What actually decides who wins a public tender

There is an industry built on the premise that you lose public tenders because your proposal wasn't good enough. Better writing. Stronger narrative. Cleaner design. A consultant at €1,200 a day to sharpen your prose.

We went looking for the evidence that any of it works.

It isn't there.

Not "the evidence is mixed." Not "the effect is small." There is no empirical study, in the European procurement literature, that measures an independent effect of proposal polish, formatting, design finish, or prose quality on tender scores. The mechanism is asserted constantly and tested never.

Meanwhile, the things that have been measured — repeatedly, with large samples, across dozens of countries — turn out to be considerably stranger, and considerably more useful, than "write more persuasively."

This piece is the map. Each of the findings below has a full treatment elsewhere; here we're laying out the terrain.

Winning happens in three stages, and they reward different things

The single most useful idea in the procurement literature is that a tender is not one competition. It's three, in sequence, and a factor that helps you at one stage may be irrelevant at the next.

Stage one: do you qualify? Before anyone reads your proposal, you must clear the gates. Minimum turnover. Insurance at a stated level. Certifications. References of a particular size, sector and recency. These are pass/fail. You clear them or you are excluded, and no quality anywhere else in your bid changes that.

This is where most SMEs actually fail — and it has nothing to do with how well they write.

Stage two: how do you score? Once you're in the evaluated pool, your points come from the published award criteria and their weights. Evaluators may award points only for what they were told to look for. Effort spent outside the scoring framework is, quite literally, unscored — however well expressed.

Stage three: who actually wins? This is where it gets strange. The final award depends not only on your score, but on the scoring rule — the formula that converts criteria into points. And that formula has properties most bidders have never examined.

Confusing these three stages is the most expensive mistake in bidding. A firm that polishes its prose while failing to notice it can't meet a mandatory reference requirement has optimised stage two and lost at stage one.

The strangest finding: your score depends on your competitors

Schotanus, Van den Engh, Nijenhuis and Telgen examined 303 Dutch public tenders and simulated what happened under the scoring formulas those buyers actually used.

In roughly one in five cases, adding a bid that had no chance of winning changed which of the other bidders won.

That's not a rounding error or a modelling artefact. It's a mathematical property of the relative scoring formulas that many buyers use — where the lowest bid sets the scale and everyone else is scored against it. Under such a formula, your price score is not a function of your price. It is a function of your price relative to whoever showed up.

There is also good evidence that the published weights are not always the effective weights — that some scoring formulas quietly compress or expand the range of price scores, so that a criterion nominally worth 40% can end up discriminating almost nobody, or a nominal 30% can behave like 50%.

Both of these are disclosed. Both are in the tender documents. Almost nobody reads them.

We treat this properly in The formula that scores you — including how to tell relative from absolute scoring, and what to look for before you decide whether to bid.

Openness helps you enter. It does not help you win.

Hoekman and Tas analysed TED data across 32 European countries — over 200,000 tenders for participation, and more than half a million for winner information.

Open procedures increase SME participation. More small firms bid. The policy works as designed.

But conditional on competing, an SME's probability of winning goes down. Openness invites everybody — including the large, well-resourced competitors who do this professionally and have been optimising their win rate for a decade.

The same study found that splitting contracts into lots — the other standard SME-access prescription — only improved SME win probability for lots below roughly €23,469. Above that, more small firms bid, and no more of them won.

The uncomfortable read: the policies designed to include small firms are measurably better at getting them to show up than at helping them succeed. Which means the burden of selectivity sits entirely with you.

We treat this properly in When not to bid.

What has been shown to work

If prose polish is unmeasured, what isn't?

Procedural capability. Flynn and Davis surveyed 3,010 Irish SMEs active in public procurement and found that procedural capability — knowing how the process works, handling the documents correctly, managing the mechanics — was associated with both higher tendering activity and a better win ratio.

Not creative capability. Not writing capability. Procedural.

This is the most actionable finding in the field, and the least glamorous. The firms that win more, controlling for size, are the ones that are better at the process. And unlike headcount or revenue, process is something a small company can actually acquire.

Size and resource. Larger, better-resourced SMEs win more; micro-firms are structurally disadvantaged. The honest implication is not "try harder" — it's be more selective, and partner more. Consortium bidding exists precisely to clear gates that weren't built for you.

Where you choose to compete. Smaller contracts, lower complexity, and — interestingly — buyers with a track record of paying on time all correlate with better SME outcomes. Target selection is a strategic decision with measurable consequences, and most firms make it in four minutes.

Where the points are

None of this makes the content of your bid irrelevant. It makes which content irrelevant.

Buyers must publish how they will score you. Here is a real example, extracted verbatim from a Dutch tender's Aanbestedingsleidraad:

Criterion	Maximum points
Quality	100
— Wens 1: Support for analysis work	15
— Wens 2: Completeness of documents	40
— Wens 3: Historical information	15
— Wens 4: Sustainability	10
Price	20

Quality outweighs price five to one — so a race to the bottom was never the play here. And within quality, one question — completeness of documents — is worth 40 points on its own. More than the other three quality questions combined.

A bidder who divided their week evenly across those four questions chose, without realising it, to under-invest in the one that decided the outcome. A bidder who spent their best day on sustainability was competing for 10 points out of 120.

The practical obstacle: that breakdown was not published on TED at all. In our own corpus of open EU tenders, fewer than two in five carry award criteria in the notice — and where they do, the data is frequently unusable. The real breakdown sits in the tender's own document, where most bidders never systematically look.

The honest gap

We should say what we don't know, because the industry never does.

Nobody has measured how often bids are rejected for administrative failure. Not the ESPD/UEA that arrived incomplete. Not the missing signature. Not the price schedule on the wrong template. The legal literature is unambiguous that these can be fatal — a non-responsive bid is excluded before anyone reads it, and courts across Europe have upheld strict deadline enforcement without sympathy. But the frequency has never been quantified across European tenders. The mechanism is documented. The rate is not.

That is a strange hole, given how much of practitioner conversation is devoted to exactly this. And it cuts both ways: we cannot honestly tell you that most bids die administratively. Only that they can, that it is final when they do, and that nobody has counted.

The same is true of what we're arguing against. Proposal polish, design, team CVs, formatting — unmeasured, not disproven. It's possible they help. It has simply never been shown.

The difference is that one industry sells you the unmeasured thing at €1,200 a day, and the other one is free to check: read the documents.

We treat this properly in What nobody has measured — including what we intend to do about it.

What this adds up to

The evidence supports a mechanical view of public tendering rather than a rhetorical one:

1. Compliance is a gate, not a score. You clear it or you are not read.
2. The scoring formula can matter as much as your bid. It is disclosed, and almost nobody reads it.
3. Effort belongs where the points are — which requires knowing where they are, and for most tenders that means reading the tender's own documents, not the notice.
4. Procedural capability is the measured winner. The least glamorous finding has the best evidence behind it.
5. Where you compete is a decision. Openness will not save you; selectivity might.

None of this is about writing better. All of it is about reading better — and then organising the week around what you found.

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FindWell reads the tender's own documents — the Aanbestedingsleidraad, the annexes — and shows you the stated requirements and the award criteria with their weights, each quoted with the section it came from. The table above is a verbatim extraction from a real Dutch tender. We work the stages the evidence says decide the outcome: compliance, criterion-fit, and readiness. The writing, the pricing and the submission are your team's, and we don't pretend otherwise.

Sources

• Schotanus, F., Van den Engh, G., Nijenhuis, Y. & Telgen, J. (2021). Supplier selection with rank reversal in public tenders. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management.
• Hoekman, B. & Tas, B. (2020). Procurement policy and SME participation in public purchasing. Small Business Economics.
• Ballesteros-Pérez, P., Skitmore, M., Pellicer, E. & González-Cruz, M. (2015). Scoring rules and abnormally low bids criteria in construction tenders: a taxonomic review. Construction Management and Economics.
• Flynn, A. & Davis, P. (2017). Investigating the effect of tendering capabilities on SME activity and performance in public contract competitions. International Small Business Journal.
• Flynn, A., McKevitt, D. & Davis, P. (2015). The impact of size on small and medium-sized enterprise public sector tendering. International Small Business Journal.
• Van Garsse, S., Verhoeven, S. & Wouters, E. (2022). An Incomplete or Missing European Single Procurement Document? EPPPL.

Thresholds, standstill periods and national procedures vary by jurisdiction and are revised periodically. Check the rules in force for your tender.