Tender Writing Tips

For businesses aiming to secure work with the Australian Department of Defence, understanding the Commonwealth Procurement Rules (CPRs) is essential. These rules form the foundation of all government purchasing activity and govern how Commonwealth entities—such as Defence—procure goods and services.

For tenderers, familiarity with the CPRs can mean the difference between a compliant, competitive bid and a disqualified submission.

Tendering for new business can be both an opportunity and a risk for companies. Winning business through this channel requires a proactive and considered approach. It is not usually the case that organisations will successfully tender for business without good preparation and planning.

Bidsmith works with businesses across industries that want to grow by winning more work through tenders. For many organisations, tendering presents both opportunity and challenge. On one hand, tendering opens doors to new clients and long-term contracts. On the other, the process is often resource-intensive, requiring specialist skills, time, and experience that smaller teams may not have in-house.

When it comes to tender writing, success often depends on your ability to stand out among a sea of similar bids.

Standing out starts long before you begin writing your tender – it starts with understanding your competition. Competitive Intelligence (CI) in tender writing isn’t about corporate espionage – it’s about collecting, analysing, and using publicly available information to understand your competitors better, and to craft a superior bid.

Competitive tendering offers huge growth opportunities for public sector-focused businesses, but success requires more than diligent compliance checking, robust workflows and tick-box writing.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of team coordination, compliance standards and submission formatting that’s covered in traditional tendering advice, many other topics can impact the quality of your tender writing and tender preparation efforts.