10 Activities to Carry Out Before Tenders Are Published to Maximize Your Chances of Success
Date
June, 2026
Reading time
7 minutes
Category
Best practice
Peggy Herman
Co-founder and Managing Director of Bee4win, where she oversees the company’s consulting and pre-sales service activities. Since 2002, she has managed numerous public and private tenders, ranging from a few tens of thousands to several hundred million euros, in sectors as varied as IT, energy, industry and events.
An expert in pre-sales, Peggy continues to provide bid management and writing services, coaching and training. She has also been conducting studies on best practices in this field for over 10 years. Committed to the development of the pre-sales profession, she is president of the French-speaking chapter of APMP and a frequent speaker at events including the Bid and Proposal Conference Europe and Bee4win’s customers.
Key words
#Goodpractice
#Tenders
#Competitiveadvantages
Responding to a tender within the required deadline can be a source of stress for presales engineers, bid managers, and proposal writers. To avoid finding yourself in this situation, a large part of the work can be anticipated well before a tender is even published.
Of course, preparing for a tender ahead of time is also the responsibility of the sales team, who handle mapping out buyers and influencers, maintaining client relationships, identifying emerging projects, and influencing the content of specifications.
But many tasks can also be anticipated on the presales side, allowing you to make the best use of your time once the tender specifications are received and the submission deadline is known.
Here are 10 concrete activities to put in place right now to approach your next tender responses with confidence.
1. Design a polished technical proposal template
The technical proposal is the showcase for your offer. Before the first tender even arrives, define a reusable template: cover page, headers and footers, heading and paragraph styles, bullet point lists, table styles, callout boxes to highlight your key messages, and a consistent visual identity. This upfront work will allow you to produce professional, consistent-looking documents without wasting precious hours on formatting under pressure.
Tip: Plan for a version of the template that can be adapted to different buyers (local authorities, private companies, public healthcare sector…) or different offers, simply by adjusting the color palette or the images used.
2. Build a library of project reference sheets
Buyers want proof of competence, not promises. Start now to prepare standardized reference sheets for your main completed projects. Each sheet might include, for example: the client, the purpose of the project, the completion date, the budget (or a budget range), the challenges and issues addressed, the solution delivered, as well as the benefits achieved for the client and the project’s key success factors. Use the same polished formatting for every sheet.
Tip: Also prepare an anonymized version of each sheet for cases where you haven’t obtained the client’s agreement to use their name.
3. Structure and keep your team's CVs up to date
For some tenders, the proposed project team is a decisive selection criterion. Define two CV formats: a short summary CV, fitting on a single PowerPoint slide, that can be inserted directly into the proposal, and a detailed CV, presenting past experience over several pages, to be attached as an appendix instead. Set up a process for regular updates — at least annually — so that CVs always reflect each team member’s most recent skills, certifications, and assignments.
Tip: Centralize these CVs in a shared space (document management system, SharePoint, dedicated drive) accessible to the whole presales team, with a version control system.
4. Set up a bid monitoring dashboard
Managing a large tender with many contributors, or several tenders at once, without a tracking tool is a guaranteed way to forget a task, miss a deadline, or duplicate effort unnecessarily. Design a tracking dashboard suited to your activity: tender reference and title, buyer, submission date, progress status (Go/No Go, in progress, submitted, outcome), contributors, and open actions. This table becomes the dashboard for your bid: it serves as a basis for progress updates and can be shared with all contributors so everyone always knows what they need to do and by when.
Tip: Include a “lessons learned” section from the start, to capitalize on each response regardless of its outcome.
5. Prepare tools to support your bid strategy
Some tools, when designed outside of rush periods, save considerable time and improve the quality of decisions. Here are two particularly useful examples:
- A cost estimation and pricing tool. Model your cost base (direct costs, overheads, partner pass-through costs…) and build in target-margin logic to automatically calculate a floor price and a recommended price. Designed ahead of time, this tool allows you, when responding to a tender, to quickly simulate different scenarios (variants, lots, service levels) and make pricing trade-offs more objective during offer review.
- A bidder comparison matrix. This competitive analysis table allows you, at the opportunity qualification stage, to position your offer against likely competitors on the buyer’s key criteria (price, references, technical capabilities, lead times, location…). Building this framework in advance, with the most common criteria for each market segment already filled in, will help you define a bid strategy that maximizes your chances of winning.
You can also find other examples in this article: The Presales Strategist’s Toolbox: 8 Essential Tools to Win More Deals!
Tip: Be careful not to lock in a single strategy applicable to all your responses. On the contrary, these tools should allow you to adapt your strategy to the specific context of each bid.
6. Prepare your differentiating arguments and value proposition
What truly sets you apart from your competitors? Put your key competitive advantages in writing: specific expertise, certifications, proprietary methodologies, exclusive references, price-value positioning. Break these arguments down by market segment, client type, and offer. Having them written and validated in advance will save you from having to improvise them while drafting — often with less precision and conviction. When the time comes, you’ll be able to pick the most relevant arguments from this library for the tender you’re responding to, and adjust them if needed to the project’s specific context.
Tip: Organize an annual competitive positioning workshop with your sales and technical teams to keep these arguments up to date.
7. Build a library of standard content blocks for recurring questions
Certain sections come up in almost every tender: company presentation, quality policy, CSR approach, project organization, risk management, subcontracting policy… Write validated reference text blocks for each of these topics. They can then be adapted to each consultation in a matter of minutes, rather than rewritten from scratch every time.
Tip: Organize this library by topic to make it easy to search when drafting, and focus on substance rather than form, to make it easier to integrate into any type of document — including those whose format is set by the client.
8. Build a list of qualified subcontractors and partners
If you regularly respond to tenders alongside partners or subcontractors, build a panel of qualified partners ahead of time — companies you’ve already worked with or whose capabilities you’ve assessed. Collect their company registration documents, insurance certificates, certifications, references, and key contacts. When a tender comes in, you’ll be able to quickly put together a solid consortium without going through a time-consuming search process.
Tip: Prepare template letters of intent that you can quickly send to these partners during a consultation.
9. Optimize your tender monitoring system
Don’t just react to tenders: anticipate them. Set up a structured monitoring system across publication platforms (such as official procurement portals and private buyer platforms), or by using multi-platform monitoring tools such as QUALIFY, and configure alerts by keyword, sector, and geographic area.
Tip: Also use these tools to qualify your opportunities and research information on your clients’ and competitors’ past projects.
10. Formalize a presales process
Responding to every opportunity that comes up is a costly mistake in terms of time and energy. Define a formalized opportunity qualification process: go/no-go criteria (fit with your offer, client relationship, estimated chances of success, effort required versus expected gain…), and hold short review sessions as soon as an opportunity is identified. Saying no to the right opportunities means giving yourself the means to say yes to the best ones.
Likewise, define a formalized validation process for your offer before it’s submitted to the client: this process can include different levels of validation depending on the deal size, the level of risk, or any other criteria specific to your business or your company.
To go further on this topic, take a look at our article: The Presales Process: A Road Trip Toward Winning Offers.
Tip: Use a simple scoring grid (5 to 8 criteria, rated from 1 to 5) to make decisions more objective and easy to share with management.
It’s also important to celebrate key moments, such as submitting a bid or winning a deal., These breathing moments, like the lessons learned from bid after bid, will help you to reduce the moments of doubt, difficulty or pain and increase the moments of joy, sharing and fulfilment in your professional life.
In conclusion
Many tasks, useful for all of your tender responses, can be put in place well before consultations are even published. By completing them in advance, you spread their benefits across all of your responses and free up valuable time once a tender is launched. This gives you every chance of producing high-quality, differentiated offers, on time.
At Bee4win, we offer tools to boost your presales performance, and we also support presales teams in structuring and strengthening their bid response practices. Feel free to contact us to learn more.
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