Bronze, Silver & Gold: The Tendering Review Framework That Gets You on the Podium
Are bronze, silver and gold review milestones named after their namesake of Olympic medals, reflecting bid teams’ competitiveness to win, or are these simply named after the metals and their value?
Each review milestone has its own unique inherent value as part of a simple tender review framework. Their effectiveness often comes down to timing, application and expectations.
Bronze is the first pass where you check compliance and structure.
Silver is where the solution is developed enough to be read properly.
Gold is the near-final pass where you sharpen the story and make the benefits obvious.
A lot of tender teams fall into a trap of treating the bronze, silver and gold review framework as a fixed schedule, using these same checkpoints scheduled at the same timings throughout the tender process, no matter what the tender looks like. Bronze is often scheduled so early, before any exploration and solutioning is done, silver gets rushed when it is a key turning point to lock in solution and direction to avoid vast changes later in the tender, and then gold becomes an ineffective panic. The framework is genuinely useful when it is used properly, giving teams a shared structure and language for review checkpoints. Each milestone offers the opportunity to separate structure from solution, features from benefits and drafting content from persuasive writing. But it only works when you appropriately match it to the tender timeframe you actually have.
Bronze is structure first
In most bids, you do not have a solution at bronze. In a longer tender, say 16 to 18 weeks, I would not expect a bronze review earlier than week seven or eight. That is usually the point where enough solution development has happened that it is realistic to put pen to paper.
If you push bronze earlier, you are asking technical SMEs to rush optioneering and document a solution they do not have yet, and that is how you end up with frustration and filler.
So, what should bronze look like on a long bid? Low expectation of technical solution and high expectation of structure.
At bronze, I want to see a compliant skeleton and a clear structure for how the information will be presented. You might have a little messaging, a little strategy and a few anchors, but the main win is that the document is blueprinted, and the team can see how it will hold together.
Silver is where the solution becomes readable
In a longer bid, silver is about eight weeks out from submission. That gap between bronze and silver crucially matters because it is where the solution gets built properly. It is where SMEs develop the detail and where bid managers and writers start turning technical thinking into a narrative that makes sense to a customer.
By silver, you are aiming for around 70% persuasively curated content and a clear direction for any remainder missing. You should be able to communicate the solution in a way that is feature-heavy, covering what you will deliver, how you will deliver it and what it looks like in practice.
Gold is where benefit shows up
Gold is the opportunity to critically review, add value and ensure content is highly compelling and appealing to your client.. In a longer tender, gold might be two to four weeks after silver. You are aiming for 95% complete, with structure locked, questions answered properly, graphics mostly in and the solution refined.
The real shift at gold is benefit. At bronze, you are seeking an understanding of what the client wants and building a structure to communicate it. At silver, you are communicating the features of your solution. At gold, you are honing in on the benefits of each element of that solution for the client.
The nine week tender still fits the framework
You can run bronze, silver, gold in a nine week tender. You just have to be honest about what bronze can realistically contain. You most likely won’t have a fully formed solution at bronze, so lower expectations on depth of solution and keep expectations high on compliance, structure and direction.
The application is the same, but the compression is different.
Two to six week tenders need a different bronze
This is where I see the framework break,too many submission managers try to force a formal bronze process into a timeframe that cannot support it, and then team frustrations when SMEs cannot meet the bronze deadline with a fully formed bronze level document.
Any drafting and review process has to adapt to the timeframe and the dynamic of the bid. In a two to four week tender, my recommendation is that you do bronze yourself.
Blueprint the document in Word or InDesign and define exactly compliant looks like and what non-compliance looks like. Plan dot points or add questions for what you think should go into each section and build a structure so the team has clear direction.
But don’t expectto receive a fully documented bronze response from a team that is still trying to work out what the solution and benefits are. You can still have silver and gold (and you should), with high expectations at silver and even higher expectations at gold.
The question to ask before you schedule reviews
Are you using bronze, silver, gold as a flexible framework that matches the reality of your bid, or are you using it as a rigid schedule that makes everyone already feel like they are failing before reaching bronze
The goal is to build a submission that is compliant, coherent and genuinely persuasive. Adapt the review process to the time you actually have, and you might just earn that gold winning medal.
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[00:00:43] Speaker 3: I have a theory that a lot of us fell into tendering because we were never going to make it in competitive sport. And actually we all want to win a medal. And so instead, we go out and win projects. And that's why instead of calling our drafting and review process, stage one, stage two, and stage three, we've gone and called it bronze, silver, and gold.
[00:01:07] It's the Olympiad of review processes. But I often reflect on whether it is used well, whether we're really deserving of those medals that we get as we go along the process. So I want to reflect on the bronze, silver, gold drafting and review process in three different timeframes. The first timeframe would be in a 16 to 18 week bid.
[00:01:32] My suggestions on that is that you don't expect a bronze review earlier than week seven or eight. Why? Because the likelihood over a bid over 16 to 32 weeks even is that there's not going to be enough solution development yet to put pen to paper. That expecting your technical subject matter experts to actually write down their solution is unrealistic [00:02:00] because they don't have one yet.
[00:02:02] So my recommendation always on bids longer than 16 weeks is week seven to nine. That's when you have a bronze and you expect 30% maximum of the content of the bid. But what you expect to be there, almost in full, is a structure around how you might present the information. Some people call it a storyboard.
[00:02:28] I don't think there's much story at bronze yet, but I do think there's a, a structure that you can put in place for compliance. So on those big bids, week seven to nine, think about that as your bronze. It's low expectation of technical solution, high expectation of structure, and maybe a little bit of messaging or a little bit of where the strategy fits in, but not much more.
[00:02:52] Then when you step into Silver Review, you're looking at about eight weeks out from submission, which means that you're giving people the time between that 30% bronze and that 70% silver to fully develop that solution to work with their tender writers if they have them. Bid coordinators, bid managers, submission managers, um, to actually craft the narrative around the solution.
[00:03:16] And as the solution evolves, the communication of that solution also evolves. So by the time you get to Silver, 70% in a long bid, you really should be able to achieve a lot of narrative about the solution that is feature heavy. So it will tell you a lot about what you as the proponent is going to deliver for the customer.
[00:03:41] Then let's turn to gold. Gold would be. Two to four weeks after silver in that sort of longer tender timeframe, and what are our expectations of gold? Then? We're talking 95% done. So it's structured. All the questions are answered properly. [00:04:00] The graphics are in there in sort of 96% style. You know exactly what your solution is, and you've refined it and communicated better from silver to gold.
[00:04:13] But what really needs to come out at that gold review is benefit. At bronze, you're seeking an understanding of what the client wants. You're trying to get that understanding down on paper. You are trying to structure it in a way that you can communicate your solution. At Silver, you are 70% of the way they're on solution, and you are communicating features of it by gold.
[00:04:41] You are presenting the solution in a visual, creative form. You're communicating it more succinctly. But what's most important is that at gold, you are honed in on the benefit of each and every element of your solution to the client. Let's look at a shorter timeframe. Let's look at a nine week timeframe.
[00:05:03] You can still go through each of the bronze, silver, and gold processes in a nine week timeframe quite comfortably. Again, think to yourself, will we have a solution at bronze? Probably not. You can see the recurring theme here. Lower your expectations of how in depth a solution you're going to get at bronze.
[00:05:22] And instead, focus on high expectations on compliance and structure at bronze. But give them four weeks of that nine week period to come up with something to put on paper. And then your period between four weeks and nine weeks. Obviously, you're going to have a shorter silver and a shorter gold process, but the application is the same.
[00:05:44] It's understanding it's well articulated solution with gaps and, and, and question marks, and then it's well presented, creatively communicated, and benefit laid in gold. The issue I have is when you come to the two to [00:06:00] four week and even six week tenders, and I think too many submission managers expect to have a bronze process, my answer to those submission managers is you're not being flexible enough.
[00:06:11] Any drafting and review process needs to adapt to the timeframe and needs to adapt to the dynamic of a bid. So my recommendations for those 2, 4, 6 week bids is you do bronze as a submission manager, you give yourself a bronze drafting and review process. You make sure that you've blueprinted the documents in word or InDesign.
[00:06:36] You make sure that you understand what compliant looks like and what non-compliant looks like, and you are studying to communicate that to your subject matter experts. You put down dot points of what you think should go into the document. But don't expect that those people working on the solution are going to be able to in a two to four week period to give you a documented bronze.
[00:07:01] But you can create that documented bronze, you can fulfil that process. You can be proactive and be the one that does that and put the onus on yourself. Then high expectations at silver, higher, higher expectations at gold. And I think actually then you'll be less frustrated as well because I think the, the bronze, silver, gold drafting and review process is most frustrating when people ignore the bronze 'cause they don't have time to look at it.
[00:07:27] So again, just to reiterate, my tips on the longer ones are push bronze further out to allow people to actually develop the solution so they have something to say. And honestly, my recommendation on the shorter ones is to do bronze yourself. And it sits there and you feel comfortable that the document is being developed.
[00:07:47] But don't make it a formal part of the drafting and review process. So I hope this chat helps you reflect a little bit about your application of the bronze, silver, gold drafting and review [00:08:00] process and the fact that it needs to adapt to its context, but also the fact that you might need to be just that little bit more proactive within it.
[00:08:09] And when it comes to the metals and the metal tally, there's no doubt in my mind that if you put the right drafting and review process together, you might end up on the podium.
