In the science track of the French baccalaureate, maths carries a weight of 8 and English a weight of 2. You can fail English and still pass with distinction if you ace maths. No one would revise English first in that setup. And yet, on a tender, that is exactly what most bidders do.
A tender’s scoring grid is the table of weights. It tells you where points are won and where they are lost. And most teams never read it before diving into the writing. They respond on instinct, spreading their effort blind, across sections that sometimes carry almost no weight.
The price reflex, and why it is a trap
The most common reflex comes from the private sector: you rush to scope the technical work to price it, then optimise the price. That makes sense when the contract is won on the lowest bid. It becomes a misreading when the technical proposal weighs far more than the financial offer.
That is precisely the case at many major donors, whose consultancy contracts use strongly technical weightings. When the technical dominates the grid, optimising the price to the last decimal moves almost nothing, while the section that actually decides stays under-served.
A counter-intuitive but real consequence: with a low price weighting, you can be notably more expensive than a competitor and still win, if your technical proposal is better. Those who ignore this shave their margins for nothing and lose on the ground that mattered.
The request-for-quote trap
There is a subtler variant of the mistake. You skim the notice, mentally file it as “a request for a quote,” and respond accordingly: a price, a schedule, three references. Except the contract was won on technical value, on understanding the need, on method.
Responding on price to a contract won on the technical is an off-topic answer, however polished. The grid was not expecting that. It makes you pay for it in points.
Read the grid, then allocate effort
Reading the weighting is not a formality. It is the strategic act that precedes all writing. Concretely, you look for two things in the terms of reference:
- The technical / financial split. What share of the total score goes to the technical, what share to the price. That is what tells you whether the contract is won on method or on the quote.
- The detail of the technical criteria and their relative weight. Not all technical sections are equal. The one that weighs the most deserves the most writing hours, even if it feels less “interesting” to write.
Once that reading is done, the allocation of effort becomes obvious. You invest where the points are, not where you are most comfortable. It is often uncomfortable. It is also what separates a proposal that scores from one that is merely complete.
Where the tool does the scanning
Spotting the weighting means extracting it from a file that can run to 50 to 200 pages, sometimes buried in an annex. Coco, the AI assistant in ICOpedia, runs that survey automatically: it surfaces the technical/financial split, the detail of the criteria and their weight, and shows you where the points concentrate. You keep the decision and the writing; it stops you from discovering, after writing everything, that you over-invested a low-weight section.
It is the same upstream reflex as for writing a winning technical proposal: read the grid before the pen.
What to take away
Before you write the first line, read the weighting. Like the baccalaureate coefficients, it tells you where the points are. When the technical dominates, optimising the price is a misreading; when the price weighs, it is the reverse. The grid decides, not your intuition.
Allocate your effort to what scores, not to what you enjoy writing. It is rarely the same thing, and it is the whole gap between losing and winning on the same criteria.
Want your tenders’ weighting surfaced before you write, so you know where to put your hours? Try ICOpedia free, seven days, no credit card.
