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Tendering Is Elite Sport: How Christian Martinsen Works With Public Tenders
Christian Martinsen has worked with public tenders for over 30 years. In this walkthrough he shows how he goes from a 7 a.m. tender alert to a complete draft bid, and why he believes tendering is an elite sport you have to train for.
Christian Martinsen runs the advisory firm Bonka Commercial Management and has worked with public tenders from the supplier side since 1990. We sat down with him for a thoroughly practical walkthrough: from the moment the first alert lands in the morning to a complete draft bid ready to go. Watch the full walkthrough here:
Three rules for good tender work
Before we dive into the tools, it's worth taking note of Christian's three ground rules. They're simple, but most people who lose tenders break at least one of them.
1. Answer what the customer asks for. It sounds obvious, but it's the first commandment of public procurement. Your bid is there to answer the tender documents, not to tell your own story.
2. Tendering is elite sport. Train for it. Winning tenders is a skill you build over time, not something you improvise your way through as the deadline closes in.
3. Start early. "I'm an honorary member of the Last-Minute Club myself," Christian admits with a grin. He knows exactly what it's like to start a week before the deadline: horribly stressful, and you lose the overview. This is precisely where the AI support comes in. You get a first draft up straight away, and spend the rest of your time on what actually decides the competition, namely quality assurance.
Tender day starts at seven
For Christian, the day begins on his phone. Every morning at seven, a tender alert lands from Cobrief. He skims through quickly to see if anything is urgent, then settles in with the scoring list.
The opportunities that fit best sit at the top. The accuracy is driven by the CPV codes and keywords he has entered, and a hit rate in the corner tells him how well each individual opportunity matches his profile. When he finds something interesting, he drops it straight into the assessment folder.
From alert to assessment in minutes
Today's example is a framework agreement that Kriminalomsorgsdirektoratet (the Norwegian Correctional Service) published on 18 May, with a ceiling of 620 million NOK. "There's money to be made here," Christian notes.
The documents are pulled straight from the e-procurement tool and uploaded in seconds. Cobrief immediately delivers an expanded assessment up top: what kind of agreement it is, which customer, what value, and which award criteria apply. Further down, the qualification requirements and the key contract terms are summarised, short and to the point.
Custom assessment criteria
Christian doesn't stop at the standard analysis. He has built his own assessment criteria in Cobrief, based on the questions he needs answered every single time.
At the top sits a simple strategy analysis: what share of the framework agreement is actually IT procurement? The agreement has six parallel lots, and the AI works out the breakdown based on the instructions he has entered. "Getting this up, bang, right there and then, is huge," he says.
Another question concerns the ranking mechanism. This is a parallel framework agreement with between two and six suppliers, and whoever is ranked number one can receive a string of direct awards without a new competition. In other words: it pays to be number one. It's in the document, but Christian's instructions surface it in plain language, with references that take you straight to the right section.
Finally, he runs a go/no-go analysis. The AI concludes with a conditional go: the agreement is attractive, but on certain terms. They need sufficient CV capacity, they need to be able to price the bid correctly and sustainably against their chances of winning, and they need to handle some data-protection elements. The recommended next step is to mobilise a bid team, start collecting CVs, and prioritise which lots to go for.
From decision to draft bid
Once the decision is made, it's time to start on the bid itself, and as Christian said at the outset: get a first version up early.
Cobrief sets up a bid plan automatically. As the bid manager, Christian distributes the tasks across the team and sets deadlines. Then he moves into the bid workspace, where an AI instruction at the top draws on everything he has already fed in: CVs (which can also be pulled automatically from Flowcase), references, process descriptions, tax certificates, ISO certifications and other formal documents, all gathered in a knowledge base.
The result is that he can have a first draft up within minutes of the tender being published. Cobrief has picked out the CVs that best fit the tasks from the bid plan, and the AI has answered the questions. From there he works on in a full editor: editing, adding sections and formatting. If the customer comes with its own template, he uploads it and gets it filled in, complete with prices per lot and a consultant overview. When everything is ready, he exports the entire project to finished files.
A final checkpoint with the AI agent
Finally, Cobrief has a little easter egg: an AI agent you can ask questions. Christian asks it point-blank: "Are all the questions answered?"
The answer is useful. The responses themselves and the completed templates are done, but a few formal documents are still missing, including a fresh tax certificate and an updated credit assessment. Exactly the kind of detail that's easy to forget, and expensive to forget.
The craft still decides
What Christian demonstrates is not that AI does the job for you. It's that AI removes the time sinks, so you can start early and spend your time on what actually wins competitions. As he has said before: AI can help you write a bid, but it can't win the competition for you.
Christian Martinsen is CEO of Bonka Commercial Management (BCM) and an advisor to companies looking to break into the public tender market.