Everyone says public tenders are about the bid: documents, price, compliance. In reality, most companies lose before they even get to the bid. They lose in monitoring (they don’t see it in time), they lose in triage (they go into tenders that don’t make sense), they lose in documentation (they miss disqualifying requirements), and they lose in product mapping (they can’t prove the requested parameters, even though they have them).That’s why a tender pipeline isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s the difference between “we submit 2–3 bids when we have time” and “we have a constant channel that brings contracts”.A good pipeline isn’t a list of steps. It’s a repeatable process with two characteristics:decisions are fast and standardized, not emotional;invisible work is aggressively reduced (monitoring, reading documents, extracting requirements, mapping products).

Start with the truth nobody tells you: the pipeline is about “Go/No-go”, not about the bid

Companies that are serious about public tenders don’t get good because they write beautiful bids. They get good because they have brutal discipline in saying “No” early. A good “No-go” saves you 1–4 days of work. Ten good “No-go” decisions a month are the difference between a calm team and one working in panic.That means the pipeline must be built in reverse: not from the bid backwards, but from the “Go/No-go” decision forwards. More precisely, you need to reach a solid decision in a maximum of 10–15 minutes, without reading 200 pages.That is the real stake.

Stage 1: Alerting that doesn’t bury you in noise

If your alerts are “CPV 30200000 – IT equipment” and you get dozens a day, you’ve already lost. If you only have 1 alert a week and “nothing good ever shows up”, you’re probably filtering wrong or too strictly.What makes alerting good? Not volume, but relevance. That’s achieved through a combination of signals: CPV + keywords + procedure type + minimum threshold + geography + institutions.But the part most companies miss is this: alerting must be built like a sales feed, not like a search. Meaning it should take you every morning to a small list of opportunities “to analyze” — not to a sea of possibilities.In practice, a lot of time is lost here if you depend only on searches in the tendering platform, because filtering isn’t fine-grained enough and you’ll end up compensating manually. It’s why teams that actually scale end up using a dedicated monitoring platform. In Tendersight’s case, the important part is that you can set advanced filtering and receive clean alerts, and monitoring is free — you never pay for monitoring, no matter how much you track.It’s not a marketing detail. It’s a condition for having a pipeline, because a pipeline can’t depend on manual checking.

Stage 2: Real triage: how you decide if it’s worth it in 10 minutes (without lying to yourself)

Triage isn’t “I take a quick look at the tender”. Triage is a mini-process with a clear output: No-go / Go / Hold. If you don’t have output, you only did reading.The key is not to start the documentation on page 1. In tenders, page 1 is almost always irrelevant. In triage, you look for only four things:

1) “Kill criteria”: the reasons that take you out of the game instantly

This includes: authorizations, mandatory certifications, minimum experience, impossible delivery, impossible warranties, absurd deadlines, contractual conditions that make your risk uncontrollable.This is why many teams lose hours: they discover these requirements after a day, not after 10 minutes. A system that automatically extracts requirements (including disqualifying ones) gives you a massive advantage. For example, Tendersight reads the documentation and pulls out the critical requirements directly, so triage remains triage, not a “meeting with the PDF”.

2) “Eval type”: how you win (price vs best value for money)

If it’s lowest price, ask yourself if you have a clear advantage (cost, supply chain, volume). If it’s best value for money, ask yourself if you have “ammunition” for scoring (extended warranty, service, performance, delivery, training).

3) “Spec risk”: how rigid the specification is

This is the classic trap in IT hardware, office supplies, medical: restrictive specification. Do you have the product? Can you prove parameter X in the datasheet? Can you prove “equivalent” if it’s brand-locked?

4) “Timeline reality”: do you have time to do the bid well?

Not to do it. To do it well. If you have 3 days and you need to find 10 products, request quotes, build evidence, gather documents, write the technical section, calculate the financials — it’s a risk.Tendersight helps here too, with everything. It searches products both in your own stock and in the supplier’s stock, but also on the internet, and automatically collects all offers and documents.

Good triage is one simple question: do we have real chances to submit a compliant and competitive bid without burning out the team?

The artifact you must have: the triage sheet

When triage is done well, you can tell: you have a short, repeatable sheet that anyone in the company can fill in.It looks something like this (I’m writing it as text, not bullets, so you can copy):

Triage Sheet — [Tender ID / title]Object & CPV: ___Value / lots: ___Submission deadline: ___Award criterion: price / best value for moneyKill criteria checked: YES/NO (what?)Obvious contractual risks: ___Clarifications needed? (YES/NO + what?)Requested products: ___Can we prove parameters in the datasheet? YES/NODecision: Go / No-go / HoldDecision reason: ___Bid owner: ___Internal deadline (48h earlier): ___

That is “pipeline” in the real sense. Not a list of stages. An artifact that produces a decision.

Stage 3: Go/No-go. The score that makes you profitable

It’s very tempting to say “Go” out of FOMO, especially when you see a large value. But large tenders are also the ones that consume the most time. If you go into them poorly prepared, you lose a week and get nothing.A simple and realistic method: a score out of 10, but with two “blocker” conditions.

Blocker 1: can you meet the disqualifying requirements?Blocker 2: can you prove the key technical requirements?If the answer is “no” to either, it’s No-go regardless of the score.

You use the score only when you’re eligible:– domain fit (0–2)– price competitiveness (0–2)– technical scoring potential (0–2)– time & resources (0–2)– contract risk (0–2)

Again: this isn’t theory. It’s how you protect your profit, because your team’s time is a cost.

Stage 4: The bid plan that actually matters: products, evidence, and the compliance matrix

Here you’ve hit the exact pain most articles avoid: the bid plan isn’t about “who writes”. It’s about how you rapidly build the technical foundation and evidence, so that everything else becomes execution.Especially in IT hardware, office supplies, and medical, the bid is won or lost on this sentence:“The requirement must be met and proven. Not just stated.”So the bid plan starts with the product, not with Word.

What does that mean in practice?In the first 60–90 minutes after the “Go” decision, you must have three things:the list of proposed products (by lots, by line items)the datasheets prepared and cleaned up for each producta compliance matrix that links requirement → product → evidence

If you don’t have this, you’ll end up writing a technical bid “from your head”, and then you’ll try to find evidence afterwards. This is exactly where chaos happens: people search for files, extract information from PDFs, compare products without being sure what gets scored.This is where the real “hack” comes in: if you have a platform that automatically extracts the requested products from the documentation and maps them to your catalog, together with datasheets, you’ve saved 3–6 hours of work per bid. Tendersight does this automatically in ~1 minute: it reads the documents, identifies products and requirements, and helps you link them directly to products in your catalog with the corresponding technical sheets. It’s not magic. It’s the elimination of the most expensive part of bidding.That’s the difference between “pipeline” and “panic”.

The compliance matrix: the document that saves you from 80% of mistakes

If I could keep only one thing from the entire pipeline, it would be this. Because the matrix forces you to be concrete.A good matrix isn’t a pretty table. It’s a control tool. It needs the columns that actually reduce risk:

Requirement (exactly as in the specs) | Proposed product | Response | Evidence (doc/page) | Notes

The Notes column is the most important, because here you write:– “equivalent, justified through parameter X”– “delivered in Y days, according to X”– “extended warranty included”– “disqualifying requirement confirmed”

If your matrix is complete, you essentially have the technical bid in skeleton form. The rest is writing.And here, again, the difference between manual and automated shows up: if someone has to read 200 pages to extract the requirements into the matrix, you lose hours. If the system extracts the requirements for you and finds the parameters in datasheets, the matrix is built fast and correctly.

Stage 5: The technical bid: you don’t “write”, you “demonstrate”

A good technical bid is not a text. It is a demonstration. And its structure looks more like an audit than like a pitch.If the tender is price-only: the technical bid must be perfectly compliant and simple. If the tender is best value for money: the technical bid must be aligned to the evaluation factors and written to be scored.A typical mistake shows up here: people think “the committee will see anyway that the product is good.” No. The committee sees what you put on the table, in a verifiable format. If the parameters are buried in the datasheet and you didn’t reference them, you lost points.A trick that works especially in hardware and medical: for each critical requirement, you have a confirmation sentence and a quote/reference to the datasheet page. Not “the product meets the requirement”. But “the product meets requirement X; evidence: datasheet, page 3, section Y”.When you have the matrix, this comes naturally.

Stage 6: The financial bid: the part that must be “auditable”

The financial bid isn’t “the final sum”. It’s a construction.In tenders you lose very easily on:– inconsistencies (quantities different from technical)– rounding– missing costs (transport, installation, consumables)– delivery conditions that eat you alive

That’s why the financials must be validated against the matrix, not separately. If you’ve done the product mapping correctly (including equivalent alternatives), the financials are simpler and safer.

Stage 7: Submission: the stupid reason good tenders are lost

There’s no magic here. It’s discipline. Submit 24–48h earlier, check the files, check the signatures, check consistency.I’d say 1 in 10 bids are lost because of something trivial. And it’s a shame.

Stage 8: Follow-up: how you build an advantage that accumulates

Everyone intends to do “lessons learned”. Few actually do it. But if you do, the pipeline improves by itself, because you start to:– optimize your filters (cleaner alerts)– improve triage (faster decisions)– prepare your product catalog (less searching)– build your evidence library (datasheets, certifications, declarations)And at some point you reach a place where the bid stops being “a project” and becomes execution.

If you truly want to get rid of overhead, there are only two places where it matters

Here’s the conclusion the reader should take away:Triage must be fast and based on extracted requirements, not on manual reading.The bid plan must start with product mapping + datasheets, not with writing.If you solve that, the pipeline becomes scalable.That’s why teams that bid constantly end up using systems that:– finely filter alerts;– read documentation and extract requirements;– map products to requirements with technical evidence;– reduce “invisible” time down to minutes.

In Tendersight, this combination is done end-to-end: advanced alerts (free monitoring), reading all documents, requirement extraction, product extraction, and datasheet mapping in ~1 minute.Notice this doesn’t “help you write nicely” — it removes exactly the work that destroys you: searching, comparing, proving.