There is a section that appears in almost every bid, in some form, under some heading. “Describe your experience.” “Provide details of relevant projects.” “Set out your track record in this field.” Whatever the wording, the question is the same — and so, depressingly often, is the answer. The bidder lists everything they have ever done, in chronological order, in dense paragraphs, with case studies attached for good measure.
This is the section where bids go to become unreadable. It is also the section where most bidders give up the ground they have spent the rest of the document earning. The instinct to list everything is understandable. The damage it does to the bid is less obvious, but it is real. Choosing what to leave out is not just an editorial preference. It is the work that separates a persuasive experience section from one that quietly loses marks.
Why “everything we have ever done” is the wrong answer
The thinking behind a long experience section is straightforward. The evaluator is being asked to assess whether the bidder has the relevant track record. More projects means more evidence. More evidence is better. Therefore, list as much as possible and let the evaluator decide what is relevant.
This is wrong in three ways at once.
First, the evaluator is not auditing the bidder’s complete history. They are scoring against a specific rubric, which asks for relevant experience. Irrelevant experience does not add to the score. It dilutes the relevant experience by surrounding it with material that has to be skimmed past.
Second, listing everything is a signal in itself. It reads as either insecurity — the bidder is unsure which projects matter and so submits all of them — or as carelessness, the bidder has not done the work of curation. Neither impression helps. The bid that picks three or four specifically relevant projects and presents them carefully reads as more credible than the bid that presents fifteen.
Third, long lists obscure the actual answer to the question. The question is “do you have relevant experience?” The answer is “yes, here is the evidence.” A list of fifteen projects, only four of which are directly relevant, makes the answer harder to find than the question that prompted it. Curation is how you make the answer visible.
The discipline of choosing
The hard part of writing a good experience section is deciding what to leave out. That is not a writing problem; it is a judgement problem, and it deserves the time most bidders give to the writing instead.
A useful exercise is to start with the evaluation criteria for the specific bid and use them as a filter. Most procurement specifications list, somewhere, what kind of relevant experience the evaluator wants to see. Similar projects in the same sector. Projects of comparable size. Projects involving specific technologies, methods, or standards. The criteria are the filter. Every project in your experience either passes the filter for this bid or does not.
Most bidders skip this step and let the experience section drift toward a generic list. The result is the same experience section in every bid, regardless of what the bid is actually for. A more disciplined approach produces a different experience section for each bid — and each one is much shorter, much more focused, and much more persuasive than the generic version.
A practical target: three projects in detail, three or four more mentioned in a short summary list. Seven items, two depths. This is enough to demonstrate breadth without sacrificing focus.
What to include for each project
For each of the three projects presented in detail, the goal is not a comprehensive case study. It is a precisely targeted piece of evidence. A good detailed entry covers four things.
The client and the context. One or two sentences. Who the client was, what they needed, why it mattered. Enough that the reader can place the project, not so much that they get distracted.
What you actually did. The specific role your team played. Not “we delivered a transformation programme.” That tells the reader nothing. “We designed the data migration approach, wrote the migration scripts, and supervised three rounds of test loads against the live system” tells them something.
The outcome. A measurable result, where possible. Time saved, cost reduced, error rate dropped, system delivered on schedule. Where no clean metric is available, a clear qualitative outcome — the system went live, the audit passed, the contract was extended — is still better than vague success language.
The link to this bid. One sentence connecting this project to the work being proposed now. This is the single most underused move in experience sections. Most bidders trust the evaluator to make the connection themselves. The evaluator, working through fifteen bids, often does not. Stating the connection explicitly costs you a sentence and earns you the marks.
The supporting list
Behind the three detailed projects, a short list of additional projects can demonstrate breadth without padding the section. Each entry is a single line: client, year, scope, one outcome.
The list works precisely because it is short. Three or four projects, presented as a clean list with consistent formatting, give the evaluator a sense that the detailed projects are part of a wider pattern of relevant work. Eight or ten projects, by contrast, start to look like padding regardless of how good the underlying work was.
The selection rule for the list is the same as for the detailed projects. Each entry should pass the relevance filter for this specific bid. A project that does not pass the filter is not improved by being shorter — it is still a distraction, just a smaller one.
Handling the awkward case
What if you genuinely do not have three highly relevant projects? This is more common than bid writers like to admit, particularly for newer companies, smaller specialists, or bids in sectors the bidder is moving into.
The honest answer is that pretending otherwise does not work. An evaluator can usually tell when a project is being stretched to fit a brief that it does not actually fit. The stretch costs you trust, which is worse than the gap it was meant to cover.
The better approach is to acknowledge the shape of the experience honestly and frame it accurately. “We have not previously delivered a project of exactly this kind, but we have delivered three projects that combine the relevant elements.” Then present those projects with their relevant elements made explicit. A bidder who is candid about the closest match is more credible than one who overclaims.
This is also where the supporting list earns its keep. A pattern of related work — even when no individual project is a perfect match — can be more persuasive than a single project that has been forced to look like one.
References, briefly
Most bids include client references somewhere in the experience section. The temptation is to provide as many as possible, on the principle that more is better. The same disciplines apply: relevance beats volume. Three good references from clients who are willing to speak positively about specifically relevant work are worth more than ten generic references.
It is also worth confirming, in advance, that the named references are willing to be contacted and know what they will be asked about. A reference who responds to a procurement enquiry with surprise or confusion is worse than no reference at all.
The structure that tends to work
Pulled together, the structure of a good experience section is roughly:
- A short framing paragraph, no more than three or four sentences, summarising the bidder’s relevant track record at a high level.
- Three detailed project entries, each following the four-part structure above, each explicitly connected back to the bid in hand.
- A short supporting list of three or four additional related projects, single-line format.
- Two or three named references, with contact details and a one-line note on what they can speak to.
This whole section, written properly, is usually shorter than what most bidders submit. It is also dramatically more persuasive. The shorter version forces the writer to choose what matters, and the act of choosing is what makes the section work.
The short version
The experience section in a bid is where many bidders quietly sabotage themselves by including too much. The evaluator does not need a complete history. They need clear, specific evidence that this bidder, on this brief, has the relevant track record. That evidence is built by curation — three projects in detail, three or four in summary, each explicitly relevant to the bid. Less material, more carefully chosen, is almost always more persuasive than more material with the work of choosing pushed onto the reader.
