RFP and tender responses

What an RFP or tender response is

An RFP or tender response is a document that answers a buyer’s published questions, in their order, inside their word limits, by their deadline. It is scored against criteria written down in advance, by a panel working through a stack of submissions in one afternoon. The job is to make every mark that can be awarded easy to find and easy to give.

It is not proposal copy, which is a document you control. In a proposal you choose the order, the length and where the argument lands. In a tender you are a guest in someone else’s document, and the discipline is compliance first, persuasion second. The two are less opposed than people assume — an evaluator who can find your answer is more easily persuaded by it.

When you need one

You need this when a contract is large enough that losing it on a technicality would hurt, and whoever would otherwise write the response already has a full week. You need it when you have bid before, scored badly and never been told why. And you need it when the questions ask for things nobody has written down: a continuity plan, an accessibility commitment, what you do when a subcontractor fails.

You do not need it for every opportunity that arrives, and saying so is part of the work. Some tenders are written around an incumbent, some are priced below what you can deliver for, and some ask for a certification you will not hold for two years. I will tell you when I think you should not bid, because a week spent on a bid you cannot win is a week not spent on work you can get. If the questions are few and you have answered near-identical ones before, reuse last year’s text and have it read through properly instead.

What goes in it

• The compliance matrix. Every stated requirement in a table, with the page where the response answers it. Evaluators score from this, and building it first is how you find the question everybody else missed.
• The answers. One per question, in their order, using their words for things. Each opens with the answer rather than a wind-up, because the limit is real and the first sentence is the one certainly read.
• The evidence. Named examples, dates, methods and approved figures sitting beside the claims they support. A claim with nothing next to it scores as an assertion.
• The mandatory attachments. Insurance certificates, policies, declarations and references in the format requested. These are pass or fail, and where small firms most often fall over.
• The pricing schedule. Filled in exactly as issued, with assumptions stated wherever the form allows a note.

A response that arrives after the deadline, or without a required document, is discarded unread. Nobody telephones to ask. That is why the schedule is built backwards from submission rather than forwards from today.

What you get

The submission-ready response. Every question answered inside its limit, in the buyer’s format, with the compliance matrix at the front and the attachments listed and ticked off.

The answer library. The reusable answers — company description, quality method, health and safety, insurance, staffing — kept separately, so the next tender starts from something rather than nothing.

The submission checklist. One page: what has to be uploaded, in what format, to which portal, by which hour, and who presses the button. Bids are lost on that page more often than on the answers.

A worked example

An illustration. A 22-person commercial cleaning contractor is invited to tender for a four-site school board contract. The document runs to 60 pages and asks 34 questions, most capped at 500 words, with five mandatory policy attachments and a pricing workbook to be submitted untouched except for the shaded cells.

The first hour goes on the bid decision, not the writing. Two of the five policies do not exist, the reference section wants three contracts of similar size and the firm has two, and the timetable leaves eleven working days. The decision is to bid: the missing policies are writable in a week, and a hospital contract is close enough in scale to stand as the third reference. The compliance matrix then shows two questions asking for the same staffing information in different words, which last year’s submission answered two different ways. The response goes in with a day and a half to spare. The firm does not win, and the debrief says the method scored well and the price decided it. The answer library means the next four tenders start with most of the text already written and approved.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. The tender document, the deadline, and what you already hold on file. No charge.
2. The bid or no-bid conversation. An honest read of whether this one is winnable and worth the week. If the answer is no, that is the end of it.
3. A fixed price in writing. Agreed against the real question count and the real deadline before anything starts.
4. The compliance matrix. Built within two working days, so a missing policy or a missing reference surfaces while there is still time to fix it.
5. Drafting. Answers written and sent to you in batches, so your corrections happen while I am still writing rather than at the end.
6. Review and submission. A full compliance read against the matrix, then upload with a working day of buffer against a portal that will be slow on deadline afternoon.

Two to three weeks is comfortable. Ten working days is common. Less than five is possible, and I will say plainly what it costs you in quality.

What it costs

Tender responses are not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so the number is fixed in writing in CAD after the half-hour call and before any writing starts. It depends on the question count, how much evidence already exists in usable form, and how long there is. A short deadline costs more, because it displaces other work. The bid or no-bid conversation is part of the free call, never part of the price.

What happens next

Firms that bid regularly usually want the reusable parts tidied afterwards, which means a set of approved company descriptions at the lengths these forms keep asking for. If the evidence was thin, a written and approved client story fixes that before the next invitation. For work that never goes to tender, a master proposal stops the same paragraphs being retyped. None of that is assumed. This response is a complete piece of work on its own, and when it is submitted the job is finished.