Your best writer might just be in the bid team

In service businesses that win work through tenders, two teams write about the company. One writes for buyers who are already evaluating and will mark the answer against published criteria. The other writes for everyone else.

The first team knows the product inside out, but none of their work ever sees the light of day.

High-scoring content

A pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) answer has to be specific, because a vague one scores badly. It has to be evidenced, because the evaluator requires it. And it can't waffle, because there's a word limit and you need to communicate precisely.

So the bid team documents the staffing model, the real response times, the named process with its failure modes and what happens when they occur. The kind of detail that would take a marketing team six weeks and three rounds of review to get out of the business, written in a fortnight under deadline.

Then it goes in a folder, might be reused in the following bid, and is never seen by anyone who isn't already deep in a procurement process and against the clock.

Cut the confidential bits and see what survives

The public writing at the same company carries the claims the whole category carries. Trusted partner. Tailored solutions. AI-powered everything. Decades of combined experience. We've written about that elsewhere, so take it as read.

The interesting question is what could replace it, and most of the answer is next door. Not all of it: client details are confidential, pricing is commercial, and a good deal of a bid response can't go anywhere near a website. That's a real constraint.

But the method isn't confidential. The operational numbers usually aren't. The explanation of why you do it this way, and what goes wrong when people do it another way, is almost never restricted, and it's the most persuasive part of the document.

Which makes it the cheapest win available to a marketing team that's short of material. Somebody has already got the detail out of the business, checked it with the people who'd know, and written it under pressure. Adapting that is a fraction of the work of starting from nothing.

The questions are worth as much as the answers

The folder holds a year of market research that's free and waiting for you.

Every PQQ is a list of what buyers in your category actually want to know. Written by the buyers. Ranked by weighting. Marketing teams commission research to find that out, and the bid team gets it several times a year, unprompted, then files it.

If the same three questions keep coming up across different tenders, that's your content plan. If a weighting has moved since last year, that's a shift in what the market cares about, arriving before it turns up in anyone's trend report.

Let the bids guide you

Take one "describe your approach to" answer from a recent bid. Strike out anything client-specific and anything commercial. Read what's left.

In most cases it's a publishable page, sitting in a folder, written by somebody who'd be surprised to hear marketing wanted it.

Then ask the same team for the last year of question sets, and see how much of your content plan writes itself.