10 Pieces of Terrible Tender Advice
For anyone who finds winning inconvenient.
By Elie Elia and Ryan C Walker
Major tenders can consume months of effort, involve dozens of people and cost millions of dollars. Fortunately, losing one can be surprisingly straightforward.
Follow these ten proven principles and you too can produce a submission that is compliant, beautifully designed and mysteriously unconvincing.
Step 1: Make it all about you
Begin with the year your organisation was founded.
Then cover your global revenue, number of employees, office locations, corporate values and the inspiring story behind your latest brand refresh.
Include an aerial photograph of a project. It does not need to be relevant, or even yours, provided it contains enough cranes.
The client’s objectives can wait. First, they need to understand just how many offices you have.
For maximum impact, describe yourself as a “global leader” before demonstrating leadership in anything the client has asked about.
Step 2: Start writing immediately
Thinking is dangerous. It consumes valuable writing time.
As soon as the tender arrives, divide it among as many authors as possible. Give each person a returnable, a deadline and complete freedom to determine the strategy.
Do not pause to agree on:
- what the client is really buying;
- what is likely to shape the decision;
- why your offer should be preferred;
- which risks matter most; or
- what evidence will be needed.
Those questions can be resolved at the final review, when 37 authors, three joint-venture partners, two designers and the legal team have each developed a different answer.
Nothing builds team cohesion like discovering the bid strategy at 2.00 am on submission day.
Step 3: Treat compliance as your competitive advantage
Complete every schedule. Use the correct file names. Submit before the portal closes.
Congratulations—you have arrived at the starting line.
Now assume that because your tender complies, the client will prefer it over all the other tenders that also comply.
Do not waste time creating a distinctive value proposition or defensible reason for selection. Your accurate use of “Attachment 6B_Final_FINAL_v12.pdf” should speak for itself.
If challenged, point out that nothing in the tender is technically wrong.
Procurement panels find that irresistible.
Step 4: Maximise the buzzword-to-meaning ratio
Simple language creates unnecessary clarity.
Instead of explaining what you will do, write:
“Our integrated, transformational and customer-centric delivery paradigm will leverage innovative best-practice solutions to optimise sustainable stakeholder outcomes.”
This sentence can answer almost any tender question because it answers none of them specifically.
For difficult returnables, add:
- agile;
- holistic;
- future-ready;
- market-leading;
- value-adding; and
- industry best practice.
If the evaluator still cannot identify the actual proposition, include the word “bespoke.”
Meaning may remain absent, but the sentence will look increasingly expensive.
Step 5: Answer the question you wish they had asked
The client asks how you will manage a specific delivery risk.
Excellent. Insert six pages describing your enterprise risk-management framework.
They ask what differentiates your approach.
Tell them your people are passionate.
They ask for evidence. Repeat the original claim in bold and place a blue box around it.
The important thing is to use material you already have. Whether it answers the question is a secondary consideration.
A polished response to the wrong question may score poorly, but it is extremely efficient to produce.
Step 6: Include everything you know
Your organisation has completed many projects. The evaluator should hear about all of them.
Include every project delivered since federation, every award ever received and every case study available in the corporate database.
Was the case study written for an unrelated sector eight years ago? Perfect. Change the client’s name in the opening paragraph and describe it as “highly relevant.”
Better still, repeat the same generic case study in four different returnables. Repetition converts weak evidence into strong evidence through persistence.
Never curate when you can accumulate.
The evaluator can work out what matters. They have an entire weekend.
Step 7: Make enormous claims and provide no proof
Describe your organisation as:
- collaborative;
- innovative;
- agile;
- trusted;
- experienced;
- authentic;
- resilient; and
- market-leading.
These words are particularly useful because every bidder can use them and nobody must prove them immediately.
Avoid unnecessary details such as what you did, where you did it, what problem you solved, what result you achieved or why any of it is relevant.
If the evaluator does not believe an adjective, add another one.
“Highly collaborative” is approximately twice as persuasive as “collaborative.” “Uniquely collaborative” should make evidence completely unnecessary.
Step 8: Assume the evaluator will join the dots
Your organisation has an excellent reputation. Surely the panel knows that.
Mention a well-known project, add an attractive photograph and allow evaluators to infer:
- your actual role;
- what you delivered;
- whether it worked;
- what outcomes were achieved; and
- why the experience matters here.
If the connection is unclear, describe it as “implicit.”
Evaluation panels have abundant spare time to research your organisation, reconstruct incomplete arguments and identify evidence you neglected to provide.
They may even award extra marks for mystery.
Step 9: Prove collaboration with overlapping circles
State that the parties will communicate openly, respect each other and hold regular meetings.
Then produce a diagram with three overlapping circles and place “One Team” in the centre.
Collaboration has now been proven.
Do not discuss what happens when time is short, risk transfers, money is contested or the parties’ interests diverge. That would make the relationship sound less collaborative.
Keep the examples safely focused on workshops where everyone agreed, the butcher’s paper was plentiful and the catering arrived on time.
True collaboration is best demonstrated before anyone has had to make a difficult decision.
Step 10: Make the evaluator work for it
Evaluators value a challenge.
Use dense pages, long paragraphs and diagrams that require their own explanatory workshops.
Place the strongest evidence in an appendix. Hide the central proposition in the third paragraph on page 73. Use eight-point font so that every possible thought can be included.
When the page limit becomes difficult, reduce the margins until the submission resembles the terms and conditions on a mobile-phone contract.
If an evaluator cannot find the answer, they should have read more carefully.
A winning proposition should never reveal itself too easily. Where is the intellectual satisfaction in that?
The serious point behind the terrible advice
These ten approaches share one fundamental problem: they transfer the bidder’s work to the evaluator.
They ask evaluators to determine what is relevant, discover the strategy, translate the language, locate the answer, test unsupported claims, select useful evidence and construct the reason the bidder should be preferred.
Strong tenders do the opposite.
They demonstrate a clear understanding of what the client is trying to achieve. They present a coherent solution, confront the issues that could undermine delivery and provide relevant evidence that gives the evaluation panel confidence.
Above all, they make the reason for selection clear, credible and defensible.
The tender submission is important. But it is the artefact produced by the work, not the work itself.
The strongest tenders do not make evaluators search for a reason to select them.
They make that reason difficult to miss.
