Whenever bid writers approaches an ITT or RFP, there are usually two important things to consider. Firstly identifying what each question is asking for and why so that it can be answered correctly. Secondly, but perhaps the most important aspect of any tender writing response – the questions which are unstated, but written between the lines for the proposal writer to discover.

 

Every bid, no matter how large or small, contains information which the customer is looking for, but which are not clearly articulated in the RFP or ITT. Even if bid writers respond answers all elements of the question competently, they still run the risk of missing points simply because the commissioner failed to ask something that was important to them.

Because of this, the bid writer needs to have a form of sixth sense when responding to each question they encounter. It's not enough to simply answer questions, when your competitors may be using their intuition to respond to the unspoken requests which lie beneath the text. The bid writer needs to consider the following, when responding to each proposal writing request for information:

 

• What are the key elements of the stated question which need to be responded to?
• What weighting would you give to each element of the question?
• Why has the customer asked this?
• What information do they really want to see the bid writer provide?
• If you were the evaluator, what would you be looking for from each response?
• How does each question fit in the wider context of the proposed solution, and industry?

 

Usually, if a question seems irrelevant to the bid writer, it could be for two reasons. The first is that the creator of the document was in a rush and simply left it in from a previous bid. The second is because the evaluator will be looking for some form of information in the response document which is not immediately obvious upon the first reading. Because of this, it's important to approach each question with equal dedication, even if it may seem at first that it won't offer much value to the overall bid writing response.

The sensible bid writer looks at the weighting for each question and allocates importance to each accordingly. From there, it takes some sharp intuition and a sense of the industry to really drill down within each question and formulate the ideal response to meet the needs of the customer.