We keep losing tenders on the written submission, and nobody in the business has time to do them properly.
Most tenders are lost on scoring, not on price. The submission that wins answers the question that was asked, in the order it was asked, with the evidence attached. We run the bid as a function: the library, the writing, the compliance schedule and the deadline. The reason that matters is arithmetic. A buyer publishes a weighting, scores each answer against defined criteria, and multiplies. A response that is commercially excellent and answers a slightly different question scores two out of five, and two out of five on a forty per cent quality weighting cannot be recovered by price. Most businesses that lose consistently are not uncompetitive. They are writing prose where the evaluator is looking for evidence against a rubric. The second reason is capacity. Tenders arrive with three weeks on the clock, and the people best placed to describe what the business actually does are the people running it that month. Bid writing is therefore the work that gets done late, at night, by whoever is available, which is exactly the process the scoring matrix is designed to detect.
Dinmore Bell runs bid writing as a standing function: the bid or no bid decision, the written submission scored against the published matrix, and a maintained library of policies, accreditations and evidence. Where a procurement raises a challenge, specialist procurement counsel are instructed and managed alongside the bid.
How we own it
The bid/no-bid decision
A tender you cannot win costs the same to write as one you can. We assess the specification, the incumbent, the weighting and the realistic scoring before anybody starts writing, and tell you when to walk away. That assessment is specific rather than instinctive. Who holds the contract now, and is there any signal in the specification that the buyer wants a change? Does the weighting favour price, quality or social value, and does your business genuinely score well on the heaviest one? Are the mandatory requirements ones you already meet, or ones you would have to acquire? Is the contract value enough to justify the cost of bidding, including the cost of the work you will not do while bidding? Walking away early is the cheapest decision available. A business that bids for everything wins a lower proportion of a larger number, exhausts the people who write the answers, and ends up with a library of mediocre responses it reuses. A business that bids for six well-chosen opportunities a year and prepares properly for each of them wins more work with less effort.
The submission itself
Written against the scoring matrix, not around it. Every question answered in its own terms, method statements that describe what you actually do, and social value and quality responses that carry evidence rather than adjectives. In practice that means reading the evaluation criteria before reading the specification, because the criteria tell you what the words are worth. An answer is then built in a fixed shape: what we will do, how we will do it, who is accountable, what evidence proves we have done it before, and what happens when it goes wrong. Evaluators award marks against criteria they have written down, and an answer laid out in that order lets them find each mark without hunting for it. The habits that cost marks are consistent. Answering the question the business wishes had been asked. Describing capability in general terms rather than describing the method for this contract. Attaching a case study that does not match the scale of the work. Running over the word count so the answer is truncated at the point the evidence would have appeared. None of these are writing problems, and all of them are process problems.
The library that compounds
Policies, accreditations, case studies, insurance certificates and standard responses held in one place and kept current, so the next tender starts at seventy per cent rather than at zero. The library is the part that turns bidding from an event into a function. It holds the corporate information every portal asks for, the policies that are routinely requested as mandatory attachments, the accreditations with their expiry dates diarised, the insurance schedule, and a set of answered questions tagged by subject so the next submission is edited rather than composed. It also needs an owner. A library nobody maintains degrades into a folder of documents with last year’s turnover figures and a health and safety policy signed by a director who has left, and a mandatory attachment that is out of date can fail a submission before the quality answers are read at all. We hold that maintenance as standing work, which is what makes a three-week deadline survivable.
Social value, scored rather than described
Social value now carries real weight in public procurement, and it is the section most often written as a list of good intentions. Evaluators score commitments that are specific, measurable, attributable to this contract and capable of being reported on. The difference is concrete. "We are committed to supporting local employment" scores poorly. "Two apprenticeships created within the first six months, recruited through the named college, reported quarterly against the contract" scores well, because it can be verified and because somebody has clearly decided to do it. We write these against what the business will genuinely commit to, because a social value commitment that wins a contract and is then not delivered becomes a contract management problem twelve months later, and the buyer is the same buyer at the next renewal.
The compliance schedule and the deadline
A submission is refused for administrative failure more often than it is marked down for weak content. Portals close at a stated minute, files are rejected for format or size, mandatory attachments are missed, and a clarification deadline passes before anybody notices the specification contradicts itself. We run the compliance schedule as a checklist with named owners and internal dates that sit ahead of the buyer’s. Clarification questions are raised early, because they are the only mechanism for fixing an ambiguous requirement and because the buyer’s answers are published to every bidder, which tells you something about what the others are worried about. Submission happens the day before the deadline. Uploading on the last afternoon is how a business discovers that a portal caps attachments at ten megabytes.
After the award, in both directions
Winning a tender creates a contract, and the contract is the document the bid promised. The method statements, the social value commitments and the key personnel named in the submission are usually incorporated by reference, so the submission becomes binding. That is worth knowing before it is signed. We read the resulting contract against what the bid actually committed to, flag the commitments that will be hard to deliver, and set up the reporting the buyer will ask for so the first contract review is not a surprise. Where a bid is unsuccessful, the feedback and the standstill period both have short deadlines. We read the debrief against the published criteria, and where a procurement looks as though it has gone wrong, specialist procurement counsel are instructed to advise on challenge. The ordinary and far more common outcome is a scoring pattern that tells you exactly what to fix before the next one.
Where specialists come in
Where a procurement raises a legal challenge — a standstill-period dispute, an allegation of unequal treatment, or a claim under the procurement regulations — we assess the position and instruct specialist procurement counsel to advise and act. We do not conduct litigation.
Sectors we run this for
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What a fully loaded General Counsel actually costs
The comparison is not our fee against an hourly rate. It is our fee against the hire you would otherwise make.
- How much does it cost to write a tender?
- It is charged inside a fixed monthly retainer rather than per bid, which is the point: a per-bid fee pushes a business towards bidding for things it should decline. The cost that matters is the internal time, which is the cost the library is designed to reduce.
- Do you write public sector tenders, private tenders, or both?
- Both. Public procurement is more formal, with published criteria, standstill periods and clarification mechanisms. Private tenders and framework renewals are less structured but score in much the same way, because the buyer still has to justify the decision internally.
- Can you take over a bid that is already half written?
- Yes, and it happens often. The first step is the same: read the evaluation criteria and check the existing answers against them. Half-written bids usually need restructuring rather than rewriting, because the content exists and is answering the wrong question.
- What is a bid/no-bid decision based on?
- The incumbent, the weighting, the mandatory requirements, your realistic score against the heaviest criterion, and the contract value against the cost of bidding. If the heaviest weighting is one you score poorly on, the rest of the analysis rarely rescues it.
- How far in advance should we start?
- Before the tender is published, where the buyer signals it. Prior information notices, framework expiry dates and incumbent contract end dates are all public. The library work happens outside any particular deadline, which is what makes a three-week window workable.
- Who writes the technical content?
- Your operational people describe what the business does, in interview rather than in writing, and we write it against the criteria. Asking an operations director to draft prose to a word count is how the deadline gets missed.
- What happens if we think a procurement was run unfairly?
- There are short deadlines attached, so it is raised immediately. We read the debrief against the published criteria and instruct specialist procurement counsel where a challenge is genuinely arguable, holding the brief and the budget.
- Does the submission become part of the contract?
- Usually, yes. Method statements, social value commitments and named key personnel are commonly incorporated by reference. We read the resulting contract against the bid before signature, so the business knows what it has actually promised.