Will your numbers survive a tender Q&A?

Somewhere on your website there’s a number nobody in your business can source.

Maybe it’s a project count that hasn’t moved since 2023. Maybe it’s “500+ MW delivered”, rounded up from a spreadsheet nobody can find any more. It went up because it sounded strong, and it stayed up because nobody owns it.

Now think about who reads it.

Your buyers check numbers for a living

Energy isn’t a sector you can impress with confidence alone. The people deciding whether to shortlist you are engineers, analysts, and procurement leads. Verifying claims is their day job. They read your capability page the way they read a load calculation.

And here’s what they do when they hit a number that feels inflated: nothing. They don’t challenge it in the meeting. They don’t email you about it. They quietly discount it, and then they discount everything that comes after it.

Nobody will call out your soft number in the room. They’ll just believe less of everything you say next.

That’s the real cost. Not embarrassment. Erosion. You never find out which claim did the damage, because the only symptom is a tender you didn’t win.

The audit: one week, three piles

You can find your weak numbers before a procurement panel does. Pull every claim your company publishes - website, capability statements, tender boilerplate, the stats slide everyone reuses - and trace each one back to a source. Then sort them into three piles.

Keep. The claim traces to something you could put on the table: a project list, a contract, a dataset with a date on it. These are your assets. Use them harder.

Floor. The claim is real but the exact figure is fuzzy. Round it down to the number you can prove and add a plus sign. “62+” with an audit behind it does more work than “80” without one. The plus sign isn’t hedging - it says you counted, and you’re still counting.

Delete. The claim has no source, or the source is a shrug. This pile hurts, because it usually contains your most impressive numbers. Delete them anyway. A precise-looking figure with nothing underneath isn’t marketing. It’s a liability that happens to be well typeset.

Most companies never do this because nobody wants to be the person who makes the website less impressive. Which is exactly why doing it puts you ahead.

We ran it on ourselves first

We’re not asking you to do anything we haven’t done. This month we audited every number on our own site. Some claims got stronger: “50+ energy companies” became “62+ energy organisations”, because counting our storyboards found more than we’d claimed. Some got more specific: 15 countries, named individually.

And one got deleted. Our homepage used to say we’d filmed 5,247 hours. It looked precise, which is why we’d written it - and precision reads as credibility right up until someone asks where the number came from. There was no calculation underneath. So it went, replaced by a counter tied to a rate we can actually show: 75 shoot days a year, 8 capture hours a day.

The deletions bought us more credibility than the additions. That’s the part worth stealing.

The test for everything you publish

One question covers all three piles: would this claim survive being read back to you, line by line, by the most sceptical person in your next tender Q&A?

If yes, publish it and defend it. If no, you already know what to do - and better now, on your own terms, than in a room where the discount has already been applied.

In a sector built on verification, auditable claims are a commercial asset. When every competitor’s page is wallpapered with round numbers, a page where every figure can be traced reads differently. Your buyers notice, even when they never say so.

This is the question stage three of the Restate Framework asks of every energy company: why should anyone believe you? Your next tender will ask the same thing. Cheaper to answer it first.