Bid review & critique

You’ve written the bid — now find out how it will score before the buyer does. Our reviewers mark your draft exactly as an evaluator would: against the published criteria, question by question, with a written verdict and the fixes ranked by marks at stake.

Two ways to use a review

What the critique covers

• Question compliance — does each answer address every requirement actually asked, in the structure the marker expects?
• Evidence density — are claims backed by numbers, named examples and mechanisms, or padded with adjectives?
• Scoring position — where each answer sits on the typical 0–5 scale, and precisely what separates it from the band above
• Win themes — whether a consistent argument runs through the bid or it reads as ten disconnected answers
• Plain English — sentence-level clarity, because tired evaluators reward answers that are easy to mark
• Compliance wrap — forms, certificates, word limits, formatting rules: the pass/fail traps

The deliverable is a written report you can act on internally, not vague encouragement. If you’d rather we made the fixes ourselves, the review fee offsets against a full writing engagement.

Why an external eye finds what you can’t

Teams who wrote a bid cannot mark it — familiarity fills the gaps on the page with knowledge in their heads. An evaluator has only the page. Our reviewers read forty-plus bids a year across a dozen sectors and know what top-band answers look like, because they write them. The patterns we flag most often are catalogued in our guide to the common reasons bids fail — read it before your next draft and the review will find less.

How it works

1. Send the draft and tender pack

   We need the questions, criteria and weightings as well as your answers — a bid can only be marked against its rubric.

2. Independent marking

   A reviewer who hasn’t seen your business scores every answer cold, then a second pass adds the fixes ranked by marks recoverable.

3. Debrief call

   A working session on the findings: what to fix first, what to leave, and honest odds. Reports without conversations get filed; this one gets used.

Speed and pricing

Reviews are the fastest service we offer — two to four working days for most bids, quicker when a deadline demands it. Fixed fee, sized by submission length. Remember the first review of a past bid is free as part of any initial conversation; the paid service is the full question-level critique with rewrites.

What the written report gives you

A review is only as useful as what you can act on, so the deliverable is a structured written report, not a few margin notes. For each scored question you get an indicative mark against the published scale, the specific reasons it sits where it does, and a prioritised list of changes ranked by the marks each would recover — so you spend your remaining time where it pays. We flag compliance risks that could void the bid entirely, identify claims that need evidence, and where the package includes it, rewrite the weakest answers to show the standard. The report is written to be handed round your team and used, with a debrief call to talk through the findings, because a review that gets filed changes nothing and a review that gets actioned changes the result.

Reviewing a win, not just a loss

Most people commission a review after losing, which is sensible — but the quiet opportunity is reviewing a bid you won. Winning with a 62% quality score isn’t a triumph if your next competition is tighter; it’s a warning that your answers are passing rather than excelling, and the margin that saved you this time may not be there next time. A light-touch review of a successful bid shows you which answers carried you and which scraped through, turning a single win into a template for repeatable ones. It’s also the cheapest insurance available on a contract renewal, where complacency — reusing the bid that won last time — is one of the commonest ways incumbents lose.