The most common bid writing mistakes that cause good consultants and agencies to lose contracts — and exactly how to fix each one.
You can be the most capable person in the room and still lose the bid. In competitive tendering, the quality of your written submission often matters more than the quality of your work — because the evaluators never see your work directly. They only see your words.
Here are the five bid writing mistakes that cost good businesses contracts — and what to do instead.
The most common bid writing failure. Submissions that open with "We are a leading consultancy with 15 years of experience" and spend the first three pages on company history, team profiles, and awards.
The evaluator does not care about your history. They care about their problem. Every paragraph that focuses on you is a paragraph not focused on them — and in a scored evaluation, off-topic content scores zero.
Fix it: Before writing any section, ask: "Is this about the client's problem, or about me?" If it is primarily about you, reframe it. Instead of "We have delivered 200 digital transformation projects," write "Your legacy infrastructure challenges are ones we have solved 200 times, most recently for [similar organisation], where we reduced processing time by 40%."
The information is the same. The framing is entirely different.
"We take a collaborative, client-centred approach." "Our team brings a wealth of experience." "We are committed to delivering high-quality outcomes."
These phrases appear in thousands of bids. They are so overused that evaluators have learned to skip over them — they register as noise, not signal.
Worse, generic language actively damages your credibility. It signals that you have not thought hard about this specific client's specific situation. And if you have not thought hard in the proposal, why would an evaluator trust you to think hard during delivery?
Fix it: Replace every generic phrase with a specific claim. "Collaborative approach" → "We will embed one of our consultants in your operations team for the first four weeks to ensure recommendations are grounded in your operational reality." Specificity is credibility.
Most formal tender processes publish their evaluation criteria — weighting, scoring method, and what evaluators are looking for. Many bidders read these once and then write whatever they were going to write anyway.
This is expensive. If the criteria weight "social value" at 20%, a submission that ignores social value and focuses purely on technical approach can score a maximum of 80% — which will not win a competitive bid.
Fix it: Before you write a single word, map every section of your response to the evaluation criteria. Create a scoring matrix: criteria on one axis, your submission sections on the other. Ensure that every heavily-weighted criterion is addressed explicitly — ideally with the language from the criteria itself, rephrased in your own words.
Evaluators often search for keyword matches. Do not make them work to find yours.
You probably have something genuinely distinctive to offer — a specific methodology, a relevant case study, a piece of proprietary tooling, a team member with unique expertise. But in most proposals, these differentiators are buried in the middle of a long methodology section or mentioned as an afterthought in the team profiles.
Evaluators reviewing multiple bids are working fast. If your strongest differentiator is on page 11, there is a good chance they will not have engaged with it deeply enough by the time they score you.
Fix it: Lead with your differentiators. Put them in the executive summary. Repeat them — briefly — in the relevant methodology sections. Finish with them in your closing statement. Important information benefits from repetition; your unique selling points should appear at least three times in different forms throughout the submission.
Bid writing under deadline pressure is real. Tender windows are short. Client commitments fill the time available. It is tempting — and common — to submit the first version that covers all the bases.
But first drafts are loose. They repeat themselves. They say in three paragraphs what one good paragraph could say. They use passive voice, hedge their claims, and fail to build the confident, credible voice that wins evaluations.
Strong bids are edited bids. The best bid writers treat the first draft as raw material — something to be cut and sharpened, not submitted.
Fix it: Build editing time into your bid calendar. A good editing pass involves three things: cutting anything that does not answer the question or address a criterion; strengthening every claim with a specific example or metric; and reading the submission aloud to catch clunky language and passive constructions.
If you have a colleague who was not involved in writing, ask them to read it fresh. The questions they ask are the questions evaluators will have.
Every mistake on this list shares a root cause: writing for yourself rather than for the evaluator. Generic language is comfortable to write. Leading with credentials is natural. Submitting the first draft saves time.
Winning bids require the opposite discipline — relentless focus on what the evaluator needs to see, written in language specific enough to be credible, refined enough to be compelling.
If you write bids regularly, the fastest improvement comes from building a library of your strongest past submissions and mining them for the language, examples, and structures that have worked before. That is precisely what DraftYourBid does — it learns from your winning proposals and applies that learning to every new brief, so your best work becomes the starting point, not the exception.
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