Read tender criteria as one set before you bid

Whether a tender is worth your team's time is settled by its criteria before anyone drafts a word: the pass/fail lines decide whether you can bid, and the weightings and price formula decide whether you can win. APMP's Winning Business Ecosystem places review of the evaluation criteria in the response stage, after the bid/no-bid decision, which is too late for the numbers that should drive that decision. Read the criteria as one set first, and turn them into numbers. In order: find every pass/fail line, check for a minimum quality score, work out what the price formula does to your score, ask clarification questions, make the call and plan the bid around the marks.

What you need before you start

The reading belongs to the head of bids or bid manager holding a live tender, with the bid/no-bid call still to make. Gather the whole pack before you read a single criterion: the instructions, the assessment methodology, the specification, the contract terms and the pricing schedule. The criteria that end bids can sit in any of these files. As an example, a selection question might set the turnover you need, the specification the service level you must run and the contract terms the liability you'd carry. Read one file at a time and each looks manageable.

Confirm the regime next, from the country and the date the procurement began. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, procurements begun from 24 February 2025 run under the Procurement Act 2023, and earlier ones still run under the regulations it replaced, so the guidance you check a criterion against depends on that date. Elsewhere in Europe, confirm which national rules govern the tender before you rely on any guidance about it.

Then put two people in the reading beside the bid manager. One is whoever leads on pricing, because the price formula decides how much quality has to carry. The other is the expert who knows the specification best, because that's where minimum standards hide. What the three of you find feeds the rest of your tender management process, from the compliance matrix to the bid plan.

Find every pass/fail line, beyond the tender selection criteria

List every requirement in the pack that a bid can fail outright, not only the tender selection criteria, because a bid ends just as surely on a line nobody shredded. Exclusion grounds and the selection stage - conditions of participation under the Procurement Act 2023, or the evidence first declared in the ESPD in an EU tender - are the obvious place to start. They're rarely the only place.

Lines in the assessment methodology

The Cabinet Office's guidance on assessing competitive tenders, written for buyers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, permits pass/fail criteria and says the assessment methodology must state where failing one or more criteria would disqualify a bid. That makes the methodology the first file to read line by line. Copy each stated disqualification rule into your list word for word, along with any pass mark on a scored question, which the next step deals with. Where a methodology is silent on what failing a requirement means, treat the silence as a question for the buyer, not as permission.

Lines outside the instructions

The same guidance gives a late submission and an answer over the prescribed word count as examples of breaching a procedural requirement, for which a buyer may disregard a bid. So deadlines, word and character limits, file formats and mandatory attachments belong on the pass/fail list, not only in the production plan.

Then read the specification and the contract terms for minimums written as "must". For example, a specification might require a service level your operation doesn't run today, or the contract terms might set an insurance level or a liability cap the business won't accept. Either is a pass/fail line whether or not the instructions call it one. Give every line on the list an owner and a plain yes, no or not yet.

In SEQUESTO: Agent Force, part of SEQUESTO's agentic operating system (aOS), extracts the requirements, evaluation criteria, mandatory attachments and word limits from every file in the pack into a tracked list. The bid manager confirms that structure before anyone drafts, so the pass/fail list and the response structure start from the same reading.

Check the tender scoring criteria for a minimum quality score

Look for a minimum quality score before you look at price, because where the methodology says missing it disqualifies, no price can rescue the bid. It may sit on each question, on a section or on the quality total, and one methodology can use more than one. Note each one beside its question on your pass/fail list.

A pass mark on a lightly weighted question deserves the same attention as one on the heaviest. Its weighting tells you what the question adds to your score. It says nothing about what failing it costs you, and failing it can cost the whole bid.

Then score your own likely answers against the descriptors, as an evaluator would, before anyone counts price. For each question with a pass mark, take the evidence you actually hold - the case study, the certification, the method you've delivered - and read it against the descriptor at the pass mark, not the top one. If the evidence that descriptor asks for isn't there, and you can't get it before the deadline, the threshold is a pass/fail line you fail.

Have the bid manager, the pricing lead and the specification expert mark each threshold question separately. Where their marks differ by a full point on the scale, treat the question as unsafe until you've found the evidence that settles it.

Work out what the price formula does to your score

Convert the gap between your price and the likely lowest bid into quality marks, because that number tells you whether quality can carry the bid. The methodology states the formula. Where it scores price against a fixed budget or ceiling, your price score is yours to set. Where it scores price relative to the lowest bid - for example, the lowest price divided by your price, multiplied by the marks available for price - part of your score is set by others.

Price gap in quality marks

Under that relative formula, the marks you lose to the lowest bidder are the price marks multiplied by your gap divided by 100 plus your gap, with the gap as a percentage. For small gaps, that comes close to the gap's percentage of the price marks. Those are the quality marks you must win back over the lowest bidder just to draw level.

Worked example, built for illustration only: price carries 30 marks and quality 70, and your price is 10% above the lowest bid. Your price score is 30 × 100 ÷ 110, or 27.3, so you've lost 2.7 marks to the lowest bidder. You need 2.7 more quality marks than that bidder, about 4% of the quality marks available, before the gap closes. Whether you can win them is a judgement about the heaviest questions, which the bid/no-bid call settles.

Competitors set your price score

The Cabinet Office guidance warns buyers about the value-for-money effects of relative scoring, where each supplier's price score is derived from the lowest price received. For you, it means your score moves with prices you'll never see. Continue the example: if one competitor comes in 10% below the lowest bid you expected, your unchanged price now sits about 22% above it.

The quality marks you need have doubled without a single change to your bid. Estimate the lowest bid as a range, not a point estimate, and run the formula at both ends.

The field you're pricing against may be small. Data in the European Court of Auditors' special report 28/2023 shows the average number of bidders in above-threshold EU procedures fell from 5.7 in 2011 to 3.2 in 2021, while single bidding rose from 23.5% to 41.8%. With an average of 3.2 bids, the lowest may be one of only two or three other prices, and one aggressive price sets everyone's score. Use the low end of your range for the decision. If the quality marks it demands are more than you can credibly win, you're competing on price, whatever the weighting says.

Ask a clarification question where a criterion is unclear or missing

Send a clarification question before the bid/no-bid call wherever a weighting, scoring method, pass mark or price formula is missing or ambiguous, because the answer can change the call. Examples worth asking about include section weightings with no split between their questions, a pass mark that doesn't say whether it applies per question or overall, and price "evaluated on value" with no formula. The Procurement Act 2023 bars a buyer from inviting suppliers to bid unless the notice or documents give them enough information to prepare a bid, which gives a question about a missing method firm footing.

Ask, too, where a pass/fail line looks more restrictive than the contract needs. The European Court of Auditors notes that overly restrictive selection criteria or technical requirements can limit how many companies take part, and over 40% of its survey respondents named them as a reason for single bidding. A buyer that wants competition has reason to hear the point. Ask whether an equivalent standard or a lower level would be accepted, rather than arguing that the line is wrong.

Keep each question to one criterion, so the answer can't come back partial. How to word and time a question so it changes the bid is covered in how to write tender clarification questions.

Make the bid/no-bid call on the tender evaluation criteria as a set

Decide on the criteria as a set, because a strong score on one part can't offset a fail on another. APMP bases the bid/no-bid decision on return on investment, win probability and risk. The criteria are where you measure win probability and risk for this bid, and they tell you what it will cost to staff.

Lines that stop the bid

Any pass/fail line you can't meet by the deadline ends the bid, and so does any minimum quality score your evidence won't reach. Neither is a weighting to trade off against something else. If a clarification question is still open on one of them, the call waits for the answer, or it's a no.

Signs the marks are reachable

With the stops cleared, three readings decide whether the bid is worth the effort: your price position under the formula at the low end of your range, the marks you can credibly win over the strongest competitor on the heaviest questions, and whether those marks cover the price gap. Don't assume quality will carry it. The European Court of Auditors found that in 2021 eight member states awarded more than 80% of their procedures on lowest bid, so in some markets a criteria set led by price is the expected reading, not the exception.

Weigh the result against how many bids you can staff. A bid you can win only on price may not justify a writer you need for one you can win on quality. Record the reasoning with the decision; how to make and record a go/no-go decision covers defending it later.

In SEQUESTO: your team directs James, who orchestrates the work in aOS, to assess the opportunity, and he returns a bid or no-bid recommendation with its reasons, drawn from the tender documents and your organisation's own information. The bid manager makes the call, and the reasoning stays documented for review.

Turn the tender award criteria weightings into the bid plan

Give writing and expert time to each question in proportion to the marks it carries, because effort spent beyond a question's marks comes out of a heavier one.

Marks per question

Where the methodology splits a section's weighting across its questions, multiply the section weighting by each question's share. Then divide by the top of the scoring scale to see what one step up the scale is worth. That step value is the figure to plan with: it tells you what moving an answer from adequate to good gains, and where that move is cheapest.

Questions with a pass mark come first, whatever their weight, because the threshold step showed what failing them costs. Where one subject matter expert holds the evidence for several heavy answers, book that expert for the heaviest first and take the material for the others from the same session. Writing each answer to its scoring descriptors is the writers' work from here, covered in how to write a tender bid.

When weightings can move

Weightings aren't always fixed when you plan. In a competitive flexible procedure under the Procurement Act 2023, Cabinet Office guidance allows a weighting published as a range to move within that range before final submissions; its example is transition arrangements weighted at 10% to 30%. Plan anything with expert lead time against the top of the range, and adjust the writing once the weighting is confirmed.

When documents rank criteria by importance instead of weighting them, the plan relies on judgement rather than arithmetic. In an EU tender, Directive 2014/24/EU allows a buyer that can't set weightings in advance to list the criteria in decreasing order of importance. Ask whether the buyer can give relative weights. Until it does, give the top-ranked criterion the largest share, without assuming the gaps between ranks are even.

Tender criteria checklist

Tick each line before the plan goes to writers:

• Every pass/fail line from the methodology, specification, contract terms and instructions sits on one list, each with an owner and a yes, no or not yet.
• Every minimum quality score is identified, and your likely answer to each question carrying one has been marked against the descriptor at the pass mark.
• The gap between your price and both ends of your estimated range for the lowest bid is converted into quality marks.
• A clarification question has gone to the buyer for each missing or unclear weighting, scoring method, pass mark or price formula, and for each pass/fail line that looks restrictive.
• Record the bid/no-bid call with the lines that could stop the bid, your price position and the marks you can reach.
• Writing and expert time follow the marks per question; threshold questions are covered first and ranged weightings are planned at the top of their range.

Run it on the next tender that lands, before the kick-off meeting books anyone's time.