What Evaluators Are Really Thinking (Confessions From the Other Side of the Table)

Here’s a thought that should change how you write every bid: the person scoring your masterpiece is tired, busy, and reading their fourteenth submission of the week.

They are not a hostile gatekeeper. They’re usually a public servant who’s been pulled off their day job to sit on an evaluation panel, working through a scoring matrix, trying to be fair, consistent, and defensible, because the losing bidders might challenge the decision.

Most bid advice is written from the bidder’s side of the table. This one flips the chair around. If you understand what’s actually going through an evaluator’s head, you stop writing to impress yourself and start writing to score.

1. “I can only mark what’s in the box”

Evaluators score what you wrote, not what you meant, not what you do brilliantly in real life, and not what’s buried in an attachment they aren’t allowed to open. Many ITTs explicitly state that evaluators won’t assume prior knowledge and won’t consider cross-references or “see our website.”

If the evidence isn’t in the answer, it effectively doesn’t exist. The most common reason good companies lose is that the truth was in their heads, not on the page.

Write as if the evaluator has never heard of you…because for scoring purposes, they haven’t.

2. “Where’s the answer to the question I actually asked?”

Panels work to a scoring guide that maps marks to specific criteria. When your answer wanders, they’re mentally hunting for the bit that matches the criterion in front of them. Make them hunt, and you lose marks you earned, not because the content wasn’t there, but because they couldn’t find it before moving on.

The fix is unglamorous: mirror the question’s structure, signpost with headings that match the criteria, and lead each section with the answer before the justification.

3. “This is the fifth bid that’s ‘passionate and committed’”

Adjectives are invisible to a scorer. “High quality,” “robust,” “market-leading,” “passionate”; they appear in almost every submission, which means they differentiate nobody. By bid three, the evaluator’s eyes are sliding straight past them.

What earns marks is anything specific and checkable: who does it, how often, how fast, how many, and how you’ll measure it. Numbers survive the read. Adjectives evaporate.

4. “I need to justify this score to someone”

Evaluators don’t just pick a number, they usually have to write a rationale and reach consensus with other panellists at a moderation meeting. A clean, evidence-led answer practically writes their justification for them: “Scored highly because the bidder set out a clear process, named accountable roles, gave specific KPIs, and evidenced it with a comparable contract.”

When you make the evaluator’s job of defending your score easy, you’re quietly recruiting them as your advocate in the room.

5. “I’m looking for reasons to trust you — and reasons not to”

Risk sits in the back of every evaluator’s mind. They’re imagining what happens if they award to you and it goes wrong. So they notice the things that signal control: realistic timescales, named governance, honest acknowledgement of risk and how you’ll manage it.

Counter-intuitively, a bid that admits a risk and explains the mitigation often scores better than one that pretends everything is frictionless. Flawless is suspicious. Controlled is reassuring.

6. “If you can’t follow the instructions, can you follow the contract?”

Word counts, formatting rules, required attachments, the right submission portal — evaluators read compliance failures as a preview of delivery. Blow the limit or miss a mandatory field and the unspoken thought is: “If they cut corners on the bid, what happens on the contract?” Some of these are pass/fail, and no amount of brilliance later rescues them.

How to write for the evaluator (not for yourself)

1.     Open every answer with a direct response to the exact question.

2.     Use headings that echo the criteria so marks are easy to map.

3.     Replace every adjective you can with a number, a name, or a date.

4.     Put the evidence inside the answer — never “see appendix” unless invited.

5.     Name your risks and your mitigations; don’t pretend they don’t exist.

6.     Do a compliance pass last: limits, formats, attachments, portal.

The evaluator empathy test

Before you submit, read your answer once more and ask three questions on the evaluator’s behalf:

•        “Can I find the answer to my exact question in the first two lines?”

•        “Could I justify a high score to a colleague using only what’s written here?”

•        “Is there anything specific and checkable, or is it all warm adjectives?”

If any answer is “no,” you’ve found exactly where you’re leaking marks.

Conclusion: empathy is a scoring strategy

You don’t win public sector bids by being the most impressive supplier. You win by being the easiest supplier to award marks to. Picture the tired evaluator on submission fourteen, write so their job is effortless, and you’ll quietly out-score competitors who are bigger, louder, and convinced their reputation speaks for itself. It doesn’t. The box does.

Written by Rob Ward, Co-Founder of BidVantage. Rob has over 16 years of bid writing experience and has worked on more than 250 bids with an 85%+ win rate. More about our team