Imagine you’re evaluating 20 tenders. You have hundreds of pages of responses to work through, scoring criteria to apply and evidence to assess. You open the next submission and the first thing you read is:
“Thank you for the opportunity to submit our proposal…”
It’s polite. It’s professional. But it tells the evaluator absolutely nothing about why they should choose you.
An executive summary shouldn’t simply introduce your tender response. It should give the evaluator a concise, compelling summary of your solution and make the value of your proposal clear from the outset.
What Does the Evaluator Actually Need to Know?
When writing an executive summary, it is easy to approach it from the perspective of your own business. You introduce the company, explain what you do, perhaps mention how long you have been operating and then move into the detail of the proposal.
The problem is that the evaluator isn’t reading the submission to learn about your business. They are trying to determine whether your solution meets their requirements and offers them the best outcome. Your executive summary should therefore answer some fundamental questions:
Do you understand the requirement?
Demonstrate that you understand what the buyer is trying to achieve, including the priorities or challenges sitting behind the specification rather than simply repeating it back to them.
How are you going to deliver it?
Give the evaluator a clear overview of your proposed solution. They should understand what you are offering and how it will work without having to piece the solution together from the rest of the submission.
Why should they choose you?
This is where your differentiators matter. What makes your approach stronger, lower risk or more valuable than the alternatives available to the buyer?
What outcomes can they expect?
Focus on what your solution actually means for the customer. Improved performance, greater resilience, reduced risk, cost efficiencies, better service levels or another measurable benefit will usually say far more than a list of company features.
Don’t Waste the Most Valuable Space
Tender responses frequently come with strict page or word limits. Every sentence therefore needs to earn its place. Generic introductions, lengthy company histories and statements that could appear in almost any bidder’s response use valuable space without giving the evaluator anything meaningful to score or remember.
That doesn’t mean information about your organisation has no place in the executive summary. Relevant experience, capability and evidence can be extremely persuasive. The difference is in why it is being included.
Instead of simply telling the buyer that you have 20 years’ experience, explain why that experience reduces delivery risk or gives you particular expertise relevant to their contract.
Instead of saying that customer service is important to your organisation, explain the service structure you will provide and the benefit the buyer will receive from it. The strongest information connects your capability directly to the customer’s requirement.
Write It for the Buyer, Not the Business
A useful test is to read the executive summary and ask how much of it is genuinely specific to the opportunity. Could you change the customer’s name and use exactly the same summary for another tender? If the answer is yes, it probably isn’t doing enough.
A strong executive summary should reflect the buyer’s priorities, the proposed solution, the key benefits and the reasons your organisation is particularly well placed to deliver them.
By the time the evaluator reaches the detailed responses, they should already understand the story you are going to tell throughout the tender.
Make Every Sentence Earn Its Place
There is nothing inherently wrong with thanking a buyer for the opportunity to tender but when space is limited and every part of your submission has an opportunity to strengthen your position, ask whether that sentence is doing anything to help the evaluator choose you. (Especially when they’ll read it another 20 times!)
Your executive summary is an opportunity to establish from the very beginning that you understand the requirement, have a credible solution and can deliver the outcomes the buyer is looking for.
Don’t use it simply to say hello.
Need support strengthening an upcoming tender? HP Tendering Consultancy provides flexible tender and bid support, from bid strategy and planning through to writing, review and submission. Get in touch to discuss how we can support your next tender.