Deciding whether to bid

Why this step exists

Most firms new to public sector work bid too much and win too little. The pattern is consistent: an opportunity looks interesting, someone starts writing, the problems surface on day three, and the bid goes in anyway because of the effort already spent.

A qualification step exists to make that decision once, early, on evidence, before the sunk cost starts arguing.

The four questions

Work through these before writing anything. A clear no on any of the first three should end it.

The mandatory requirements come first

Check pass and fail gates before anything else, because they are absolute. A minimum turnover you do not meet, an accreditation you do not hold, or an insurance level you cannot obtain will end the bid regardless of how good the response is.

These usually sit in the selection questionnaire or the instructions, not the specification, which is why people writing to the spec find them late.

Evidence, not capability

There is a difference between being able to do the work and being able to prove you have done it. Evaluators score the second. If your strongest example is four years old, in a different sector, or a project where you were a subcontractor whose role is hard to describe, you are at a structural disadvantage that good writing will not fix.

That is a reason to no-bid this one and go and build the evidence somewhere smaller, not a reason to bid harder.

Differentiation against the published weightings

The tender tells you where the marks are. If quality is weighted at 60% and split across five questions, you can see precisely which five things the buyer cares about. Ask whether you would beat a competent competitor on those specific things.

“We would do a good job” is not differentiation. Everyone bidding would do a good job. Something you can evidence that the typical bidder cannot is differentiation.

The incumbent question

If there is an incumbent, find out who. Award notices are published, so this is knowable rather than guessable, and our buyer pages show who holds what.

The received wisdom is that incumbents are almost impossible to displace. If that were true, nothing would ever change hands. It does, and we can put a number on how often.

So the question is not whether an incumbent can be beaten. It is whether this incumbent, on this contract, is beatable by you. A supplier who is performing well, whose buyer is happy and who helped shape the specification is a hard target in a single competition. One whose service has visibly struggled, or whose contract has been quietly extended twice because nobody got round to re-tendering it, is not.

• Bid when the specification has visibly changed, when the service has publicly struggled, when the buyer has changed leadership, or when you have a genuine structural advantage such as location, capacity or an accreditation the incumbent lacks.
• Think harder when the specification reads like a description of the current supplier and price carries a small share of the marks. That combination usually means the buyer has already decided what good looks like.
• Either way, note the end date. Arriving eighteen months early and being a known quantity is worth more than any amount of effort in the three weeks you get once the tender is published.

The figure above counts contracts where the same buyer awarded the same named contract again at least six months later, and only where a single supplier was named, because a framework has no one incumbent to displace. Re-tenders that were renamed will not be caught, so treat it as a real measure of a real subset rather than a number for the whole market.

A no-bid is a decision, not a failure

Record it. What you declined, why, and what would have to be true for you to bid next time. That list becomes your development plan: the accreditation to get, the reference to build, the partner to find.

It also tells you whether your alerting is pointed at the right market. If you are declining most of what reaches you for the same reason every time, the filter is wrong, not the market.