Your vendor pool can be broad, your notifications can reach every registered vendor in the right category, and your registration process can be simple. You can do all this and still only get one or two responses on a solicitation that should have drawn eight or 10.
Sometimes the problem isn’t who you’re reaching but the information you’re giving them to bid on.
Poorly written specifications and scopes of work are one of the most common and overlooked causes of low bid participation. Vendors won’t spend time on a proposal they’re not confident they can price or win, and they can’t be confident if they can’t clearly understand what is required in the bid.
Fortunately, improving specification quality is one of the easiest ways to garner more participation. And unlike growing your vendor pool, which takes time, a better scope can change your response rate on the very next solicitation.
Sometimes a qualified vendor receives a bid notification and decides not to submit, not because they’re not interested in the work but because something in the solicitation made the bid feel like too much of a risk or too much effort.
There are a few common reasons:
Vendors have difficulty pricing a bid when the description of the work is overly general and can be interpreted in multiple ways. If they bid conservatively with a cushion, they may price themselves out. If they bid aggressively, they risk winning work they can’t deliver at the promised price. In these cases, many will simply decline to bid, rather than take the risk.
Scopes that are specific enough for a vendor to understand exactly what they’re committing to, including deliverables, timelines, performance expectations, and site conditions, help vendors price with confidence.
It’s pretty easy to recognize when specifications are written around the exact capabilities or products of a specific vendor, especially when that vendor is already fulfilling the contract. Highly specific brand references, proprietary technical requirements, or performance criteria that match only one supplier’s offering signal to the market that the award has already been decided before the bids are submitted.
Qualified vendors with equivalent products or approaches likely won’t waste their time on a solicitation they believe is already settled.
Insurance requirements, bonding thresholds, financial documentation, and prequalification criteria that are appropriate for multi-million-dollar infrastructure projects can be prohibitive for smaller service contracts. When the administrative burden of responding exceeds what a vendor can reasonably expect to recover in margin, smaller businesses opt out.
That results in a vendor pool limited to large firms with the infrastructure to absorb compliance costs, even when the work itself would be well within the capabilities of smaller, competitive suppliers.
Vendors need time to prepare a thoughtful, competitive response. If the timeline is too short, they’ll be discouraged from taking the process seriously and may either throw something together quickly or price conservatively to account for any uncertainty they didn’t have time to clear up.
A realistic solicitation window that is long enough for vendors to review the scope, perform any required site visits, resolve questions through Q&A, and prepare a competitive response is a basic participation driver that can be easy to underestimate.
Lengthy or complicated proposal formats, excessive documentation requirements, multiple in-person copies and materials, and high-effort submission processes all reduce the pool of vendors willing and able to submit a bid. If a vendor is evaluating three bid opportunities simultaneously, they’re likely to prioritize the one with the most straightforward or easily accessible submission requirements, all else being equal.
If your submission process is burdensome, complicated, or requires in-person participation, you’re probably losing vendors to other agencies with simpler processes like digital bidding and virtual bid openings. It’s not that your opportunity is less valuable or attractive, but the cost of responding is just too high.
Well-written scopes of work do more than just describe the project requirements. They communicate to your vendors – both potential and active – that your agency is organized, professional, trustworthy, and worth investing time in.
Vendors talk to each other, especially in like networks and smaller regions. Agencies that have a reputation for providing clear, fair, and professionally written solicitations attract more responses over time because the individual RFPs are easier to respond to and because vendors know from experience that working for them is straightforward.
Agencies that are consistently known for vague scopes, incumbent-friendly specifications, or excessive compliance requirements see the opposite: that experienced vendors often opt out before they even download the bid documents.
A clear, well-structured scope should accomplish a few things:
Every vendor responding to your solicitation should be able to arrive at roughly the same understanding of what is being asked, even if their approaches differ. If vendors need to make significantly different assumptions about scope, timeline, or deliverables to prepare a response, the pricing will vary wildly and it will be difficult to compare those responses side by side.
Review insurance, bonding, and pre-qualification requirements against the actual risk and value of the contract. If you’re your requirements exceed what the work demands, you’ll filter out qualified vendors and add compliance costs without adding value. For categories where you want to attract small and diverse-owned businesses, proportionate requirements are a direct correlation to number and quality of responses.
When able, build your solicitation timeline around the time a qualified vendor needs to prepare a competitive response, not the minimum required by your agency’s procedures or the time of required delivery. For complex scopes, that means time to review documents, attend pre-bid meetings or site visits, submit questions and receive answers, and prepare a complete response.
This may mean consistently releasing solicitations earlier than what has been done historically, resetting timeline expectations with departments making requisition requests, or revising your team’s procedures to accommodate the additional time. But it’s a necessary adjustment to get quality responses. Rushing the timeline may save you days on the front end, but it costs weeks on the back end when low bid participation forces a rebid.
Don’t just think of the question-and-answer period as a compliance process. This is an opportunity to clarify any ambiguities that may keep qualified vendors from committing to a response.
Pay attention to what your vendors are asking when they submit questions. If those questions indicate confusion about the scope, uncertainty about requirements, or concerns about site conditions, that’s a signal that your specifications need clarification, not just for the vendor who asked but for every firm evaluating the solicitation. It could also indicate that you need to adjust your specification and scope writing in general for future solicitations.
A well-managed Q&A process should address these questions thoroughly and issue formal addenda when needed to recover participation that would otherwise be lost to vendor uncertainty. It can also help improve the process for future solicitations, speeding up the procurement lifecycle and getting more participation and better competition over time.
Your agency should be reviewing Q&A questions as individual inquiries to be answered as well as diagnostic feedback on the quality of the solicitation. If multiple vendors are asking the same question, the specification didn’t address it clearly enough. If vendors are asking questions that suggest they don’t understand the basic scope, you should rewrite the scope, not just answer the questions.
In a digital procurement system with a connected vendor portal, like the one from PlanetBids, Q&A is centralized and automatic. Questions are submitted by vendors within the portal, summarized and grouped for similarity to limit repeat responses, and logged automatically in the procurement record. Those questions can be routed directly to the necessary team member to be answered, then answers are posted within the portal and sent out to all registered vendors simultaneously.
The entire process is documented and auditable, and vendors have access to every question and answer. Potential bidders are required to acknowledge any addenda as part of the workflow to protect your agency and your vendors, and the access to information levels the playing field and reduces uncertainty in the process.
One of the most underutilized resources for improving specification quality is your own solicitation history.
If your procurement platform maintains a library of prior solicitations and scopes of work – your own and those of other agencies using the same system – you have a practical starting point for every new solicitation in the category. Scopes that produced strong participation and competitive pricing in prior cycles are worth studying, while those that resulted in thin responses or a high Q&A volume are telling you something about how the market received them.
When your agency builds new scopes from templates or utilizing comparable solicitations from other agencies, your starting quality is higher, the drafting time is shorter, and the result is a scope that is already validated by the market.
PlanetBids’ end-to-end digital procurement platform not only helps you create solicitations faster with unlimited templates and quick copy-paste capability. It also allows you or your requesting department to create a rough draft of specifications and scope of work and let Artificial Intelligence edit and finalize professional copy.
Don’t know where to start with a specification? Search PlanetBids’ library of comparable solicitations from other member agencies to find examples you can use to create a clearer, more comprehensive RFP. Want to see how you can create better solicitations without starting from scratch?
Beyond your own history, post-award debriefs with winning and non-winning vendors are a valuable source of feedback on specification quality. What parts of the scope were unclear? What requirements felt disproportionate or unnecessary? What would have made the bid easier to respond to? Vendors who participated have already invested time in the solicitation and are often willing to share direct feedback to directly improve your next one.
It’s easy to treat scope writing and vendor pool management as separate problems. One is about what you’re asking for, and the other is about who you’re asking. But they’re really connected parts of the lifecycle.
An agency pool that has a broad, diverse number of network vendors but experiences consistently low response rates may have a scope problem, not a pool problem. And a vendor pool that has limited registered vendors but still draws strong participation may have a scope quality advantage that is offsetting its depth.
Understanding which variable is driving your participation in each category makes your improvement efforts more precise instead of scattered and reactive.
Analyze your participation data to highlight the problem areas. Q&A volume and non-participation feedback will tell you whether you have a scope problem or a depth problem, so you can address the right issue and move your participation in the right direction.