The Australian Government buys most of its ICT contractors through the Digital Marketplace. Agencies publish a Request for Quote, approved sellers respond with candidates, and a panel evaluates. It is a fair system and a transparent one. It is also a firehose. On a busy week dozens of RFQs land, each with a different set of selection criteria, a different clearance requirement, a one-page pitch limit of exactly five thousand characters, a list of additional questions with three-hundred-character answers, and a closing date that is sometimes four days away.
When we started responding, we did what everyone does: read each request, decide whether it is for us, and start drafting. Within a few months it was clear that the quality of a response had almost nothing to do with how hard we worked on it and almost everything to do with whether we followed a consistent method. So we wrote the method down. This post is about that method. We will not describe the tools we use to run it; those are ours. The method, though, is worth sharing, because it is the part that makes the difference and it is the part most sellers skip.
Read the whole document before deciding anything
The first discipline is boring and decisive: read every RFQ in full, including the questions-and-answers page, before forming a view. The criteria tell you what will be scored. The additional requirements tell you what the buyer actually cares about. The Q&A tells you what the document really means, and it frequently changes the answer. A request that says a clearance must be "able to be obtained" is often clarified, three questions down, to "must be held at submission". Deciding to pursue a role on the header alone is how sellers waste a week.
Decide whether it is for you, honestly, and early
Not every role is ours. We decline work where we cannot meet the clearance or citizenship requirement, where the location or on-site requirement rules out the people we know, or where the role is outside what we can assess with confidence. An honest no on day one costs nothing. A weak submission costs a candidate's time, a partner's goodwill and, eventually, the buyer's trust.
Tell everyone the competitive position before they do any work
If an agency accepts one candidate per seller, every person we ask for a CV needs to know that, up front, because they may be competing for a single slot. We learned this the hard way from a partner who was rightly annoyed to discover, after their candidate had written a pitch and chased referees, that the role had always been a one-slot contest. Now every release we send states the client's limit and whether a competitive selection applies, and we ask for the CV only until we have given an honest read on whether the candidate is in the race.
Treat a named clearance as mandatory
Our default is that any clearance level named in an RFQ must already be held, unless the buyer has said in writing that it need not be. We are stricter than the document because the document is often softer than the buyer. An uncleared candidate who wins a role and then waits months for a clearance is a bad outcome for the agency, the candidate and us. We would rather miss a role.
The pitch is the candidate's, and it has to be evidence
Evaluators score criterion by criterion. A pitch that reads as a position description, however senior the person, loses to one that names a project, says what the candidate personally did at the level the criterion describes, and gives a result with a number. We do not write pitches for candidates. We do give blunt feedback, criterion by criterion, and we send it back until it is evidence. That conversation is the most valuable thing we do in a response.
Verify everything you submit
Citizenship, clearance and its reference, qualifications, referees: we check them against source documents before anything goes to a buyer. A submission is a representation to the Commonwealth, and we treat it that way.
Count the way the portal counts
Five thousand characters means five thousand including spaces and line breaks; three hundred means three hundred. We lost a submission once to a pitch that was twelve characters over. Every field is now counted before lodgement, and nothing goes in that does not fit.
Lodge early and keep the paper
We aim to lodge a day before the close, not an hour. We keep the buyer's confirmation, the exact text lodged and the versions of every attachment, so that a question months later about what was submitted can be answered in minutes.
Why this matters beyond us
Every seller on the panel faces the same firehose, and most cope by responding to fewer requests, or by responding badly. A method like this is how a small, honest seller competes with the volume shops without becoming one. If you are an agency reading this: the reason our submissions arrive complete, compliant and on time is not that we have a large bid team. It is that we decided what good looks like, wrote it down, and refuse to lodge anything that falls short of it.