating exactly the same amount of time to every section. The questions with the greatest weighting, highest complexity or greatest delivery risk will normally need more drafting and review time.
If the available resource doesn’t match the workload, make that visible early. The answer may be to bring in additional support, reduce other commitments or reconsider whether the organisation can give the bid the attention it requires.
Identify Who Needs to Be Involved
A bid manager or writer can’t develop a credible submission in isolation.
Identify the people who understand how the contract would actually be delivered. Depending on the opportunity, this could include colleagues from:
- Operations
- Finance
- Human resources
- Information security
- Health and safety
- Quality and compliance
- Sustainability
- Social value
- Mobilisation
- Contract management
- Senior leadership
You may also need input from external partners, subcontractors or suppliers.
Involve these people early and be specific about what you need from them. A broad request to “provide some information for the tender” is unlikely to produce a useful response.
Explain the question, the buyer’s priorities, the evidence required and the deadline for their contribution. Where possible, speak to contributors directly rather than relying entirely on email exchanges. A focused conversation can often uncover stronger detail than asking someone to draft a complete answer from scratch.
You should also confirm people’s availability. If a key subject matter expert is on leave during the bid period, you need to know at the beginning, not a few days before their contribution is due.
The same applies to senior reviewers. There’s no point building a review stage into the plan if the person responsible for approval hasn’t agreed to the date or won’t be available.
Decide How You Intend to Win
Before allocating individual questions, agree what the submission needs to communicate as a whole.
Why should the buyer choose your organisation? What can you demonstrate that competitors may struggle to match? Which strengths are most relevant to this buyer and this contract?
The answer shouldn’t be a list of generic claims.
Most bidders can describe themselves as experienced, innovative, responsive or customer-focused. Those statements only become persuasive when they’re supported by evidence and connected directly to the buyer’s requirements.
Your approach might centre on:
- Proven performance on comparable contracts
- A low-risk mobilisation method
- Strong local knowledge
- Specialist expertise
- Better management information
- Greater service resilience
- Measurable social value
- A clear approach to continuous improvement
These themes should be agreed before contributors begin writing independently.
Otherwise, each answer may be reasonable on its own, but the submission as a whole can feel inconsistent or unfocused. Different writers may emphasise different strengths, use conflicting terminology or describe the proposed service in slightly different ways.
Your strongest themes should run naturally through the relevant answers, supported by examples, data and clear commitments. They shouldn’t be inserted into every response regardless of relevance.
Plan the Bid Properly
You can now turn the tender requirements into a structured plan.
For each response, record:
- The question and scoring criteria
- The word or page limit
- The weighting or available score
- The lead writer
- The subject matter contributors
- The evidence required
- The first-draft deadline
- The review stages
- The final approval owner
- Any dependencies or risks
The timetable should work backwards from the submission date and include proper review stages.
At a minimum, I’d plan for a content review to check the accuracy, evidence and strength of the response, followed by a final review covering consistency, grammar, spelling, typing errors, readability and compliance.
That final check should also confirm that information is consistent across the full submission. Company figures, staffing numbers, service descriptions, timelines and commitments can easily vary when different people have contributed to separate sections. Even small inconsistencies may create doubt for an evaluator, so the response needs to read as one coherent submission rather than a collection of individually drafted answers.
The plan also needs to include pricing and supporting documents. Commercial schedules, certificates and declarations shouldn’t sit outside the main timetable simply because they aren’t narrative responses.
Good bid management gives the team a clear view of the whole submission, rather than treating each answer as a separate writing task. It helps you manage dependencies, monitor progress and intervene before a missed deadline becomes a serious problem.
The plan doesn’t need to be overly complicated, but it needs to be visible, realistic and actively maintained throughout the bid.
Run a Proper Kick-Off Meeting
Once the initial analysis and planning are complete, bring the core bid team together.
The kick-off meeting should confirm:
- The opportunity and contract requirements
- The bid or no-bid decision
- The buyer’s likely priorities
- The proposed win strategy
- The key risks and compliance requirements
- The timetable
- Individual responsibilities
- The review and approval process
- How progress and issues will be reported
Everyone should leave knowing what they own, what they need to produce and when it’s due.
This is also the right time to challenge assumptions.
Do the operational teams agree that the proposed delivery model is realistic? Can the available evidence support the claims the bid intends to make? Are there dependencies that haven’t yet been reflected in the timetable? Does everyone understand which elements of the proposed solution are confirmed and which still require approval?
A kick-off meeting shouldn’t simply be a presentation from the bid manager. It should create agreement across the people who’ll write, approve and ultimately deliver the commitments made within the tender.
If responsibilities remain vague when the meeting ends, the bid hasn’t been properly mobilised.
Good Bids Start Before the Writing
None of these steps is especially complicated. The challenge is completing them thoroughly when the pressure to start writing is already building.
The early stages of a tender shape everything that follows. They determine whether the team understands the opportunity, whether the right people are involved and whether there’s enough time to challenge and improve the response.
Strong writing still matters, of course. But it’s much easier to produce when it’s based on a clear strategy, credible evidence and a realistic plan.
When an ITT lands, resist the urge to begin with a blank answer document. Understand the opportunity first, establish whether you can win and deliver it, and give the team the structure it needs to produce the strongest possible submission.
If your team regularly finds itself starting the writing before the planning is properly done, that's usually a sign the structure around your bids needs attention rather than the writing itself. Whether that's bid administration support to keep documents, deadlines and compliance under control, or bid management to run the process end to end, we're happy to talk through where the gaps are. Get in touch and we'll take it from there.
