The buyer publishes the scoring grid. Write accordingly
The tender rules give you the weighting of each criterion. It is the most actionable information in the pack, and often the only one nobody rereads before writing starts.
Writing at constant effort means allocating it badly
Writing follows the table of contents. You start at section 1, you work through, and you finish with whatever time is left before the deadline. Effort therefore gets allocated by document order and by fatigue.
The scoring grid, on the other hand, is rarely uniform. One section can be worth several times another, and the section that takes longest to write can be the one that scores least. The consequence is arithmetic: the best of the work lands where the buyer looks least.
Read the weighting before opening the template
The tender rules, or the contract notice, carry the split between price and technical merit, then the breakdown within technical merit. Extract that first, before you even allocate contributors.
- Map each section's weight against the imposed response outline.
- Find the heavy sections where your current answer is the most generic.
- Find the inverse: the light sections you over-invest in out of habit.
- Send your experts' time, which is the scarce resource, toward the former.
What the weighting changes about who writes what
The operational question is not who knows the subject. It is where an expert's judgement earns points.
On a light, heavily standardised section, an answer pulled from your knowledge base and reviewed quickly will do. On a heavy section it is the reverse: human judgement is irreplaceable there, and that is where it should be concentrated. Plenty of teams do the opposite, because the standardised sections are easier to clear and give the feeling of making progress.
In AIRFP, the weighting is captured alongside the rest of the framing, and production organises around it rather than around section order.
The oral defence
When the process includes an oral defence, it carries its own share of the points, separate from the written proposal. It deserves its own framing and its own schedule. Treating it as a run-through of the bid's slides the night before means playing part of the scoring grid without having prepared for it.
The scoring grid is published. Allocating effort against it rather than against the table of contents is still the cheapest high-return decision in the whole response.