If your trade business has ever put hours into a tender submission only to miss out on the contract, the problem might not be your capability or your price. It might be how you wrote your response.
Tendering for government contracts, commercial projects or larger corporate work is one of the most effective ways to grow a trade business beyond the day-to-day residential and maintenance pipeline. But the competitive tender process has its own rules, and a lot of trade businesses are losing marks not because they cannot do the work, but because their written submissions are not doing justice to what they can offer.
The good news is that the most common tender writing mistakes are entirely fixable once you know what to look for.
Here are the three that come up most often and what to do about them.
Mistake 1: Not Answering the Whole Question
This is the most common and most costly tender writing mistake, and it happens more than you would think.
Tender questions are often multi-part. A single question might ask you to describe your approach to something, explain how you will monitor it and outline how you will report on it. Those are three distinct things, not one.
If your response only addresses one or two of them, you will not score full marks on that question, regardless of how well you answered the parts you did cover. Evaluators are working to a marking criteria and marks are assigned to each element of the question. Missing an element means missing those marks.
Before you write a single word of your response, read the question carefully and break it down into its individual components. Write them out as a checklist. Then make sure your response addresses every single one before you move on.
It sounds obvious when you see it written down, but under time pressure it is remarkably easy to focus on the part of a question you feel most confident about and inadvertently skim over the rest.
Mistake 2: A Structure That Makes the Evaluator Work Too Hard
Tender evaluators are typically reviewing dozens of submissions, often under time pressure. Their job is to assess how well each respondent has addressed the requirements, not to hunt through your response trying to find where you addressed each part of the question.
If your response is a block of text that covers everything in one flowing narrative, it is much harder for an evaluator to identify and score each element. Even if all the information is there, a poorly structured response will almost always score lower than a well-structured one because the evaluator cannot easily verify that all requirements have been met.
The simplest and most effective structure for a tender response is to mirror the question itself. If the question asks about three things, use three headings that directly reflect those three things, in the same order they appeared in the question, using the same or similar language.
This makes the evaluator’s job easy. They can move through your response systematically and tick off each requirement as they find it. That ease translates directly into a better score.
A practical tip: before you start writing, set up your document with those headings already in place. Writing to a structure is significantly easier than trying to impose structure on something you have already written.
Mistake 3: Describing What You Do Instead of How You Will Do It
This is the mistake that feels the most surprising when you first hear it, because it seems counterintuitive. Of course your tender response should explain what your business does and what you are capable of. Why would that be a problem?
The issue is the difference between describing your general capability and demonstrating how that capability will be applied specifically to this contract, for this client, to meet these particular requirements.
Evaluators are not just looking for assurance that your business can do the work. They know you can do the work or you would not be tendering. What they are scoring is evidence that you have read and understood their specific requirements and that your response shows clearly how you will meet them.
A response that reads like a copy and paste from a company brochure, covering your general approach and experience in broad terms, will score significantly lower than one that directly references the contract requirements and explains how your business will deliver against each of them.
Read the tender document thoroughly before you write anything. Identify the specific requirements, any key performance indicators or deliverables mentioned, the client’s stated priorities and any particular challenges or constraints they have flagged. Then write your response to show you have understood all of that and explain, specifically, how your business will address it.
The more your response reflects the specific language and requirements of the tender document, the more clearly you are demonstrating to the evaluator that you have read it carefully and that your submission is tailored to their needs rather than generic.
A Few Things Worth Knowing Before You Tender
Tender writing is a skill that takes time to develop and the stakes are high. A single successful tender can transform the trajectory of a trade business by delivering consistent, contracted revenue that reduces reliance on finding new work month to month.
The Australian Government’s Business.gov.au website provides free guidance on how to prepare for and respond to government tenders, including what evaluators look for and how the procurement process works. If your business is new to tendering, starting with that resource is worthwhile before you invest time in a submission.
Most state and territory governments also publish their own procurement guidance and many have small business specific resources to help businesses understand the tender process for the first time.
Beyond the writing itself, it is worth reviewing every unsuccessful tender submission you make. Many government and larger corporate clients will provide feedback on unsuccessful bids if you ask for it. That feedback is genuinely valuable because it tells you exactly where your response fell short, which is far more useful than guessing.
Every tender you submit, regardless of outcome, makes the next one better.
Know someone in the Tradie Wives community who has navigated tendering and could share their experience? Come and connect with members who have been through the process at tradiewives.com.au
Sources referenced in this article:
- Australian Government, business.gov.au, government procurement and tendering guidance
