How to Effectively Review a Tender Submission

Understanding how to effectively review a tender submission can be the difference between winning and losing the bid. There should be a distinct structure in place, which incorporates a number of reviews throughout the writing process, along with a final review prior to submission.

It is important to note that the bid review process can be time consuming so must be included when plotting your bid timeline. This will avoid a last minute submission that has lacked the time for a thorough evaluation.

Who should review the bid?

The person evaluating the submission should either be a bid manager or another team member.

When using a team member it is necessary that they have a good understanding of both your company and the bid itself. There is no point using someone who has no knowledge of the submission.

How many reviews?

Deciding how many times to review a document completely depends on the writer and reviewer. If the team have worked together on many bids you can often just allow for one review followed by proofreading.

Teams just starting out or those using a novice bid writer should strongly consider using a greater number of reviews in order to get the best quality submission.

As standard we would suggest using a two-review system as employed by our company. Each response is assessed once by a bid manager before being passed back to the writer to amend. The entire document is then reviewed once more before submission, along with a thorough proof check.

What to look for

When evaluating a response there are a number of questions to ask:

Does it answer the question?
Is evidence provided?
Is the answer relevant to the bid?
Does it comply with the specification?

This is the basic structure of the analysis but it can often go into much more specific detail. The key areas to focus on are the relevance and compliance of the response. You will lose marks for answers that stray from the question.

Similarly, not backing up your points with evidence means that you will not score as highly as you could. Look out for a lack of supporting evidence and highlight these areas for improvement.

Incorporating feedback

Incorporating feedback from your reviewer is usually a relatively simple process, but in some cases it is worth having an in depth discussion to check that the bid writer understands the comments and why the reviewer has made them.

It is important for the writer to understand exactly what the feedback means and learn from the process. Both the writer and the reviewer are constantly learning and should treat the exercise as one that will greatly benefit the company in the long run.

In many cases it is worth having your submission evaluated by a professional. We provide this service to a wide range of clients who use it to improve their submissions and ensure they are of the highest quality.

Get in touch for more information on our review services.

For more tips, here are some ways to quickly improve your submissions: