The same claim appeared in every competing submission
A bid and capture team was preparing a submission for a chemicals sector program. The firm’s case rested on understanding how specifiers choose, meaning the people who decide which materials get used, and the procurement leads who buy them. Every other bidder was making the same claim, and an evaluator reading them side by side had no way of telling which one was true.
The claim was probably accurate. It was still worth only what it could show, and there was nothing underneath it but the firm’s own account of itself. Published material describes the sector rather than how this segment decides. The one source that could settle it was the buyers themselves, and nobody had asked them in a form the bid could quote.
We surveyed the buyers the bid was written about
We ran an opinion survey across a screened panel of specifiers and procurement leads working in the segment the bid was aimed at. The questions were written around the claim the submission had to support, so each one earned its place in the document rather than filling out a general picture of the market.
The survey was sized to be quoted rather than to indicate a direction, because a number an evaluator can weigh has to rest on enough responses to be worth weighing. We also described the panel in the submission itself: who was screened in, what they do, and which part of the segment they sit in. That let an evaluator see what the findings rest on instead of taking the figure on trust.
The submission carried findings where competitors carried a claim
The bid set out how specifiers in that segment actually choose, attributed to the panel that answered, in a section every competitor had filled with an assertion. The evaluator could check the basis of the statement rather than decide whether to believe it.
The firm then changed how it runs bids. Gathering evidence moved into capture, the stage where the team decides what the response will be able to prove, instead of being considered once drafting had already started. The findings themselves outlived the bid and were used again in later positioning work.
