We Have Been Invited to Tender. What Happens Now?
An invitation to tender means a buyer wants a full priced proposal from you against a published specification, scored against published criteria. Your first three actions are to register on the procurement portal named in the invitation, find both the submission deadline and the earlier clarification question deadline, and check the pass or fail requirements such as minimum turnover, insurance levels and accreditations. Those requirements are assessed before anyone reads your answers, so they decide whether bidding is worth your time at all.
Key facts at a glance
- What an ITT actually is
- An Invitation to Tender: the buyer asking for a full priced proposal against a published specification, scored against published criteria
- How it differs from an SQ or PQQ
- A selection questionnaire is the earlier stage that decides who gets invited. An ITT is the stage where the contract is actually awarded
- Do you have to respond
- No. Declining has no consequence for future opportunities, and withdrawing early is better than submitting something weak
- First action, before anything else
- Register and get verified on the procurement portal. Approval can take a working day or more
- Where the contract is won
- The scored quality questions, usually a small part of a large document set. Read the award criteria before the specification
- Typical time from invitation to deadline
- Commonly three to six weeks for an open tender, though late stage invitations with ten days or fewer are not unusual
What you have actually received
Look at the document title. If it says Invitation to Tender, ITT, or Request for Quotation, the buyer wants a full priced proposal and this is the stage where the contract is awarded.
If it says Selection Questionnaire, SQ, Pre Qualification Questionnaire or PQQ, this is the earlier filter. It is mostly factual: turnover, insurance, accreditations, previous contracts, policies. It decides who gets invited to the next stage, and it is largely pass or fail rather than scored on persuasiveness.
If it says Dynamic Purchasing System, DPS, or Framework, you are applying to join a list of approved suppliers rather than bidding for a specific piece of work. Getting on does not give you work. It gives you the right to compete for work released under it, often for four years or more, which is usually why it is worth doing.
If a customer has told you that you need to go through procurement this year, you have not received anything yet, and this is the best possible position to be in, because you have time to prepare before the notice publishes.
The seven things to do in the first 48 hours
Register on the portal. Not tomorrow. Portal registration, company verification and user approval can take a working day or more, and a finished bid you cannot upload scores zero.
Find both deadlines and put them in calendars. The submission deadline, and the clarification question deadline, which is earlier and is frequently the binding one.
Read the award criteria. Find the page that splits the marks between price and quality, and splits quality between questions. It is usually one or two pages and it tells you where the work should go.
Check the pass or fail requirements against your actual business. Minimum annual turnover, employer and public liability insurance levels, professional indemnity, accreditations such as ISO 9001 or Cyber Essentials, financial ratios, and how many comparable reference contracts you need.
List the scored questions and their word limits. This number is what tells you whether the time remaining is realistic.
Decide whether to bid, honestly. Contract value, times your margin, times your real chance of winning, against the cost of bidding including management time.
Name one owner. Bids fail when three people each assume someone else is watching the deadline.
What the buyer is actually scoring
Evaluators score against published criteria and cannot award marks for anything outside them, however impressive. The single most common reason a good company loses is writing about what it is proud of rather than what was asked.
They are looking for specifics. Saying you have a robust quality management system scores nothing. Naming the standard, the certificate number, the last audit date, the person responsible and what happened the last time something went wrong scores well.
They are looking for evidence you have done this before, at this scale, for a comparable organisation. Two or three concrete examples with named contracts, values, dates and outcomes beat any amount of general capability description.
They are looking for social value, which is usually a separately scored section worth 10 to 20 percent of the total. Local employment, apprenticeships, training, carbon reduction, community work. It is routinely under answered, which makes it the cheapest marks on the table.
They are looking for compliance with the format. Word limits, file naming, mandatory templates, signed declarations. Breaching these can make an otherwise strong bid non compliant.
Should you bid at all?
Not every invitation is worth accepting, and declining costs you nothing. Buyers do not hold it against a supplier who does not respond, and there is no blacklist.
Bid if you can meet every pass or fail requirement, you can evidence the scored answers truthfully, you could deliver the contract if you won it, and the expected value justifies the effort.
Do not bid if you fail a mandatory requirement, if winning would stretch you past what you can actually deliver, or if the margin does not survive the cost of bidding. Public sector performance problems follow you into future procurements where past performance is assessed, so winning work you cannot deliver is worse than losing it.
If you are unsure, the fastest way to find out is to check the mandatory requirements first. That is usually a fifteen minute job and it settles most of the question.
What being invited says about you
Buyers do not invite suppliers at random. If this is a selective process, someone has already assessed you as capable of delivering, which is a stronger position than most first time bidders realise.
The gap between being capable and winning is usually not capability. It is the ability to evidence capability in the format and vocabulary the evaluation demands, against criteria you did not write and within word limits that force you to choose what to leave out.
That is a learnable skill and a reusable asset. Almost everything produced for this bid, the policies, the case studies, the standard answers on quality and safety and social value, will be reusable on the next one. The first submission is the expensive one; the fifth is not.
Frequently asked questions
What does invitation to tender mean?
It means a buyer is asking you for a full priced proposal against a published specification, which they will score against published criteria alongside other bidders. It is the stage at which the contract is actually awarded, as distinct from a selection questionnaire, which is the earlier stage deciding who gets invited.
We have never bid for a contract before. Can we still win?
Yes. Evaluators score the submission in front of them against published criteria, not your bidding history. What tends to separate first time bidders from experienced ones is not capability but evidencing it in the required format and within word limits, which is a learnable skill.
Do we have to respond to an invitation to tender?
No. Declining carries no penalty and buyers do not hold it against you in future procurements. If you cannot meet a mandatory requirement or could not deliver the contract, declining is the right answer.
What is the difference between an ITT and a PQQ?
A PQQ or selection questionnaire is the first filter: largely factual questions about turnover, insurance, accreditations and past contracts, used to decide who is invited to bid. An ITT is the bidding stage itself, where scored quality responses and price decide who wins.
How long do we usually get?
Commonly three to six weeks for an open tender, though it varies and late invitations with ten days or fewer are not unusual. The clarification question deadline is earlier than the submission deadline and is often the real constraint.
What is the most common mistake first time bidders make?
Leaving the portal until the end. Registration and verification take longer than people expect and portals slow down as everyone submits at once. The second most common is answering the question they wish had been asked rather than the one that was.
Do we need a bid writer for our first tender?
Not necessarily. If the scored question set is small and you hold current policies, accreditations and relevant case studies, many businesses manage the first one themselves. Support is worth most where the question set is large, the evidence base does not yet exist, or the deadline is close.
What if we win but cannot deliver?
Do not put yourself in that position. Public sector contracts carry performance monitoring, and problems follow you into future procurements where past performance is assessed. If capacity is the concern, bid for a smaller lot, or bid as part of a consortium with a delivery partner.
Send us the invitation and we will tell you if it is worth bidding
Bring the deadline, the documents or the portal reference, and what you already hold by way of policies and accreditations. We will tell you honestly whether this one is winnable before you commit any resource. Call 020 3668 5488.