Tender writing: an underappreciated art form
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
You’ve read the RFP cover to cover, assembled your crack team and started to dream of establishing a fruitful, long-term relationship with your ideal client.
Then you read your first tender draft. It’s packed with dense, technical language, industry jargon, and long, difficult sentences that bury the point.
If you don’t fix it, you could be handing the win to your competitors.
Just because a tender is a technical document, read by someone within your industry, it should never be hard work to read. The best tenders follow plain language principles and inject a bit of creativity, even within a formal, structured document.
Our job is to win you clients
So how does a good tender achieve that?
First, make the document easy (dare I say, enjoyable) to read.
Evaluators have to work through a stack of submissions, comparing yours against several competitors, all within a tight deadline. When you write clearly and structure your content well, you're making their job easier. They’ll notice this and thank you for it. Readers form a more positive impression of a business that has clearly put in the effort to help them through their process, rather than one that's dumped a wall of jargon on their desk and left them to decode it.
Second, it needs to tell a good story.
A tender is the story of your business, boiled down to the essentials: who you are, what you do, why you're different, and why this customer should choose you over everyone else pitching for the same contract. Your positioning needs to be spot on, with specific, defensible points that separate you from the pack.
The creative part
People assume tenders are dull. We disagree. Working with businesses to understand what genuinely makes them different, then finding the sharpest, most compelling way to articulate it is rewarding. And it can seriously move the needle – winning a tender for a large client can shift your business's trajectory for years.
When done well, the positioning and language developed for a good tender ends up feeding into everything else – your website, social media, capability statements and sales collateral. Good tender writing forces a level of clarity about your value proposition that most businesses never get around to nailing down. Once you've articulated it properly once, you'd be wasting it not to reuse it.
Where most tenders fall short
A few patterns come up in tenders that underperform:
Answering the brief technically but not persuasively. Evaluators are forming a judgement about who they want to work with. A response that's accurate but flat loses out to one that's accurate and compelling.
Ignoring structure and skimmability. Evaluators are time-poor. Headers, clear formatting and confident, direct language help your strongest points land, even on a quick read.
Burying your differentiators. Most businesses have a genuine point of difference, but fail to state it clearly and persuasively up front.
No evidence to back the claims. "Proven track record" doesn't tell the evaluator much. Give them something concrete – a number, result, case study or example that demonstrates what you mean.
Where Octave Content fits in
We've worked with organisations across New Zealand and Australia to write and edit RFPs, tenders, capability statements and company profiles. In every case, the goal is the same: find what makes the business genuinely different, and say it in a way that's clear, credible and hard to ignore.
There's no better thrill in this job than hearing a tender we've worked on has directly led to a win for a client. But a good tender is more than a bid for one piece of work. It's an exercise in getting your entire marketing message straight.