Reading a buyer's scoring grid, at scale

Every published tender already says what the buyer intends to score and how heavily. It says it in the award criteria, usually in an annex nobody opens twice. We pulled that text out of the documents themselves: 44,163 award criteria across 11,831 tenders, an average of 3.7 per tender, alongside 35,287 selection criteria in another 9,819.

Read at that scale, the grid stops being boilerplate and starts being a market-wide statement of preference.

Price is the most common criterion, and it is heavy

Price is scored more often than anything else, appearing 11,439 times. Where the weight is published, its median is 40% of the total score. In 46.2% of the tenders that price anything, price alone carries half the grid or more.

Quality is nearly as common, appearing 11,221 times, but it is worth less when it appears: a median weight of 20%. The distance between how often a criterion shows up and how much it moves the score is the useful part.

What the rest of the grid is worth

Service levels are scored in 3,613 criteria at a median weight of 10%. Timing and planning, 2,173 criteria, also 10%. Sustainability, which absorbs a disproportionate share of proposal-writing effort, appears 489 times at 10%. References and experience are rarer than the folklore suggests, 949 criteria, though they carry a median 25% where they do appear.

The criterion a buyer scores most often and the criterion that decides the award are not usually the same criterion.

In the 4,274 tenders where both price and a quality-family criterion carry published weights, quality outweighs price 51.3% of the time. A coin flip, decided per tender, in a document you can read before you decide whether to bid.

1. How much of the grid is price, before you argue about the price.
2. Which criteria carry weight but appear rarely, because those are where a specific answer is worth writing.
3. Whether the selection criteria filter you out before the award criteria are ever applied.

None of this requires guessing at the buyer's habits. It requires reading the annex that everyone downloads and nobody finishes.