Response Approach: guided setup

Response Approach is a guided way to work through a tender response. Instead of jumping straight into questions, it walks you through capturing your approach, pressure-testing it against the tender, drafting answers, running quality checks, and reviewing the finished response — in that order.

The aim is to get your team's thinking locked in before any answer is written, so drafts build on a shared, stable brief rather than being figured out question by question.

The steps

• Approach: capture your kickoff direction — your angle on the tender, key decisions, and anything still unknown. You can paste in meeting notes or a call transcript and have them fill in blank answers automatically.
• Gap Analysis: a one-time check of your Approach against the tender's own scoring criteria and signals, surfacing anything that looks thin or missing before drafting starts. Meeting notes can be pasted here too, and there is a catch-all notes field for anything that does not fit elsewhere.
• Draft answers: questions are drafted one at a time, in order, so later answers can build on what has already been written rather than being generated in isolation.
• QA review: quality checks run across the drafted response, with issues appearing and clearing as they are worked through. See Tender Intelligence QA for how findings are grouped and fixed.
• Preview: once drafting and QA are done, you land on a clean read-through of the finished response. See Project Preview.

Why Approach and Gap Analysis lock

Once drafting begins, the Approach and Gap Analysis steps lock and become read-only. This is deliberate: the brief that shaped your drafts needs to stay stable, so later changes to strategy can't quietly drift out of sync with answers that have already been written.

• You can still review your Approach and Gap Analysis content at any time from Tender Settings.
• If your strategy genuinely needs to change partway through, make the change through your team and update the affected answers directly rather than editing the locked brief.

Skipping the guided setup

• If you would rather work the way you always have, use Skip guided setup to bypass Approach and Gap Analysis and go straight to drafting.
• Skipping does not disable any other feature — bulk answer generation, Eva, and Tender Intelligence QA all work the same way afterwards.