Submitting a tender can feel strangely anticlimactic. After days or weeks of reviewing documents, gathering information, writing responses, checking evidence and making sure everything is uploaded correctly, you finally press submit.
Then… nothing.
For businesses that are relatively new to tendering, it can feel as though the submission has disappeared into a black hole. In reality, pressing submit is simply the point at which your part of the process pauses and the buyer’s evaluation process begins.
What happens next will depend on the procurement and the evaluation process set out in the tender documents, but there are several stages you can typically expect.
Compliance Checks
Before evaluators begin deciding how good your tender is, the buyer may first check whether you’ve actually submitted everything they asked for.
This can include checking that all mandatory questions have been answered, required documents have been provided, declarations have been completed and any minimum requirements have been met.
Compliance sounds relatively straightforward, but it can have serious consequences. Missing information, failing to provide a mandatory document or not meeting a pass/fail requirement can potentially result in a submission being excluded before the scored evaluation even begins. (There have even been situations where the wrong font or size of writing has excluded entire bids!)
It’s one of the reasons a thorough compliance check before submission is so important.
Evaluation
Once the tender has passed the relevant compliance checks, the evaluation panel assesses the scored elements of the submission against the criteria published within the tender documents.
This is where your written responses, methodology, experience, evidence, social value commitments and other quality elements are assessed.
Evaluators aren’t simply deciding whether they like a response. They should be scoring it against the published evaluation criteria and scoring methodology. That means a well-written response alone isn’t enough; it needs to clearly demonstrate how your proposed solution meets the requirement and provide the evidence the evaluator needs to award the available marks.
Depending on the procurement, different questions or sections may also carry significantly different weightings, making some areas of the submission considerably more influential on the final result than others.
Price Evaluation
Commercial submissions are normally assessed separately in accordance with the methodology set out in the procurement documents. The lowest price does not automatically win.
Some tenders place significant emphasis on price, while others give considerably more weight to quality. The buyer may use a formula to convert submitted prices into a commercial score before combining this with the quality evaluation.
This is why understanding the price-to-quality weighting before deciding whether to bid is important. A business competing primarily on service quality may approach an opportunity weighted 70% quality and 30% price very differently from one where price accounts for 70% of the available marks.
Moderation
Where several evaluators have independently scored responses, their initial scores may differ.
During moderation, evaluators discuss their assessments and agree the final moderated score for each response. This helps create a consistent evaluation process and ensures that the final score reflects the published criteria rather than simply averaging several different interpretations.
The comments and reasoning recorded during this stage can also contribute to the feedback bidders receive once the procurement has concluded.
Clarifications
Depending on the procurement, the buyer may contact bidders during the evaluation period to clarify elements of their submission.
A clarification isn’t normally an opportunity to rewrite a weak answer or introduce an entirely different solution. Instead, it allows the buyer to resolve specific uncertainties or request further information where appropriate within the procurement process.
If a clarification is received, it’s worth treating it with the same care as the original tender. Read exactly what is being asked, check any deadline carefully and make sure the response answers the clarification directly without inadvertently changing other aspects of the submission.
Award Decision
Once the evaluation and any necessary approvals have been completed, the buyer identifies the successful bidder or bidders and issues the outcome of the procurement.
Exactly what you receive will depend on the type of procurement. You may receive your overall score, individual quality scores, information about the successful bidder and feedback explaining where your submission performed well or lost marks.
For some procurements there may also be a standstill period between notification and the contract being formally entered into.
And, unfortunately, the time between submission and award isn’t always short. Evaluation can take weeks or sometimes months depending on the size and complexity of the procurement, the number of submissions received, clarification requirements and the buyer’s internal approval process. (I’ve known this to even be a year apart in extreme cases! Always keep your final submission for reference just in case.)
Don’t Ignore the Feedback
Whether you’ve won or lost, the feedback can be one of the most useful outputs from the entire tender process.
A loss doesn’t necessarily mean the whole submission was poor. You might discover that your quality scores were excellent but your commercial score wasn’t competitive, or that one heavily weighted response significantly reduced an otherwise strong result.
Equally, winning doesn’t mean there is nothing to learn. There may still be responses that scored below the maximum and could be strengthened before the next opportunity.
Looking at the scores alongside the evaluator comments can help identify patterns across multiple submissions: where evidence is consistently strong, where responses are losing marks and where changes could improve future tenders.
Use the Result to Improve the Next Tender
Tendering shouldn’t be a series of isolated submissions. Each opportunity gives you information you can use to improve the next one.
Over time, evaluation results can help you understand which evidence resonates with buyers, where your strongest differentiators sit, whether your pricing is competitive and which types of opportunities are the best fit for your business.
So, once you’ve hit submit, your work on that particular tender might temporarily stop, but the tender process certainly hasn’t. When the result eventually arrives, whether it’s a win or a loss, there should always be something you can take from it into the next opportunity.
Need support with an upcoming tender? HP Tendering Consultancy provides flexible tender and bid management support, from opportunity assessment and bid planning through to writing, review and submission. Get in touch to discuss how we can support your next tender.