Most importantly, tendering is a competition. The bidder with the most advantageous tender (MAT) effectively wins the contract and will be selected through the tendering process to work with the buyer on the contract. But when your goal is to win a tender, it is essential to submit a proposal that not only meets the buyer’s requirements but also stands out as the best value option.

Our team of bid writing consultants at Executive Compass has worked with thousands of companies tendering for contracts and pursuing public sector tendering. We provide our top tips for how to win tender contracts.

How to win tenders:

To win a tender, you need a specific set of skills. Here are a few that can significantly enhance your chances of success and improve your chances of writing a winning tender:

1. Review your chances of success

Drawing upon our experience of why companies don’t secure contracts and may be unsuccessful, the first place to start in the tender process is with identifying the correct tender opportunity. But before diving straight into writing your tender, you must undertake a thorough review of the tender opportunity, to determine your chances of success. This is commonly known as the ‘bid/no-bid’ decision.

At this stage, you can assess your potential competitors, thoroughly analyse the specification and the buyer’s strategic goals, and review your company’s experience and unique strengths. This will help you decide whether the contract is a suitable and valuable opportunity for your business. For example, meeting the mandatory minimum criteria such as a financial threshold, or holding the correct accreditations – if not, the tender opportunity may be a non-starter. Recognising the public sector’s inherently risk-averse nature is essential. For this reason, bidding organisations must ensure they meet all criteria and demonstrate a strong track record. It is vital to factor this consideration into your assessment process.

Even the most advanced bid writing techniques cannot compensate for a poor bid choice. If you meet the minimum requirements but don’t think you have the experience, resources, or skills to win the tender, you may need to “no bid.” Be realistic in your analysis and decision-making, as this can save valuable time that could be used to improve more competitive submissions.

Taking a more strategic approach to bidding will improve your success rate and be a better allocation of both time and resources. A clear and honest review of whether your business can meet the requirements of the contract will also help you avoid overextending your business’s abilities or wasting resources on the tendering process.

2. Tender writing and planning

Once you have assessed your chances of success and found them to be high, next comes the actual tender writing. Considering how to win a tender through your writing is all about planning, being persuasive and always keeping the wording of the question set in mind.

Before you start bid writing, it is important to put together a bid plan and allocate sufficient time to complete your tender responses. Deconstruct each question into a few bullet points, to ensure you keep focus and make the questions more manageable. You may wish to consider bid win themes or storyboarding, to keep a consistent message throughout and add in the right content. This is the stage of tender writing where you turn to technical subject matter experts within your business for their input into the responses. Effective bid writing depends on leveraging their expertise to ensure the responses are well-informed and detailed.

Avoid the major pitfall of bid writing that mirrors the services you would like to provide; winning tenders must align with the evaluator’s expectations and the information they have requested. When answering the question, break it down into constituent parts, stick to the evaluation criteria and let these elements guide your submission for the individual opportunity in order to win a tender.

Clear and concise communication is critical during this phase. Ensure your bid reflects your organisation’s unique value, demonstrating how your capabilities directly meet the buyer’s needs. Strong evidence in the form of case studies, measurable results, or performance metrics will add weight to your submission.

Check out our full list of top tips for tender writing and our bid writer’s top 10 helpful tips, including:

• Carefully reviewing the contract specification, highlighting the key themes and priorities of the purchasing authority in order to create a project-specific answer plan which is tailored to the opportunity.
• Answer planning all quality responses to ensure you address all aspects of the tender question and nothing is missed or omitted. This ensures nothing is missed, helping you achieve the highest possible marks from the client’s evaluation committee.
• Raising clarification questions around anything unusual or conflicting information within the specification or tender documents, ensuring you receive understanding in good time.
• Writing persuasively and emphasising the benefits of your contract-specific offerings, framing all aspects of the submission in a positive light and adhering to the evaluation guidance. Here you will use your technical expert’s information to ensure the bid writing process is specific to your business.
• Using simple, concise language within your tender, eliminating technical jargon or specialised technical terminology to make clean, clear and easy-to-read responses.
• Provide evidence-based information to substantiate your claims within a tender submission, in the form of case studies, KPIs and statistics from previous contracts to demonstrate your business’s capacity, capability and suitability.

It is also crucial to ensure sufficient quality assurance processes cover each element of the tender submission documents. Before a final draft is proofread by an additional set of eyes. An impartial member of your bid writing team or an external bid consultancy should undertake bid reviews for each response, providing comments and suggestions as needed.

3. Tender pricing

Tender pricing plays a critical role in determining whether your submission is successful. There needs to be that delicate balance between competitiveness and profitability. Pricing too low may raise doubts about your delivery capability, while pricing too high can make your bid less attractive. For more insights on how to navigate this delicate balance, refer to Price vs Quality in a Tender, which offers valuable guidance on ensuring your submission achieves the right equilibrium.

Get your price right by ensuring that your costings are transparent, presenting the buyer with a cost aligned to a budget and expectation. Where possible, always provide detailed breakdowns, explaining the value behind each cost element. Highlight any additional benefits or cost-saving measures your business can offer, such as long-term efficiencies, sustainability practices, or innovative budgeting strategies that demonstrate your ability to deliver value while controlling costs effectively.

Review the evaluation criteria to understand how pricing will be evaluated against the quality of proposals. This shall enable you to make a submission that represents not only value but also quality.

Finally, double-check your calculations and ensure all financial documents are completed accurately. Errors in pricing can result in disqualification or weaken your bid’s credibility.

4. Ensure you cover the ‘must-haves’ in your tender responses

It is good practice in bid writing to ensure your tender submission includes everything the buyer has requested in a clear and accessible format to remain compliant and ultimately win the contract.

Typically, this will be the following:

• Trading history, including trading name, duration of trading, turnover and fiscal health, demonstrating your business is in good financial standing.
• Relevant experience, usually shown in case studies that are relevant to the tender contract. These can be both public and private sector case studies. Please note that when using case studies to demonstrate technical and professional ability, the organisations used as case studies might be contacted to provide a reference.
• All suitable memberships and certifications for your industry sector – for example, Care Quality Commission for health and social care or Gas Safe registration for gas servicing, maintenance and installation
• A unique selling point (USP) to set your company apart from competitors, also known in bid writing as bid ‘win themes’
• Solid organisational structure and appropriate staff for the contract, emphasising their relevant experience, qualifications and skills
• A competitive price. We focus heavily on the quality element of a tender, but you must also ensure you complete all pricing documents and submit your best price, to maximise your chance of success.

Additionally, consider how well your organisation aligns with the buyer’s broader goals, such as sustainability, local impact, or innovation. Highlighting these factors can strengthen your bid and demonstrate added value, supporting you to win tenders for public sector contracts.

5. Bid review

The bid review process applies to two stages of tendering. Firstly, when submitting the bid, ask someone from your organisation who has not been involved in bid writing the bid review to check the key elements, such as:

• Does it answer the questions in full?
• Have we portrayed ourselves favourably?
• Have all the documents been completed and attachments provided?

This will provide a good foundation for self-verification that you have submitted a potentially winning bid.

If there is an occasion when you are not successful with a bid, learn from it! Continual improvement is crucial when considering how to win a tender. Following the steps outlined below to drive continual improvement will aid in achieving higher success rates the next time you respond to an invitation to tender:

• Always request feedback from the public sector buying authority – it will support your organisation’s learning and development, enabling you to improve scores and ultimately win a tender.
• Undertake a post-bid review to determine what scored well and what didn’t, making sure this is noted when repurposing content for future submissions.
• Review underperforming areas for your bid and actions – Do you need to review your social value strategy? Were your case studies not up to scratch? Allocate appropriate time to complete.
• Enlist support or improvement plans ahead of the next bid – do not leave it until the last minute, particularly as public sector tenders typically have a four-week submission window.
• Review your tender writing – do the style, win themes and formatting support the strongest possible submission?

And, most importantly, make sure you don’t make the same mistakes on the next tender opportunity and will win a tender in the future.

If you still have questions about how to win tenders, then get in touch; we are always happy to help!

And if you don’t have the time to complete a bid, you can turn to expert bid and tender writers at Executive Compass. Our professional in-house bid writers have years of experience and collectively complete hundreds of tender submissions each year, ensuring they are ideally positioned to support your organisation to win a tender.