Strategy as foundation: If a competitor can say it too, it is not a discriminator

In a previous blog we covered the 2 inputs which define the battleground a tender is fought on: customer issues and hot buttons, and the competitive landscape. This post covers the 2 which decide whether the response converts understanding into a high score. Discriminators and strategic priorities are the raw material of win themes, the backbone a winning response keeps returning to.

My controversial take: both are exercises in subtraction. Most bids improve by claiming less.

Owning a capability does not make it a discriminator

A discriminator is the reason a buyer selects one supplier over the alternatives. The bar is higher than it first appears. The test is unforgiving. A discriminator has to connect to a problem the buyer actually has, deliver a benefit the evaluator can recognise and value, create separation competitors cannot credibly match and stand up to proof. A claim failing any one of the 4 is not differentiation.

Competitive separation is the condition that removes most candidates. A discriminator exists only where the organisation’s capability intersects with something the buyer needs and the competitive field cannot match. What separated the offer on the last tender may be parity on this one, because a competitor has acquired the capability or the buyer has stopped caring about it.

Table stakes are the most common false positive

Accreditations, familiar methodologies, a capable team, a history of similar work and a compliant staffing model are the entry price. They are necessary to be competitive and compliant, they create no evidence for preference.

The pattern is easy to recognise once it is named. If a claim could be lifted from the response and dropped into a competitor’s document without a word of editing, it is not a discriminator. It may still belong in the response as supporting content. It should not carry the argument.

Where a claim is differentiated and cannot be proven, the safest treatment is removal. Unsupported claims raise the evaluation panel’s scrutiny of everything around them.

Proof is the mechanism, not the appendix

Differentiation without evidence reads as risk to an evaluation panel.

Strong proof is specific, measurable, comparable in scale and complexity to what the buyer is purchasing and verifiable through data, references or documented performance. It sits immediately beside the claim it supports. Panels working through a large response under time pressure do not go looking for validation so it needs to be easy to find.

“Extensive experience in similar environments” carries no evaluative weight. A statement that the same approach “reduced transition time by 20% across 3 named comparable contracts” proves the claim, the scale and the credibility in a single sentence.

Weak proof is not neutral. It lowers confidence, because a panel which cannot verify a strong claim starts to discount the claims it has already accepted.

Strategic priorities decide where the bid does not compete

The final input asks for a trade-off. Not everything can be emphasised.

Word, character and page limits and evaluator attention are all finite. Every paragraph spent on an issue which will not raise your score is taken from one that would. Prioritisation decides the split on 3 tests: impact on evaluation scoring, impact on the buyer’s business or mission outcomes and the advantage or vulnerability sitting in the competitive field. Inputs scoring low on all 3 tests should not shape your response.

The output across the 3 tests includes a decision most teams never make explicitly, when to No Bid. Naming the areas where the offer is at parity, and treating them as compliance rather than competitive value, make the emphasis on differentiation easier.

Bids which try to be strongest on every criterion but miss the 3 tests often read as undifferentiated on all of them.

Strategy is owned, approved and locked

Strategy set by consensus during the writing period is not strategy. It is negotiation, and it often produces responses with competing arguments.

The strategy discipline is sequential. Strategic inputs are validated and prioritised, one accountable person approves them, disagreements are resolved before drafting starts and the approved direction then governs every content decision through to lodgement. Reviews test the response against the approved strategic direction not individual preference.

The part which does not appear in the response

None of this work is submitted. Evaluation panels never see the issue analysis, the competitive assessment, the discriminator tests or the priority decisions.

They see the result. Relevance in the answers, evidence beside the claims, risk addressed before it is raised and win themes consistent enough for the panel to repeat in its own recommendation. This is the value of investing time in building a solid strategic foundation. The hours invested before the writing are worth more than the hours spent on the draft.

Therisano advises Australian organisations on bid and grant strategy, from opportunity assessment through to submission. Some of that work runs across a whole pursuit, some of it is evaluation on competitive positioning about whether the bid is worth the effort.