The document lands in your inbox on a Tuesday morning. Forty-three pages. Twelve attachments. A pricing schedule in someone else’s format, a list of mandatory accreditations, four quality questions with 500-word limits each, and a submission deadline three weeks away.
If you’ve never responded to a formal tender before, your first instinct is probably one of two things: spend the next fortnight writing something generic and hopeful, or quietly close the email and tell yourself it wasn’t the right fit. Both are wrong, for different reasons.
Field service businesses that consistently win commercial and public sector contracts aren’t necessarily the best in their trade. They’re the best at proving it. They understand what buyers are actually looking for, they’ve done the preparation before the opportunity arrived, and they know when a tender is worth entering and when it isn’t.
This guide covers the full picture: from understanding what type of procurement you’re dealing with, to building the document library that makes tendering possible, to what separates a winning submission from one that scores well on price and nowhere else.
Table of Contents
- The types of formal contract opportunity
- Before you enter: the questions worth asking first
- Build your tender library before the opportunity arrives
- How your submission will be scored
- Pricing your tender
- After you submit — and after you lose
- How Fieldmotion supports the process
- FAQs
The types of formal contract opportunity
Not every formal quotation request is the same thing, and treating them as if they are is one of the more common mistakes field service businesses make. The process, the paperwork, and the evaluation criteria differ significantly depending on who’s buying and how much they’re spending.
Public sector open tenders
Councils, housing associations, NHS trusts, schools and universities are funded by public money. That means their procurement is scrutinised. They can’t simply award work to a supplier they already know, and they can’t keep rolling contracts over indefinitely without testing the market. The result is a formal, regulated process that’s transparent by design.
Open tenders are advertised publicly, usually on Contracts Finder for contracts over £25,000, or Find a Tender for higher-value work. Once live, any supplier can register to access the documents and submit a response. Submissions are scored against published criteria, typically a mix of price and quality questions, and the highest-scoring bid wins.
The upside is that there’s no favouritism built into the process. A well-run smaller business can beat a larger competitor on quality scores if they put together a better submission. The downside is that the process is time-consuming, the documentation requirements are significant, and public bodies tend to be strict on pass/fail criteria. If you don’t meet the minimum insurance level or accreditation requirement, your bid is out before it’s even read.
Public sector RFQs
For lower-value contracts, public bodies have more flexibility. Rather than running a full open tender, they can invite a shortlist of suppliers to quote. This is the Request for Quote, or RFQ. The process is less bureaucratic, the documentation lighter, and the weighting often tilts heavily towards price. If you’re already on a council’s approved supplier list, this is typically how smaller reactive maintenance contracts come through.
Framework agreements
Frameworks operate differently to individual tenders and are worth understanding separately. A public body, or a group of them, runs a single procurement exercise to establish a list of approved suppliers across a category of work. Once you’re on the framework, individual contracts are awarded as call-offs without a fresh open tender each time.
Getting onto a framework requires a full application process, but once you’re on it, you’re in the room every time a relevant opportunity comes up. For field service businesses in HVAC, fire and security, electrical or FM, frameworks run by bodies like Crown Commercial Service or local government buying consortia can be a reliable source of ongoing work. They’re harder to get onto initially, but the recurring pipeline makes the effort worthwhile.
Private sector formal quotations
Large commercial clients, FM companies, property management firms, housing developers, multi-site retailers, increasingly run procurement processes that look and feel like public sector tenders even though they’re not subject to the same rules. You might receive a detailed scope document, be asked to complete a supplier questionnaire, and submit against a pricing template they’ve created.
The process is less regulated and the timelines can be tighter, but the evaluation logic is similar. They want to know you can do the work, that you won’t create problems, and that your price represents value. The main difference is that relationships count for more in private sector procurement. Being known to the right person in a property management company can get you into a shortlisted process that wouldn’t appear on any public portal.
If you’re still weighing up whether commercial work is the right direction, our guide to diversifying your revenue streams covers how field service businesses can move from domestic or reactive work into more consistent commercial contracts, including the operational changes that make it viable.
Before you enter: the questions worth asking first
One of the more expensive habits a field service business can develop is treating every tender invitation as something worth pursuing. It isn’t. A formal tender submission takes serious time, typically 20 to 40 hours for a competent response to a mid-sized public sector contract, and that’s time pulled away from billable work and the people who do it.
Before you commit, ask these questions honestly.
Can you meet the pass/fail criteria?
Most public sector tenders include mandatory requirements assessed before quality or price. Common ones for field service businesses include minimum public liability insurance levels (often £5m or £10m), specific accreditations (CHAS, SafeContractor, Gas Safe registration, NICEIC, BAFE), minimum annual turnover thresholds, and evidence of relevant industry certifications.
If you don’t meet these, the submission is dead before the evaluators reach your methodology section. Check the mandatory requirements first, every time, before spending an hour on anything else.
Do you have evidence of comparable work?
Buyers want to see that you’ve done this kind of work before, at similar scale, for similar clients, with measurable outcomes. A council evaluating a reactive maintenance tender wants examples of other council contracts, not an impressive-sounding reference from a large private sector client. Relevance matters more than scale.
If your case study bank doesn’t have examples that genuinely match the contract you’re bidding for, that’s a real gap in your submission. Worth knowing before you invest three weeks writing one.
Has this work already been earmarked for someone?
It happens more than people admit. A consultant who helped a council write the specification has a preferred supplier in mind. The outgoing contractor helped shape the tender document. The specification is written so tightly around one company’s service model that everyone else is essentially making up the numbers for a compliant process.
It’s difficult to know for certain, but there are signals. If the specification reads like it was written by the incumbent, if the accreditation requirements are oddly specific to one certification body, or if the buyer is unusually difficult to reach for clarification questions, pay attention. A bid that was never going to be won is still a bid that cost you 30 hours to write.
Is the contract commercially viable?
This question gets skipped more than it should. A contract that keeps engineers busy for 12 months sounds good until you’ve accounted for the SLA penalties if you miss response times, the admin overhead of monthly reporting requirements, and the rates the buyer is willing to pay.
Public sector clients often have fixed schedules of rates for common job types. If those rates are set below what you need to make the work profitable, winning the contract creates a different kind of problem. Price it properly before you commit to entering, not after.
Do you have the capacity to deliver if you win?
Winning a contract you can’t resource is worse than not winning it. Think about whether you have the engineers, the coverage area, and the systems to manage the contract volume before submitting. Buyers check this during due diligence, and some ask you to address it directly in the quality questions.
Build your tender library before the opportunity arrives
This is the section that most tender guides skip, and it’s where most field service businesses lose before they’ve started.
The businesses that respond well to tender opportunities don’t write their health and safety policy the week before a deadline. They don’t chase an old client for a reference the night before submission. They have a document library that exists, is maintained, and can be deployed quickly when an opportunity lands.
If you’re serious about tendering, this is what that library needs to contain.
Policy documents
Health and safety policy, current, signed by a director, dated within the last 12 months. Environmental policy. Equal opportunities policy. Quality assurance process. These are asked for in almost every public sector tender and in many private sector formal quotations. They don’t need to be long, but they need to exist and to be coherent. A two-page health and safety policy that’s clearly been thought through will do more than a ten-page document that reads like it was copied from a template website.
Insurance certificates
Public liability, employers liability, and professional indemnity where your work requires it. Keep these current and know your coverage levels, as minimum thresholds vary by contract type and buyer.
Accreditations and certifications
CHAS or SafeContractor for general health and safety competency. Trade-specific certifications: Gas Safe registration, NICEIC or NAPIT for electrical, BAFE for fire suppression, F-Gas certification for refrigerants. Engineer-level qualifications: CSCS cards, specific manufacturer training, IPAF or PASMA for working at height.
Know what you hold, keep the certificates accessible, and know the renewal dates. A lapsed certification can kill a submission.
For fire and security contractors specifically, the compliance and recordkeeping requirements have become more demanding since BS 9991:2024 came into force. Our guide to the updated standard covers what’s changed and how it affects the documentation you’ll need to maintain and evidence in tender submissions.
Financial evidence
Most public sector buyers ask for at least two years of filed accounts or an accountant’s letter confirming annual turnover. Larger contracts may ask for three years. Have these ready before you need them.
Case studies
This is the most important element and the one most field service businesses do badly. A case study for a tender is not a testimonial and it’s not a vague description of work done. It needs to answer specific questions: what was the client type and sector, what was the scope and scale of the contract, what was your role, what challenges came up, and what was the measurable outcome.
Build three to five of these from your strongest and most relevant completed contracts. Format them consistently. Update them when you have new evidence: response times achieved, SLA compliance percentages, renewal rates, customer satisfaction scores. The more specific and evidenced they are, the more work they do in a quality submission.
Key personnel CVs
Not full employment histories. Curated documents that show relevant experience, qualifications, and what each person will actually bring to the contract being tendered. An evaluator reading your contract manager’s CV wants to know that person has managed contracts of this type before and holds the relevant qualifications, not that they worked in a different industry fifteen years ago.
An organisational chart
Simple, clear, showing who is responsible for contract management, who engineers report to, and who the client’s point of contact will be. Larger contracts care about this because they want to see accountability built into the structure.
Briefed references
Written references are often worth less than the paper they’re printed on, as any experienced bid writer will tell you. What matters is having contacts at relevant clients who can take a call from a procurement team and speak specifically to your performance on work similar to what you’re bidding for. Brief them before you put their names down. Tell them what the contract is, what the evaluation criteria are, and what aspects of your work you’d like them to be ready to speak to.
The point of all this isn’t bureaucracy. A field service business with this library in order can respond to a tender in the time available. One without it will either submit something rushed and incomplete, or pass on opportunities it could have won.
The job records, compliance certificates, engineer qualifications, SLA performance data and signed job sheets in Fieldmotion are the raw material for most of this. Case studies are built from actual job history. Performance evidence comes from the data the platform already holds. If that data is organised and accessible, the tender library is mostly already there, it just needs to be formatted for the purpose.
How your submission will be scored
Understanding the scoring methodology before you write a word of your response isn’t optional. It determines everything about how you allocate your effort.
Price vs quality weighting
Every scored tender will tell you how price and quality are weighted. A 60/40 split (60% price, 40% quality) is common for maintenance contracts where the work is relatively standardised. A 40/60 split is common where the buyer is more concerned with service quality, methodology and risk management than squeezing the lowest rate.
The implications are real. In a 60% price-weighted tender, your margin for error on the quality questions is smaller. You need competitive pricing and competent quality responses. In a 40% price-weighted tender, a genuinely strong quality submission can compensate for a price that’s not the cheapest in the room.
Never assume it’s all about price. It rarely is, and field service businesses that price to win without reading the weighting regularly discover they’ve won an unprofitable contract or lost one they could have won on quality.
What quality questions actually test
The specific questions vary by contract, but public sector tenders in field service tend to cover the same ground. Health and safety: not just whether you have a policy, but how it operates in practice, who’s responsible, what your incident record looks like. Risk management: how you identify, log and mitigate risks on site, and what your method statements look like for relevant work types. Relevant experience: examples of comparable contracts with evidenced outcomes. Staffing and resource: how you’ll be structured to deliver, what your contingency plans are if an engineer is unavailable, how you manage subcontractors if you use them. Sustainability is increasingly common, particularly in public sector contracts, with questions around fleet emissions, supply chain sourcing and social value commitments.
Answer the question that’s being asked
This sounds obvious. It isn’t. The most common reason field service businesses lose marks on quality questions is providing a general answer about their company when the question asked for something specific about how they’d approach this contract.
If the question asks how you’ll manage SLA compliance for reactive callouts, the evaluator wants to see your actual process: how jobs are logged, how response times are tracked, what happens when you’re at risk of breaching a deadline, and how you report performance to the client. Three paragraphs about your company history and a list of accreditations won’t score.
Word limits are not suggestions
Public sector tenders almost always impose word or page limits on quality responses. Going over is frequently an automatic disqualification. Going significantly under suggests you haven’t engaged seriously with the question. Use the available space well, not to pad, but to fill it with substance.
Write for a procurement officer, not an engineer
The person scoring your submission almost certainly isn’t a specialist in your trade. They’re a procurement professional working from an evaluation matrix. Avoid trade jargon where plain language will do, explain your methodology in terms a non-specialist can follow, and make it easy for them to find the evidence they’re looking for. A flowchart showing your response process for reactive callouts does more work than three paragraphs describing the same thing in text.
Pricing your tender
The instinct to price low to win is understandable and almost always a mistake.
Schedules of rates
Many public sector contracts, particularly those with housing associations and councils, operate on fixed schedules of rates for common job types. Rather than asking you to quote freely, they provide a rate card and ask you to confirm you’ll work to it, or to quote against specific line items within it.
The practical implication for a field service business is that you need to be able to work to client-specific rate structures without it creating an invoicing nightmare. Managing multiple clients with different rate cards in a spreadsheet leads to errors, disputed invoices and delayed payments, which is exactly the kind of friction that costs you a contract renewal even if you delivered the work perfectly. If late payment is already causing problems in your business, this guide covers how to tackle it without damaging client relationships.
Price in the full cost of the contract
SLA penalties are real and they compound. A reactive maintenance contract with a four-hour response requirement sounds manageable until you’ve had three concurrent call-outs on a Friday afternoon and one engineer stuck in traffic. Price your SLA risk honestly.
The admin overhead of formal contract management is also real. Monthly performance reports, portal updates, compliance certificate submission, attendance at contract review meetings: these aren’t billable hours, but they consume time. A contract that looks profitable on the labour and materials calculation can look very different when you’ve accounted for the management overhead. Our markup vs margin guide walks through how to build a pricing model that accounts for all your actual costs, including a free calculator you can use when working up a tender price.
Selling on value, not price
A buyer who has been let down by a cheaper provider, missed SLAs, disputed invoices, paperwork that never materialised, engineers who couldn’t evidence their qualifications on site, will pay more for a supplier who demonstrably won’t create those problems. Your submission is the place to make that case.
The evidence that supports it isn’t generic. It’s your actual SLA compliance data, your actual invoice accuracy rate, your actual renewal rate with existing clients. If you can point to specific, evidenced performance and compare it to what the buyer is likely experiencing with the incumbent, price becomes one factor among several rather than the deciding one.
After you submit — and after you lose
The standstill period
In public sector tendering, there’s a mandatory pause between notification of the winning bidder and formal contract award, typically ten days. This is the standstill period, and it exists to give unsuccessful bidders the opportunity to challenge the decision if they believe the process was flawed. In practice, most businesses don’t use it. But it’s worth knowing the window exists if something in the outcome doesn’t add up.
Get feedback, every time
Public sector buyers are required to provide feedback to unsuccessful bidders on request. Most field service businesses don’t ask for it, which is a significant missed opportunity. Feedback tells you exactly where you lost marks: whether your price was uncompetitive, your quality responses were too generic, your experience evidence didn’t match the requirement, or your accreditations fell short. That information makes the next submission materially better.
Ask for feedback within a few days of notification. Be specific about what you want, not just “why didn’t we win” but “can you share our scores against each quality question and where we fell short relative to the winning submission.” Most procurement teams will provide this.
Get in the room before the tender goes live
The businesses that consistently win tenders don’t just respond to opportunities. They build relationships with buyers before procurement goes live. Public sector organisations are required to publish upcoming opportunities as future notices on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder. Some run market engagement events before a tender is published, where potential suppliers can ask questions and help shape the specification.
Attending these events, responding to pre-market engagement questionnaires, and building a relationship with the estates or procurement team before a contract goes out to tender means you understand what the buyer actually wants, not just what the specification document says they want. Those two things are not always the same.
Local council meetings where contract decisions are approved are public record and often available online. If you can spot a contract coming before it’s formally advertised, you have time to prepare, build the relevant case studies, and address any gaps in your accreditation or documentation before the deadline lands.
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How Fieldmotion supports the process
The connection between job management software and tender success isn’t immediately obvious. It becomes clear when you think about what a tender submission actually requires and where that evidence comes from.
Job records as tender evidence
The quality questions in most field service tenders ask for evidence of performance on comparable contracts: response times, SLA compliance rates, first-time fix rates, customer satisfaction. That evidence lives in your job management system. If your records are clean, timestamped and accessible, producing a performance summary for a tender response is straightforward. If they’re not, you’re writing case studies from memory and hoping your numbers hold up to scrutiny.
SLA compliance during contract delivery
Winning a tender creates a new set of obligations: response time SLAs, planned maintenance schedules, compliance certificate submission windows. Fieldmotion’s job tracking gives you visibility of where you are against each obligation in real time, not at the end of the month when it’s too late to do anything about a breach. That visibility protects your contract and generates the performance data that supports your next renewal or rebid.
Schedules of rates per client
Managing client-specific rate cards through Fieldmotion means the right rates are applied to the right jobs automatically, without manual cross-referencing. Invoices go out accurately first time, payment queries are reduced, and the friction that can damage a contract relationship over time is largely eliminated.
Engineer qualifications and compliance certificates
Tender submissions ask for evidence of engineer qualifications. Contract management requires you to evidence ongoing compliance: Gas Safe registration, NICEIC enrolment, F-Gas certification. Having these held centrally and accessible means you’re not chasing paper when an auditor asks, and you can demonstrate current compliance in a tender without a week of administrative excavation.
Reporting for contract review meetings
Most formal contracts include periodic review meetings where you’re expected to report on performance. Fieldmotion’s reports and dashboards pull the data you need for those conversations, job volumes, response times, completion rates, outstanding work, without hours of spreadsheet preparation.
FAQs
Do I need to be on a framework to win public sector work?
No, but frameworks make it significantly easier to win recurring work without going through a full tender process each time. Open tenders are accessible to any qualifying business. Frameworks are worth pursuing if you want to build a pipeline of public sector work rather than winning individual contracts.
What accreditations do I need before I can tender?
It depends on the contract. As a baseline, CHAS or SafeContractor covers health and safety competency and is required in the majority of public sector maintenance tenders. Beyond that, your trade registrations need to be current: Gas Safe, NICEIC, BAFE, and so on. Check the mandatory requirements in each tender document before assuming your existing accreditations are sufficient. Some contracts specify additional requirements like ISO 9001 or ISO 14001.
How do I find out about tender opportunities before they go live?
Register on Contracts Finder and Find a Tender and set up email alerts for relevant keywords and geographic areas. Also register on your local council’s own procurement portal. There are around 61 separate portals in use across English councils alone, so checking the council website directly is worth doing for your key target authorities. For Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the relevant portals are Public Contracts Scotland, Sell to Wales and eSourcing NI.
What’s the difference between a PQQ and an ITT?
A Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) is used in two-stage tender processes to establish a shortlist of qualified suppliers before the full tender documents are issued. It typically covers financial standing, accreditations, insurance and relevant experience. Only those who pass the PQQ stage receive the Invitation to Tender (ITT), which contains the full scope, pricing schedules and quality questions. Single-stage open tenders skip the PQQ and go straight to ITT.
How long does a typical public sector tender process take?
From the point a tender goes live to contract award, most mid-sized public sector contracts take three to six months. The submission window is typically three to six weeks from publication. After that, evaluation and moderation usually takes four to eight weeks, followed by a standstill period before contract award. Add mobilisation time and you’re often looking at six months from tender publication to starting work.
Is it worth hiring a bid writer?
For larger contracts, yes, particularly if the quality questions are complex and you don’t have someone internally who writes well and understands the evaluation process. Professional bid writers typically charge per project or day rate, and experienced firms have sector-specific knowledge that translates directly into better quality scores. For smaller contracts, the economics don’t usually stack up. The better investment for most field service businesses is building internal capability: understanding the process, maintaining the document library, and developing template responses for the quality areas that come up repeatedly.
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Key Takeaway
The gap between field service businesses that win commercial contracts and those that don’t is rarely about the quality of the work. It’s almost always about the quality of the evidence, the preparation done before the opportunity arrived, and the discipline to only enter the bids worth winning.
A well-maintained tender library, a clear understanding of how submissions are scored, and the job records to back up the claims you make in your quality responses: that’s what makes tendering viable rather than expensive guesswork.
If you’re at the stage where commercial contracts are part of your growth plan, book a free demo with Fieldmotion to see how the platform supports the whole process, from the job records that go into your case studies, to the SLA data that wins contract renewals, to the rate card management that keeps invoicing clean when you’re working to a client’s schedule of rates.
